AI agent · Legal · Read & extract
Obligation extraction
Once a contract is signed, its obligations sit in a repository until a deadline has passed. The agent reads the contract and its amendments, extracts each obligation with its trigger and date, and puts it in front of the person who owns it.
Typical volumes for this process, not a client figure.
Obligations sit in signed contracts until someone rereads them near a deadline.
Each obligation extracted with owner and date, linked to its clause, and tracked.
Where the time goes today
A signed contract creates work that has to happen long after signature: a notice to terminate before an automatic renewal, a quarterly report to a customer, an annual certificate of insurance, an audit the other side may call, a price review window, the return or destruction of confidential information at the end, a notification within a fixed number of hours after a security incident. Most of these are not in any system. They sit in the text.
Legal or contract management teams usually abstract a few key dates, start, end and renewal, for the larger contracts. The rest depends on someone remembering. Reading a contract family properly takes time: the main agreement, schedules, three amendments and a side letter, where a later amendment changes a notice period that the schedule still states in its original form.
The failures are familiar. A contract renews for another term because the notice window closed unnoticed. A reporting duty is missed and the customer invokes a service credit. A rebate is never claimed because nobody knew the volume threshold had been passed. None of these comes from a lack of skill; they come from obligations nobody was assigned.
How the agent works
- Assemble the familyThe agent gathers the main agreement, schedules, amendments and side letters for each contract and orders them by date, recording which document amends which.
- Find the obligationsIt identifies sentences that create a duty or a time-bound right, separates your obligations from the other party's, and ignores definitions and recitals that only look like duties.
- Structure each oneFor each obligation it records who must act, what they must do, the trigger (a date, an event or a recurrence), the deadline, the consequence of missing it, and the clause reference.
- Resolve amendmentsWhere an amendment changes an obligation, it applies the later text and keeps the history. Where two documents conflict and precedence is unclear, it flags the conflict instead of choosing.
- Load and assignIt writes each obligation to your contract system or tracker, assigns an owner from your map of obligation types to teams, and schedules reminders ahead of each deadline.
What stays with a person
Lawyers keep interpretation. Obligations built on standards such as reasonable endeavours, promptly or material breach cannot be reduced to a date, and conditional triggers often depend on facts outside the contract. The agent extracts the text, marks it as conditional, and a lawyer decides what it means in practice and whether it deserves a reminder at all.
Business owners keep the obligation once assigned. The agent can tell finance that a report is due on the tenth; it cannot produce the report. If an owner rejects an assignment, the item returns to legal with the reason rather than disappearing.
What it reads, what it produces
| It reads | It produces |
|---|---|
| Signed contracts, schedules, amendments and side letters | Obligation register entries, each linked to its clause |
| Repository metadata: parties, dates, contract owner | Computed deadlines, showing the rule used to compute them |
| Your obligation taxonomy and the map of types to teams | Owner assignments and scheduled reminders |
| Dates of business events that act as triggers, such as go-live or acceptance | A list of conflicts between amendments and earlier documents |
| Existing entries in the obligation tracker, to avoid duplicates | A review queue of conditional and low-confidence items |
Controls that come with it
- Every entry links to the exact clause text it came from
- A confidence threshold below which a lawyer confirms the entry
- Contracts above a value you set are reviewed in full before entries go live
- Computed dates display the rule, so any reviewer can check the arithmetic
- A sample of sections where no obligation was found, checked monthly
- All changes to entries versioned, with who changed what
How you know it works
- Obligation deadlines missed
- Days from signature to a complete register entry
- Entries corrected by reviewers, by obligation type
- Share of the contract backlog covered by the register
- Reminders acted on before the deadline
Is your process ready?
- Written rules: you need an obligation taxonomy and a map of which team owns which type. Without them, everything is extracted and nobody owns anything.
- Systems: a contract management system or tracker with an interface, and a repository whose licence permits automated reading of documents.
- Cheap check: each entry links to its clause, so a lawyer confirms or corrects it in well under a minute.
- Volume: a backlog of several thousand contracts plus a steady flow of new ones repays the build; a few dozen contracts can be abstracted by hand.
- One description: legal, procurement and business units must agree what counts as an obligation worth tracking before the agent starts extracting.
The five candidacy checks are explained, with an exam, in the free Module 01.
What goes wrong
- Over-extraction: every sentence containing shall becomes a reminder, owners learn to ignore them, and the register loses its value.
- Obligations incorporated by reference to the supplier's standard terms or a policy that is not in the repository.
- Event-based triggers, such as ninety days after acceptance, where the acceptance date sits in no system.
- Amendments stored separately from the main contract, so the family is incomplete and old terms stay live.
Questions we get
How is this different from contract review or lease abstraction?
Contract review happens before signature and compares clauses with your playbook. Lease abstraction extracts a fixed set of commercial terms from one type of document. Obligation extraction happens after signature, on any contract type, and looks for everything that someone must do by a date or on an event, then assigns it to an owner and tracks it.
Can it work through our backlog of signed contracts?
Yes, and the backlog is usually where the first value is. Most teams start with contracts that renew automatically or carry reporting duties, sorted by value, and work down. Old scanned contracts are read with lower confidence and go to review more often, which is worth knowing when you estimate the effort.
What about obligations triggered by events rather than dates?
The agent records the trigger in words and links it to the event in your systems where one exists, such as a go-live date in the project tool. When the event is recorded, the deadline is computed and the reminder scheduled. Where the event lives in no system, the entry stays open with a prompt to the owner to record the date.
Who receives the reminders?
The owner from your map of obligation types, such as finance for reporting or IT for security notifications, with the contract owner copied. Reminders repeat on a schedule you set and escalate to the owner's manager as the deadline approaches. Completion is recorded against the obligation, so the register shows what was done, not only what was due.
Want this agent on your process?
Tell us about your version of this process — volumes, systems, what goes wrong. A person answers with an approach and a price, usually within two working days, or tells you it is the wrong project.