The Intelligent Automation of Contract Analysis of Collateral Warranties

“Beale & Company是建筑行业的律师。我们花了大量的时间代表我们的客户审查合同，一种特殊类型的合同被称为担保是一个特别的麻烦。审查担保的工作是商业风险管理的重要组成部分，在法律上可能很复杂，但往往被低估和资源不足。如果它能实现自动化，哪怕是部分自动化，所有相关方都将受益。目前的合同审查软件主要是基于机器学习的，无法实现所需的详细法律分析，而且它如何实现其结果往往是不透明的。另一方面，基于规则的方法过于复杂和脆弱。Beale & Company已经与斯旺西大学合作开发原型合同审查软件来克服这些缺点。它将以一种创新的方式结合机器学习和基于规则的方法。我们将利用机器学习的高级审查能力来识别合同中可管理的部分，并利用规则的高度精确性来详细分析这些部分的法律内容。这些规则将简单而有力。它将由律师为律师开发。该软件将基于由谢菲尔德大学开发的开源自然语言处理软件“GATE”。虽然我们最初为CWs开发了一个原型，但我们相信我们可以将这种方法扩展到其他类型的建筑合同和其他一般合同中。”

"Beale & Company are construction industry lawyers. We spend a great deal of time reviewing contracts on behalf of our clients, one particular type of contract known as a Collateral Warranty is a particular bugbear.The work in reviewing Collateral Warranties is an important part of commercial risk management, can be legally complicated but is often undervalued and under-resourced. If it could be automated, even partially, all concerned would benefit.Current contract review software is largely machine learning-based and cannot achieve the detailed legal analysis required and how it achieves its results is often opaque. On the other hand, rule-based approaches are overly complex and frail.Beale & Company have teamed up with the University of Swansea to develop prototype contract review software to overcome these shortcomings.It will combine both machine learning and rule-based approaches in an innovative way. We will harness the high level review power of machine learning to identify manageable parts of contracts and the close precision of rules to analyse the legal content those parts in detail. The rules will be simple and robust.It will be developed for lawyers by lawyers.The software will be based on the open source natural language processing software, 'GATE' developed by the University of Sheffield.While we initially develop a prototype for CWs, we believe we can then extend the approach to other types of construction contracts and to other contracts generally."