To kick off the series, let us first start with the simplest question – What is legacy contract migration and why do I need to do it?

You are looking to install a Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) system to get a handle on your contracts, what good is having a great CLM without any data? Or having a CLM with only documents serving as a document repository – that is not much better than a shared folder.

The best way to get the maximum benefit is to migrate the legacy documents a.k.a. already executed contracts into the CLM, after being text searchable (OCRed). You need to associate these documents to an account within the CLM hence you need to know the contract type and the contracting party. You would also need to know the effective date, is it auto renewed, what is the initial term, what is the renewal term, etc. For these, you need to extract this meta-data (attributes) from within the contracts, associate it with the document and the account name, create the contractual hierarchy and ingest it all into the CLM. The CLM can then give you reports on this data customized for you, trigger renewals, and even track obligations and rights if that data has been extracted and ingested into the CLM.

Of course, Brightleaf helps in this complete process.

More details are in the following blogs!