The Intelligent Automation of Contract Analysis of Collateral Warranties

"Beale & Company are construction industry lawyers. We spend a great deal of time reviewing contracts on behalf of our clients, one particular type of contract known as a Collateral Warranty is a particular bugbear.

The work in reviewing Collateral Warranties is an important part of commercial risk management, can be legally complicated but is often undervalued and under-resourced. If it could be automated, even partially, all concerned would benefit.

Current contract review software is largely machine learning-based and cannot achieve the detailed legal analysis required and how it achieves its results is often opaque. On the other hand, rule-based approaches are overly complex and frail.

Beale & Company have teamed up with the University of Swansea to develop prototype contract review software to overcome these shortcomings.

It will combine both machine learning and rule-based approaches in an innovative way. We will harness the high level review power of machine learning to identify manageable parts of contracts and the close precision of rules to analyse the legal content those parts in detail. The rules will be simple and robust.

It will be developed for lawyers by lawyers.

The software will be based on the open source natural language processing software, 'GATE' developed by the University of Sheffield.

While we initially develop a prototype for CWs, we believe we can then extend the approach to other types of construction contracts and to other contracts generally."