Seal Software is a provider of contract discovery and contract analytics software that is different than your standard CLM (contract lifecycle management) module built into your e-Sourcing or e-Procurement suite (which is designed to negotiate and track contracts, awards, milestones, and related documents). And unlike many CLM providers that just focus on Procurement, Legal, or Sales, Seal Software is designed to support Legal, Procurement, Sales, M&A, and IT — making it a fuller enterprise CLM solution than many of its peers. In fact, in large organization with tens of thousands of contracts, Seal Software is often used in conjunction with a traditional CLM solution.
This is because Seal’s strengths of contract discovery and contract analytics are quite unique. Seal’s contract discovery capability can automatically locate existing contractual documents wherever they may reside, automatically extract key contractual terms and clauses, and automatically populate other corporate solutions including Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM).
The discovery engine can handle multiple file format types (text, doc[x], PDF, jpg, etc.) and work across local hard drive, network drives, file shares, and even cloud-based repositories — anything with a UNC path or API is accessible. It then uses advanced semantics and machine learning to analyze the contracts and identify the clauses and critical information that the organization has deemed to be of interest.
It does this by comparing all files discovered to standard contract templates and identified organizational contracts to find contracts. It then determines the type, category, and whether or not it is a (potential) duplicate. Finally, it runs all (unique) contracts through descriptor templates that identify and extract the clauses, terms, and date elements of interest.
But the power of Seal only starts at discovery. Once the contracts and elements are identified, the analytics solution not only allows the user to access all contracts that meet a specification or search; filter down based on timeframe, search, or other elements of interest; and create reports, but to also identify all contracts that contain clauses or terms of interest that were not previously of interest. If all of a sudden a new regulation comes into effect and the organization now has to determine whether or not all of its contracts are compliant with a new privacy requirement or contain clauses to ensure compliance. All the organization has to do to find all contracts with a relevant clause, paragraph, etc. is find a few contracts with clauses and sentences of interest, define any additional phrases or terminology of interest, and tell the system to re-process all contracts and it will find all contracts, structured or otherwise, that contain associated phraseology. The semantic engine can learn from examples and key-phrase definitions.
And the analytics can be used during negotiation and review too. The platform allows for the definition of policies that will auto-detect clauses and phrases in suggested revisions that can alter the intended meaning of the actual contract and bring them to the attention of the reviewers. It can also highlight contract areas using non-standard language or language identified by legal to be (high) risk. And this review can be done in the contract creation platform of choice. Seal’s newly released Analyze this Now capability allows links to be embedded that send the contract to seal which sends back a marked-up highlighted docx file that highlights everything of interest and concern. (In Microsoft Word, it’s a simple plug-in.)
It’s a very powerful solution for large (global) organizations that often have well over 10,000 or even 100,000 contracts that need to be tracked, analyzed, maintained, and negotiated in accordance with a plethora of business rules and industry (and government) regulations. When you consider that even enterprises with revenues below $250M have an average of 8,000 Procurement contracts (as per Aberdeen Group), most of which are not in the e-Procurement system (and not effectively managed and tracked), the importance of discovery and analytics cannot be underestimated.
For a deeper dive on Seal Software, and its capabilities, see the recent Pro series by the doctor and the prophet over on Spend Matters (Part I, Part II, and Part III) [membership required].