Case Study
Global Oil and Gas Company: Streamlined, Organized Contracts Search and Access
Situation
A longstanding Valora key account, this Fortune 50 multinational oil and gas concern already utilizes Valora’s software in numerous aspects and sectors of their business. Accumulating over many decades of business, through multiple corporate structures, reorganizations and mergers and acquisitions, this Client stores important, necessary legal contracts in numerous on premises and online repositories all over the world. Naturally, as the number of contracts and variety of repositories grew, this became more and more of a burden on the Client’s legal and compliance teams to search for relevant content, whether for litigation and disputes, government and investigations, data privacy needs, or a host of other ongoing data requests.
Solutions Applied:
AutoClassification
Document Analytics
Electronic File Processing
OCR & Text Extraction
Analytics & Data Mining
Products Used:
PowerHouse
BlackCat
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Challenge
Familiar with both AutoClassification and Valora’s methodologies, the Client envisioned a central command interface or “Virtual Vault” that allows their legal team to search contracts and related documentation with ease and confidence, across multiple sources, and changing and specific criteria. The ultimate goal was to create a master dashboard interface responsive to and aware of the changing contents in each of over a dozen repositories. Further, the retrieval mechanisms needed to be simple and adaptable, organizing the content in such a way that allowed the legal team to search with little to no specific information in a timely manner.
Solution
The first step in this project was to connect PowerHouse to the various repositories such as Ariba(TM) and SharePoint(TM) that were being utilized by the Client’s various business units.
The second phase of the project was to automatically classify the existing contracts with key fields for contractual information, such as: Nature of Contract, Parties, Signatories, Jurisdiction, Business Area, Pricing Terms and Confidentiality clauses.
The third phase applied custom classification rules for Records and Retention, ROT and Duplicates, Data Privacy, and Security Access.
Results
The Client’s legal team has been able to save valuable time and effort, that otherwise would have been spent searching across multiple repositories for their necessary documents, often resulting in a partial or incomplete picture. Today, they can rest easy knowing that PowerHouse has accounted for all of their contracts, not just the ones that came up form a simple text search. Additionally, the process of searching itself is much more streamlined and organized automatically through BlackCat’s data dashboard. Another key result is the integration of records retention and data privacy with other typical legal concerns around contracts.
Ariba and SharePoint are trademarks of SAP and Microsoft Corporation, respectively.