What is the Public Contract Database?

The legal tech industry has seen a recent movement towards a reliance on technology, automation, and artificial intelligence (AI). After seeing these factors drastically impact rapidly growing industries elsewhere, it seemed obvious that a similar effect would take place in legal tech. However, contract AI technology hasn’t had the immediate impact or adoption as one may have expected. In many cases, core technological platforms (CLMs for example) and ancillary products (AI contract review tools) have failed to recognize the magnitude of importance when it comes to structured data in legal tech. Contracts by nature are massively complex assortments of unstructured language. Building scalable and reliable solutions based off of an unstructured dataset is nearly impossible.

Many solutions offer the core tenants of workflow management, wrapped in legal tech skin, or succeed in recognizing contract language and reformatting that language in a slightly more useful manner. This has brought tremendous value and excitement around innovating to the space. However, the fundamental pillar missing here is an extreme focus on amassing and structuring market data. That’s why TermScout exists.

TermScout was built with one mission, to bring efficiency and transparency to the contracting process by converting unstructured contract language into structured data from which you can make informed business decisions. How do we get there? With an intense focus on building the world’s first Verified™ Contract Database. In this article we will begin dissecting the meaning of the TermScout Verified™ Contract Database, and shed light on how AI contract review tools can revolutionize the world of contracting if properly backed by significant and accurate market data that legal, sales, and procurement teams alike can trust.

What is a contract database?

In order to understand the Verified™ Contract Database, we must first understand what a database is. A database is an organized collection of structured data, electronically stored either locally or in the cloud. A database is typically controlled by a database management system (DBMS). In our case, a contract database is an organized collection of contract data points categorized and stored on the TermScout platform in order to provide robust and critical market data to both vendors and buyers. At a granular level, the Verified™ Contract database can be viewed as a contract clause database, where contract language is structured, reviewed and analyzed both at a macro and clause-by-clause level.

What does it mean to be Verified™?

At TermScout, we have two contract review levels, Predicted™ and Verified™. The foundation of our business is built on Verified™ contract reviews that fuel our Verified™ contract database, perpetually enhancing our market data and creating more value for our users. Verified™ contract reviews are always carefully QC'd by our team of contract language and data experts. TermScout products leverage a combination of our AI + Human QC that produces first pass contract reviews with up to 99% accuracy against any given playbook. You can learn more about contract review levels here.

In Summary, Verified™ means that a particular dataset has been analyzed by both artificial intelligence and human contract experts to ensure 99% accuracy.

Why did TermScout build the Verified™ Contract Database?

When building an artificial intelligence platform with the promise of analyzing complex contract language without a robust dataset backed by contract experts, you’ll be lucky to achieve modest accuracy levels. In addition, like we’ve seen with many early AI contract review tools, you’ll likely fail to reach mass market adoption due to mistrust and perceived opportunity cost of adopting a new technology and workflow within legal, procurement, and/or sales teams. With this premise in mind, TermScout has remained un-wavered in our commitment to 99% accuracy and truly solving the efficiency gap in the contract review process. We knew that our market data had to be plentiful and Verified™ by contract experts.

Is the Verified™ Contract Database public or private?

The Verified™ Contract Database is a public repository of contractual language that has been converted into data points. All free and paid TermScout users have unlimited access to explore thousands of contracts and contract clauses within our database. In addition, users have the ability to privately upload any contract for a Verified™ review. With any private upload, users have the choice of whether they’d prefer their contract remain private (only visible to select members of their organization), or public (available for the entire TermScout community to review, benchmark, compare, and gain insights from). You can learn more about private uploads and how companies like Microfocus, Techstars and Travelers Insurance maximize efficiency and compliance by leveraging human-backed first pass reviews with 99% accuracy here.

Conclusion

Our Verified™ Contract Database is the foundation for the movement in legal tech. We believe in a world where contracting happens with zero friction, with both parties fully informed about what they’re signing. TermScout users gain unparalleled insights into their own contracts, but that’s only half of it.

All TermScout users get access to TermScout’s Verified™ Public Database, consisting of millions of data points from thousands of public contracts, plus the largest set of anonymized and aggregated negotiated contract data in the world.