ABSTRACT
Contracts, being the lifeblood of trade and commerce, are entered into faster than ever and more than ever. However, despite defining critical rights and obligations for businesses, organizations, and consumers, contracts are rarely read, reviewed, or let alone scrutinized in much detail. The failure to read contracts is a serious legal and social problem that has not yet been addressed. But this may be about to change. With the rise of automated contract review, which uses machine learning and natural language processing techniques, it is now made possible to automate and streamline what would otherwise be a costly, cumbersome, and time-consuming task. However, automation is not a simple effort, and requires sophisticated algorithms that are trained on a copious amount of contracts through so-called data annotation – that is, translating and mapping contracts into readable and thus actionable data. Contract data annotation is both a legal and technical task, and is likely to become a more prevalent one in the near future as more lawyers are likely to be tasked with annotating contracts or reviewing annotations. This Article discusses how such data annotation processes can be utilized and how the final product, that is, automated contract review, can potentially be a game changer in solving what are real legal and social problems through technical means.
Rättzén, Mattias, Automated Contract Review: Challenges and Outcomes of a Data Annotation Framework (August 17, 2022), 62 Jurimetrics Journal 225-239 (2022).
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