Where are your contracts right now? For many organizations, the answer is “inside a filing cabinet”— physical or digital, it doesn’t really matter which. They’re executed, archived, and consulted when something goes awry. But Adam Becker, the Director of Legal Operations at Cockroach Labs, thinks that’s about to change. And he couldn’t be more excited.
In our new series, Car Counsel, Adam describes contract intelligence as the ability to know what’s in your contracts without the manual effort that always made getting those answers so difficult. He elaborates. “[Contract intelligence is] a program that can tell you what's in your contracts without the need for traditional CLM tagging and review.” Suddenly, contracts are actually becoming useful.
From archive to asset
Becker says that the first way many legal teams feel this shift is in moments of urgency. Perhaps a contract dispute might arise, or, as Adam notes, a global event like a pandemic makes force majeure language the most important text imaginable. You need to find that language quickly without having to sift through dozens of documents.
"If you have something that can just tell you, that's awesome, and if it's as good as a person, or close to it, that's awesome, too."But reactive retrieval is just the starting point. The more interesting question is what happens when contract data becomes proactively useful as a matter of course.
Answering the impossible questions
Where contract intelligence comes into its own is when legal teams can spot patterns that are valuable to the rest of the business. Becker's clearest illustration of this involves the finance team, which might want to know how many customer agreements carry 120-day payment terms. It's a reasonable business question, the kind of question that used to require a manual review project that could take weeks or months.
"That is not something that I'm particularly interested in," Becker says, "and a tool can do it for them and they can learn how to use that themselves.” Now, contracts stop being a legal artifact and start functioning as a data source. Becker imagines a world where finance, procurement, and operations can access that data themselves. The upshot is that businesses are using data, until now buried inside contracts, for actual revenue opportunities.
A different relationship with your contracts
What Becker is describing is a different relationship between an organization and its own agreements. The intelligence was always there: buried in executed PDFs, scattered across shared drives, indexed by no one. Contract intelligence, powered by AI, makes it retrievable.
He sees this as part of a broader shift in how organizations are connecting data sources across departments to get a holistic view of all relevant data sources. "The things that we put into place should have an impact outside of legal," Becker says. That requires legal ops practitioners to think past the mechanics of contract management and into the underlying business logic. "It's not enough to say, 'Oh, they care about these five clauses in the contract, so this is how we built the flow,'" he explains. "Well, why do they care? What does it mean? What happens when it goes wrong? You need to be able to build that now."
How to stay ahead of the curve
For legal ops professionals thinking about what this moment demands of them, Becker's advice is consistent: stay curious, keep up with what leadership is being asked to do, and make sure the work you're building has reach beyond the legal team.
"We have to keep up with what our bosses are being tasked to do — figure out how we strategically support them as they are involved in more of the organization. And we should be, too.” After all, he points out, thanks to AI-powered legal technology, legal teams are now considered the center of innovation in many companies. "The legal department's starting to look like the ones who have these innovative products that help everybody," Becker says. "And it's actually true."
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