contracts

Looking backwards to predict the future

Diana Lease demoing Smart Clauses at Docusign Momentum 2019

My photo library turns me into an intrepid explorer, spelunking through time and place. All those pictures of conferences and whiteboards become a treasure-trove of past lives, ideas and dreams. In this post I will take a look back over the past five years or so, from our “Smart Clause” mission as Clause.io, to the latest Intelligent Agreement Management developments at Docusign.

Disclaimer: I don’t make any promises about products, timelines or roadmap; that is not my role, and the past shows that progress is not a straight line, but is a meandering river — so don’t use any of this article to make purchasing decisions!

So, in the words of Eric Zenz, hop in my Deloren and let’s accelerate to 80 miles per hour!

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October 14, 2024 0

Dates & Times in Contracts

In this article I will explain the nuances of dates and times and how to reference them in contract text, and provide recommendations for how to make them computable for contract automation purposes.

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July 2, 2024 0

Semantics of Contracts and Clauses

One of the more challenging aspects of digitising contracts (making then computable) is understanding how to assemble a contract from a reusable set of clauses. There is inherent tension between the notion of a clause as an atomic reusable snippet of text, and the assumptions that a clause makes about its host contract, or the other clauses that must be present in the contract.

In this article I dive deeper into what assembling contracts from clauses means in terms of semantics, and sketch out some Concerto data models to capture those semantics.

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March 13, 2024 0

Contracts as Promises

Today, I will continue my meander through contract digitisation, taking a deeper look at contractual obligations and rights and the theoretical background of “contracts as promise”, and I begin to outline a data model that captures some of the concepts.

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February 5, 2024 0

Taxonomy of Contract Logic

I spend a lot of time talking to colleagues and connections about contracts, and the types of logic we find in contracts and in contract management. In this post I aim to describe my point of view on this topic and to provide some signposts and terminology to help you navigate this complex space.

I will introduce three types of logic we find in contracts:

Contract Definition Logic
Contract Automation Logic
Contract Assembly Logic

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January 22, 2024 2

Overview of the MPEG-21 Media Contract Ontology

I was recently passed a pointer to the MPEG-21 Media Contract Ontology (thank you Niall!). This post is a high-level summary of the very informative paper (linked above) by Víctor Rodríguez-Doncela, Jaime Delgadob, Silvia Llorenteb, Eva Rodríguezb and Laurent Boch.

The Media Contract Ontology (MCO) is an OWL ontology formalizing a vocabulary to represent business contracts in the media content industry. MCO contracts are RDF documents using that vocabulary.

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December 18, 2023 0

Why Concepts and Clauses?

Variables without concepts are not conceptually grounded.

What does {{amount}} mean in a template? How about {{height}}?

Contrast with a locale-independent concept model / ontology / data model:

concept Loan has-a-property Amount (a Monetary Amount)

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November 28, 2023 0

Contract Digitisation Literature Review

Introduction

The conceptual leap from managing contract text and data, to understanding the real-time rights and obligations of the various parties to a contract is a major one! To get even a partial view of the rights and obligations of contractual parties requires creating a computable representation of the logic and workflow inherent/implicit in the contact, as well as tapping into a digital representation of real-world contract events.

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November 21, 2023 1