Ghent-based scale-up Contractify is already working with numerous partners to optimize their contract management software. Contractify’s goal is to offer their clients a solution that allows them to manage the entire contract lifecycle in one place. For the first phase in this cycle, contract creation, they have now joined forces with Leuven-based legal software platform ClauseBase.
Who is Contractify?
Steven Debrauwere and Herlinde De Buck started Contractify in 2015. In the meantime, the ambitious company has grown into a leading software supplier for contract management. The cloud software helps companies centralize, manage and sign all contracts in one secure contract library. The platform prevents unwanted automatic extensions and speeds up the signing of contracts with customizable signing and approval flows. With the help of Ada, an AI-powered contract assistant, the company also aims to improve the speed of contract digitization and analysis.
The collaboration with ClauseBase will add the creation phase to Contractify, which enables users to manage the entire contract cycle in one smooth flow.
Call for solution to cover full contract lifecycle
“In conversations with prospects, we often hear that they are looking for a solution in which they can manage the full contract lifecycle,” says Steven Debrauwere, CEO of Contractify. “From drafting a contract, to approving it, signing it, storing it securely and following up proactively: companies want to be able to do everything in the same place instead of using a different tool for each stage.”
The new partner: ClauseBase
ClauseBase is run by Maarten Truyens, Senne Mennes and Robbert Jacobs, former lawyers and in-house legal counsels with years of experience in drafting legal documents.
In their previous lives, they were repeatedly confronted with the expensive, repetitive and time-consuming nature of drafting contracts, and they were not satisfied with existing solutions. In 2018, the trio launched ClauseBase to make life better for anyone drafting legal documents – and that is not just lawyers. In the meantime, they have also launched ClauseBuddy, a Microsoft Word plugin that makes it easy to share knowledge between drafters of legal documents.
The added value of ClauseBuddy to Contractify
ClauseBuddy is a plugin that allows users to combine smart templates with a library of pre-approved clauses to ensure error-free contracts. Users can create libraries of clauses and commonly used text extracts directly from MS Word and MS Outlook. By sharing clauses and supplementing them with legal knowledge, legal teams can increase the quality of their documents while speeding up the writing process.
Documents prepared in ClauseBase can be forwarded to Contractify with one click of a button. All relevant data – from the contract party to the effective date – are automatically exported. The solutions go hand in hand, allowing companies to streamline their contract creation and contract management process.
Artificial Intelligence
Both ClauseBase and Contractify have been exploring and implementing AI in their solutions in the last few years.
Contractify introduced their new AI-assistant ADA this year. ADA helps companies register contracts three times faster, making it a revolutionary asset for the digitization and automation of contract management.
ClauseBase uses AI to support the automation of grammatical constructions. This makes it possible to replace all mentions of people and companies, including associated verbs and pronouns, at any place in the document, fully automatically.
In addition, ClauseBase also uses AI in detecting clauses of interest. The AI makes it possible to find clauses that are substantially about the same topic, even if the literal wording is very different. The software can, for example, suggest alternative contract wording.
According to Contractify and ClauseBase, they thereby put themselves as Belgian scale-ups on the level of major international players when it comes to the use of AI.
