At Hyperlex, a team is dedicated to the activity of contract history recovery, which consists of migrating all of a client's contract data into a secure, reliable and ready-to-use database. These are the Contracts Analysts!
Their objective is to process the data contained in the contracts in order to make the most of them. Martin Fauvel is in charge of this division. In the continuation of our series of articles on the backstage of a legaltech, he presents us his missions.
Behind the scenes of a legaltech, Martin Fauvel, Lead Contracts Analyst at Hyperlex
Hello Martin. It's a pleasure to interview you today! Can you tell us about your background?
My background is a mixture of law and business: I went to law school and business school. I worked as a lawyer for more than a year, then I was a consultant for legal departments and law firms.
I joined Hyperlex in 2019 as part of the Customer Success team , which supports clients in the implementation of their projects.
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You recently changed jobs. You were in the Customer Success team for two years, but now you are a Lead Contracts Analyst. What exactly does that mean?
Yes, indeed, since March 2021, I have been responsible for contract analysis, Lead contracts analyst in French. In theory, this involves processing the data contained in contracts on behalf of our clients and helping them to exploit this data to the full. We analyse contracts, which are unstructured material, to transform them into structured data.
From a more practical point of view, this means that clients come to us with large volumes of documents and want to know what they contain. For some, a large volume is 100 documents. For others, it's 20,000 documents. At Hyperlex, we handle both levels of volume.
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Why was the position of Lead contracts analyst created?
The creation of this position was born out of the realisation that recovery, i.e. the migration of contractual data, is extremely important for our clients.
The takeover involves taking a stock of existing contracts and migrating them into Hyperlex so that the solution is up and running from the first day our customers use the platform.
When I first joined Hyperlex, recovery was integrated into the overall project. Then we realised that customers attached a lot of importance to it, so we developed our own tools to do it. That was the first step.
And then we put in place increasingly structured processes. That was the second step. The third step was to say that, in fact, this migration of contractual data that we propose is an activity in its own right which is not necessarily linked to the parameterisation of the tool. So we need to understand it better.
We need to optimise it to be even faster, even more efficient and to give even more value to our customers. So we have created a separate division to be able to measure this activity better and improve it!
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What is the scope of the Contracts Analysts team?
Firstly, data migration. Clients come to us with large volumes of contracts that they want to put into Hyperlex so that they can run the solution from day one.
The second point is to carry out compliance analyses, whether it be regulatory compliance or compliance with standards. For example, for a large insurance company, we are currently analysing the structuring and configuration of the general conditions of certain contracts, to help them build what will be the new standard contract. But it could also be compliance analyses in relation to a rule, for example. Today, this is a bit outdated, but if we wanted to know all the contracts that contain a data protection clause, we would be able to do this work.
The third point is audit/due diligence. This is where the client comes to us because they need to know, on a very specific basis, whether or not there is a particular set of elements in a particular set of contracts. So, generally, the change of control clause, the force majeure clause, the names of the parties, the important dates and everything else you need to do an audit.
Who does the Contracts analyst team work with on a daily basis?
With everyone! I interact with the customer, but always with the support of Customer Success.
I also interact with the Machine Learning team, which provides me with artificial intelligence tools to improve the performance of my division, to find new ways of doing things that allow us to be even more efficient.
Finally, I work with the tech team, so both the front-end developers (the visible part of the Hyperlex solution) and the back-end developers (the back office of the solution). We have developed our own tools to carry out this work of recovering the contractual history. I collaborate with them to develop new functionalities, to monitor the few small bugs that may arise, or for any other need related to the product.
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A victory is when a client tells you...?
A victory is when the client comes back to us, after we have worked on and integrated their data, to say: "I realise that we could never have done this alone. This is what our business is really all about!
I have two examples that come to mind. The first is for a software company. Our client recently told us that he had become aware of the extent of the recovery work and that he had recently said to himself "what a job! Thank goodness we had Hyperlex do it".
The second example is when we conducted audits for a law firm. The client came back to us and said two things. The first was: "Thank you. Because you really helped us to go much faster and extract a lot of data, which we wouldn't have been able to do without recruiting an army of trainees.
And the second: "when we understand what your tool is capable of producing in terms of analysis, and that it totally transforms our profession, we say to ourselves that we wouldn't do the same audit again in the same way... Because what's interesting is being able to give very broad trends with your tool, and it's up to us, the lawyers, to go into the details!
This is real life experience. And when lawyers come to us to say these words, it is extremely valuable.
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What advice do you have for legal professionals who are considering a project to digitalise their business this year?
Transform their vision of the legal profession to add a notion of data. The contract is data transformed to conform to legal elements.
So it's extremely interesting when a client comes to us and has managed to transform his vision to say: "I'm interested in statistical reasoning, in quantified risk analysis, because I want to understand the risks in order to better control them. And so, thanks to Hyperlex, I'm going to take an interest in the large masses and then concentrate on the details arising from these large masses.
If, as a lawyer, I am able to say that 20% of contracts contain a change of control clause for example, I am focused on my analysis. This statistical analysis is not at all intuitive when you have been to law school, I am the first to witness this. In fact, in the company, this statistical vision is extremely useful; it allows the lawyer to speak the language of business.
And this is what is expected of him, to speak with figures, with quantified elements. And that's what we aim for, and what we do every day at Hyperlex!
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