Reference architecture
IllustrativeContract clause extraction to support an in-house legal team
A reference architecture for extracting key terms from supplier contracts into a reviewable register.
Illustrative scenario. Not a completed client engagement. It describes how we would approach the problem; no client, results or quotes are implied.
/ 01Problem
The situation
An in-house legal team manages several thousand supplier contracts in mixed formats. Renewal dates, liability caps and termination rights are tracked in a spreadsheet that is always out of date, and renewals are sometimes missed.
/ 02Baseline
Measuring before building
A labelled sample of contracts is prepared with the correct values for each target field, and the time lawyers spend abstracting a contract by hand is recorded.
/ 03AI architecture
Architecture snapshot
- Contract repository export
- OCR for scanned agreements
- Document type classification
- Clause location with page references
- Field extraction with confidence
- Normalisation of dates and amounts
- Cross-check against amendment documents
- Playbook deviation flags
- Missing-field detection
- Side-by-side source and field view
- Lawyer approval per contract
- Corrections captured for evaluation
- Contract register
- Renewal alerts
- Accuracy reporting per field
/ 04Delivery
How it would be delivered
- 1
Labelling and baseline
Legal team and engineers agree field definitions and label a representative sample.
- 2
Extraction pipeline
Models and prompts are tuned field by field against the labelled set.
- 3
Review workflow
Lawyers review every extraction in the first phase; thresholds for lighter review are set from measured accuracy.
/ 05Outcome measures
What would be measured
- Field-level precision and recall on the labelled set
- Lawyer time per contract compared with baseline
- Share of fields accepted without correction
Limitations
- Outputs are drafts for legal review, not legal advice.
- Heavily negotiated bespoke clauses may need manual abstraction.
No results are claimed for this scenario. Targets would be set from the measured baseline in a real engagement.
/ 06Client quote
Illustrative scenarios do not carry client quotes.
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