Automated Legal Agreement Generation Portal
THE QUICK LOOK
We worked with the legal department of a Government Agency to design, develop and commission an Automated Legal Agreement Generation Portal. In the Agency’s existing process, there were several pain points, including:
- Agency Officers spending unnecessary time and effort to identify the appropriate legal agreement templates for their needs, either through manual communications or based on experience
- Using of outdated versions of legal agreement templates to create first drafts
- Manual population of standard details like agreement parties, details, dates and etc, resulting inefficiency and potential human errors
- Lack of a central depository for Agency legal department to manage legal document versions and track usage of these legal agreements
The Challenges
A key objective of the portal was to enable Agency Officers, who may or may not have knowledge of legal terminologies, to identify the appropriate legal agreement template for use in differing partnership models with various external entities and institutions. One of the end goals was to enable the Government Agency to leverage on the portal as a training tool, for Agency Officers to self-serve and familiarise themselves with the various document templates to be used on different business and legal context.
The end solution needed to be able to process the nature and context of these differing partnership / working models and suggest the most appropriate legal agreement template to be used. At the same time, the portal would also serve as the single source of truth whether legal document templates and their versions will be managed and made available to Agency Officers in their preparation of legal agreements.
There was a strong focus on user experience and user interface to encourage long term usage of the portal, and to achieve the objectives of using the portal as a training tool.
Solution
We built the automated legal agreement generation portal on the back of a configurable, user-defined decision tree, where the appropriate legal document template(s) were automatically suggested to the user (Agency Officer) based on his/her answers to two or more leading questions.
The selected legal document template could then be further modified by allowing users to input the relevant details (e.g. receiving party, contractual period, etc) in order to produce a document which is ready to be shared. The final output is a downloadable Word Document, with the contractual details automatically populated. This is the first draft of the legal agreement which will be reviewed and eventually signed off by the Agency’s legal team.
This question and answer decision tree was designed to be configurable by system administrators, where administrators can add and edit questions, and implement conditional logic between an answer and the subsequent question. There was also a bespoke document manager where different versions of legal document templates can be managed and also have their usage tracked (e.g. most popular template downloaded).
The automated legal agreement generation portal has since saved the Agency tremendous amount of time in the management and creation of legal agreements, significantly reducing the back-and-forth in the identification of the right legal document template, the identification of the latest template version, and the manual population of contractual details. The first draft of these legal agreements can now be generated in a matter of minutes.