Ricoh eDiscovery

We Answered Your Top 8 Questions About Contract Analysis

Posted by Sean Lynch |4 minute read

May 27, 2020 10:38:06 AM

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The COVID-19 pandemic has rocked many organizations. Between uprooting our office environments and working from home to juggling the challenges of procurement, services and fulfillment, the current crisis has brought force majeure clauses, termination clauses, and business interruption insurance policies to the forefront.

Yesterday, I was joined by Michael Gildner of Heretik to present on Contract Analysis & Review: Now and into the Future. The live presentation, which was part of Ricoh's New World of Work Webinar Series, brought together a diverse group of professionals of all different legal and corporate backgrounds. If you didn't have a chance to tune in, you can view the full webinar recording here.  

During the webinar, we received a lot of excellent questions from attendees. Below are the answers to some of your top questions related to contract review technology and services.

1. Why is it important to centralize contracts and how does Heretik help?

By centralizing your contracts and utilizing the tools provided by Heretik and Ricoh's Contract Review Service, you can easily analyze, extract important information from, and compare your contracts all in one place. 

Heretik helps you make smarter and faster decisions with your contract data by allowing you to monitor your liabilities and risks in real time to be better prepared for what's ahead. Once you're finished reviewing a contract, you can easily move it into an active Relativity case to leverage Active Learning to identify other documents that may be relevant and related to a certain contract clause, for example.

2. How can I search for terms in my contract? 

The best part about Heretik is that it does a tremendous amount of data extraction for you. Once you upload a contract, it’s OCR’d and all of the information you need is automatically classified and segmented so you can easily navigate each of its different data points. Simply search for the term you're looking for on the file level or across an entire document in the Heretik Viewer.

3. Are there limits as to what Heretik can extract? What if my contracts are unique with lots of jargon?

There are no limits to what Heretik can extract. When you begin analyzing a new contract, Heretik's library of expressions will automatically be applied to the document to pick up known phrases and popular expressions. If, for some reason, the program is unable to identify the jargon you want flagged, you can easily add new expressions to the list. Additionally, Heretik can look for linguistic patterns within the contract to help extract other related terms. In other words, Heretik is completely customizable.

4. Can Heretik be used as a long-term contract repository?

Absolutely. In fact, there's no reason not to use Heretik as a long-term contract repository. Both Heretik and RelativityOne are incredibly flexible and allow you to load all your information into the program so it can be hosted in one environment. From there, you can easily store and retrieve all the information you need as you go. Utilizing RelativityOne by Ricoh’s cold storage option, you can substantially reduce your costs by storing those cases and contracts that you’re not actively working on.

5. What is the benefit of outsourcing contract review? 

Scalability of manpower. Corporate legal departments and external counsel are weighed down by the demands of their clients in the current crisis. Outsourcing contract analysis and review frees up your time and energy to focus on the important legal issues your clients are facing.

6. How long does it take to get my contracts ready for analysis and review with Ricoh?

Depending on the load file size, anywhere from 2-5 days.

7. If many of my contracts are in paper format, how do I get these contracts into Heretik with Ricoh for review? Will there be problems if the documents are older and not great printouts?

All of your paper documents can be collected, scanned, unitized and have optical character recognition (OCR) utilized. This way, they are ready to be reviewed just like any other electronic document. In addition, Heretik has a great, built-in quality control workflow that flags any issues within a document so we can quickly compare the native file to its digital version and adjust as needed. 

8. Is Contract Review and Heretik a subscription service? How is it priced?

Heretik Contract Analysis is priced on a by-contract basis, along with a standard fee for hosting. If you're engaging with Ricoh's Contract Review Services, we're able to bundle a package to include collection, hosting, Heretik Analysis, and Ricoh Review Services so you know exactly how much the review will cost.

If you'd like to explore Ricoh's Contract Analysis Services, be sure to take advantage of our new promotion below. Have questions about Heretik? Get in touch with us today. We’re here to help support your business.

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Topics: Sean Lynch, Contract Analysis

   

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