Law and Data · Pilot
Contract Analytics for Lawyers
Every legal team holds hundreds of contracts and can answer almost no question about them as a group. Contract analytics changes that: it turns contracts into data you can count, filter, chart and check. This course teaches the part software does not do for you: deciding what to record, tagging consistently, cleaning the data, tracking renewals and notice deadlines, benchmarking terms, and reading the results without being misled.
All contracts, parties and figures are invented, and every answer is exact and checkable. No coding and no software purchase is needed: a spreadsheet is enough. Your fictional client is Alderwick Exports, and the capstone uses Sigeric Supplies.
Module 1
What contract analytics is, and the contract data modelThe fields worth recording and why each needs a definition. Lab: Contract Data Sheet.
Module 2
Clause libraries and taggingTaxonomies, definitions, and measuring whether two reviewers tag the same way. Lab: Clause Tagger with an agreement report.
Module 3
Cleaning contract dataDates, currencies, names, duplicates and blanks that quietly spoil a count. Lab: Data Cleaner.
Module 4
Asking the portfolio questionsFilters, counts, totals and the denominator, on a portfolio of 60 contracts. Lab: Portfolio Explorer.
Module 5
Renewals, deadlines and money at riskWork out the last day to stop an automatic renewal and see which windows have closed. Lab: Notice Calendar.
Module 6
Benchmarks and outliersMedians, quartiles and percentile rank, and what to do with an extreme value. Lab: Benchmark Finder.
Module 7
Reading results honestlyAverages, missing data, mixed currencies and unrepresentative samples. Lab: Dashboard Critic.
Capstone
The Sigeric Supplies portfolio reviewSeventy contracts, six questions, a data-quality check and a one-page report.
Contract analytics: common questions
- What is contract analytics?
- Contract analytics is the practice of turning a set of contracts into structured data, such as end dates, renewal terms, values and liability caps, so that you can count, filter, compare and chart them. It lets a legal team answer questions across hundreds of contracts at once, for example which ones renew next quarter or which have no liability cap.
- How do you extract data from contracts?
- First decide which fields you need and define each one precisely. Then record them, by hand or with software, taking each value from the clause that governs it and noting the clause reference. Finally, check a random sample of the records against the source contracts to measure the error rate before you rely on the data.
- How do you track contract renewal dates?
- Record the end of the current term, whether the contract renews automatically, and the notice period. The last day to stop an automatic renewal is the term end minus the notice period. Set alerts on that deadline, with warning time before it, not on the end date.
- What is a clause library?
- A clause library is a collection of clauses tagged by type, such as payment, termination or liability. A written definition for each tag and a check that two reviewers tag the same way are what make the library reliable enough to count and compare clauses.
- Do you need to be able to code to do contract analytics?
- No. Everything in this course works with the thinking that sits behind the tools: what to record, how to clean it, what to ask, and how to read the answer. A spreadsheet is enough to apply it.
Part of the Law and Data series, with Legal Risk Quantification and Checking Legal AI Tools. Not legal advice.