11Document Generation/Data‐Driven Contracts
This chapter moves away from the various financial regulations that we have discussed in the past few chapters and considers contract management, which seeks to document financial instruments and trading whilst meeting business objectives and complying with financial regulation. The benefits of legal technology being used with regards to the creation, negotiation and monitoring of financial contracts are also debated, followed by a consideration of whether legal agreement data should in fact be considered earlier in this contract lifecycle management process (rather than the typical creation of most contract metadata as a post‐execution process). This, of course, leads to the question of whether contracts should be ‘data‐driven’ in their creation, rather than the legal agreement data only being truly focused on once the agreement exists as unstructured data, in the form of characters in a hardcopy executed document (or scan of this).
Contract Lifecycle Management
We have seen the importance of legal agreement data throughout the course of this text. Financial firms are increasingly looking to address this through the use of contract lifecycle management solutions (Figure 11.1), assisting with the initial request for an agreement to be put in place, the drafting of the initial contract, its negotiation (including stakeholder approvals and tracking of changes during this process), execution, tracking and reporting of contract status, ...