Brightleaf: Data Extraction from Contracts Simplified

Samir Bhatia, Founder & CEO

A business executive has negotiated a contract with a supplier and agreed upon certain clauses, penalties, expiration, renewals, CPI increases and other terms and conditions. Years later, employees of the organization are not even aware of the contract that is lying in a drawer collecting dust. Or the purchasing staff that negotiated the contract is no longer with the company. Imagine the risk they are undertaking by not paying attention to the contractual clauses, some of which deal with costs and revenues and others with the latest regulatory policies. The organization may lose huge amounts of money due by not policing penalty or CPI increases with the counter party. “Organizations are looking at unstructured data in emails and other sources, but they are missing out the data stored within documents, specifically contracts,” says Samir Bhatia, CEO and founder of Brightleaf. Even if businesses wish to get the data out of contracts, they are concerned about how they can do it. Digging up vital information within thousands of contracts continuously involves a resource-intensive, manual search and abstraction process that is often very expensive and time-consuming. Brightleaf addresses all these pain points by completely metamorphosing the way data is siphoned from contracts through its semantic intelligent technology.
The company is focused on extracting crucial information from unstructured, text-based legal documents and making it portable for analytics, triggers, and queries. “Clients can leverage our technology on their existing contracts, report on the extracted data, even recover hidden revenue and comply with current and upcoming regulations.”

Clients can leverage our technology on their existing contracts, report on the extracted data, even recover hidden revenue and comply with current and upcoming regulations

Brightleaf’s semantic intelligence engine is a proprietary software platform for analyzing and abstracting commercial terms, legal provisions, and obligations from any text-based legal document. “All we need from clients is their soft documents; whether they are PDF files, TIF files, JPGs, XLS, Doc etc., and what information they want us to extract. We then work with the clients on how they interpret their data, and details on their business specific data points that they would like us to extract. This is a very important part of the process,” says Bhatia. The engine uses Natural Language Processing (NLP), AI and Machine Learning technologies and can adapt to an array of different contracts, irrespective of their content or formats to extract key attributes as well as any client’s business specific attributes/data-points. The extraction process then follows a complete review by Brightleaf's team of lawyers and financial analysts. This ensures data verification and fixing errors that may have occurred in the original contracts and would be missed out by the software, such as wrongly captured data or handwritten information.
“Brightleaf delivers quality results as per Six Sigma standards with the highest accuracy for further processing by clients,” adds Bhatia.

Among the myriad of satisfied clients is a Class 1 railroad company that was finding it difficult to manage contractual obligations hidden under thousands of contracts. Brightleaf’s proprietary software extracted crucial data from their contracts ranging from industrial track maintenance, rail crossing agreements, to haulage and real estate. Complying with Six Sigma methods, Brightleaf Solutions delivered a high-quality error-free data for the railroad company. Brightleaf investigated and helped the company track legacy contracts worth 8.2 million dollars that were not billed for years leading to massive revenue realization.

The company works as a value-added partner for CLM software systems providers and focuses solely on the extraction part of data while the analytics part is carried out within the CLM systems.“This way we address client’s data extraction needs while adding value to their existing CLM systems, creating a win-win situation for all companies,” says Bhatia.

Continuing the journey as data extraction experts, Brightleaf is set to expand the enormous potential of extraction technology across various industry verticals. “We have already done pilot projects for financial services firms for extracting data from mutual funds documents. We see a number of expansion opportunities from our base technology to bring value from unstructured data from not just contracts, but even other types of documents where the same information is required across multiple documents,” he concludes.