Case Study - Streamlining Contract Review Cycles with AI-Powered Automation
Apex Innovations faced significant delays in their contract review process, hindering deal velocity. Contour engineered a bespoke solution integrating AI to automate key review stages, drastically reducing turnaround times and freeing up legal counsel for strategic negotiation.
- Client
- Apex Innovations
- Year
- Service
- Workflow Automation & AI Integration
The Challenge: Contract Velocity as a Bottleneck
For Apex Innovations, speed was paramount. As they scaled, their manual contract review process became a major impediment. Legal counsel spent excessive time on routine reviews, approval chains were complex and often opaque, and tracking contract status required significant administrative effort. This resulted in delayed sales cycles and frustrated internal stakeholders. They needed a way to accelerate review without compromising risk management.
Our Approach: Engineering Efficiency
Contour partnered with Apex's legal and sales operations teams to dissect the existing process. Our analysis revealed:
- High Volume of Standard Clauses: A significant portion of review time was spent verifying standard, pre-approved language.
- Inconsistent Risk Assessment: Manual review led to variability in identifying and escalating non-standard or high-risk clauses.
- Lack of Visibility: Tracking contract status and identifying bottlenecks was difficult and required manual follow-up.
Based on these findings, we designed a solution centered around intelligent automation:
- AI-Powered Clause Analysis: An NLP model trained on Apex's contract history automatically identified standard clauses, deviations, and potential risk areas based on configurable rules.
- Automated Routing: Contracts were automatically routed to the correct approvers (e.g., finance, security, specific legal specialists) based on identified clauses or deal value, bypassing unnecessary steps.
- Centralized Dashboard: A real-time dashboard provided complete visibility into the contract pipeline, status, reviewer assignments, and potential delays.
- Integration: The solution integrated with Apex's existing CRM (Salesforce) to minimize disruption and ensure data consistency.
The Outcome: Strategic Legal, Accelerated Deals
The implementation yielded immediate and significant results. The 60%+ reduction in average review time directly translated to faster deal closures and increased revenue velocity. More importantly, it fundamentally shifted the role of the legal team. Freed from the burden of repetitive, low-value review tasks, Apex's counsel could dedicate more time to complex negotiations, strategic risk mitigation, and proactive legal guidance, adding far greater value to the business. The system also enforced consistency in risk assessment and provided valuable data on negotiation patterns and cycle times, enabling continuous process improvement.