Your Contracts Already Know the Answers. Can You Find Them?

Suppose a regulator calls tomorrow asking what you've promised customers about data breaches. The answer is in your contracts. The problem is that those contracts may be in DocuSign, a shared drive, a procurement tool and someone's inbox, and it could take a week to find them all.

For 15 years, contracting technology has focused on getting to signature. Much less attention has gone to what happens after that. That gap was the topic of Contracts That Think: The Rise of Contract Intelligence, a webinar hosted by SpotDraft and In-House Connect on September 23, 2026. Akshay Verma, COO of SpotDraft, moderated the discussion with Kiara Graves, Legal Counsel, Corporate and Transactional at Kyriba, and Natasha Giuffre, Founder and Fractional General Counsel at Founder's Counsel Legal Services Professional Corporation.

Their main point: contracts record your obligations, your risks, your pricing rights and every compromise you made to close a deal. That information is data, and AI can finally turn it into insight the business can use.

Finding a contract is not the same as knowing what's in it

In a live poll, only about 11% of attendees said they could easily surface insights from their agreements. About half said they could "find information when needed," but finding the contract is only the first step. Someone still has to confirm the version, locate the clause, analyze it and respond.

The panel separated search, which tells you whether a clause exists, from intelligence, which tells you what the clause means, whether your position has shifted and what to do about it. Teams need both.

Build a company source of truth, not a legal one

Contracting involves the whole company, not just legal. Sales works in the CRM, procurement in its sourcing tool and finance in its own systems. None of them is thinking about uploading contracts to a legal repository.

The panel's rule: if a process depends on someone uploading a contract by hand, it will eventually fail. Meet teams in the tools they already use and automate the rest.

Legal shouldn't own every obligation, either. Each team should know which commitments belong to it and when to bring in legal for a judgment call.

Look at the whole portfolio

Lawyers usually review contracts one at a time. The bigger opportunity is looking across the whole portfolio:

• Find repeated friction. If counterparties keep striking your clause on interest for late payments and you never collect it anyway, why is it still there?
• Capture the "why." Turnover wipes out institutional knowledge. "We've always done it this way" doesn't survive a change in business model.
• Bring context into negotiations. A request for 24-hour breach notice makes sense once you understand the counterparty's regulatory obligations.

AI: speed is the minimum, judgment is the goal

Speed is now expected. The real value of AI is pattern recognition: seeing where you drift from your standards and which clauses use up the most negotiation time.

The panel came back to two words for lawyers in the age of AI: context and judgment. AI can bring up deal history and regulatory detail, but weighing those factors is still the lawyer's job. Contract intelligence can also help junior lawyers build judgment faster by showing how their own company actually makes its calls.

Where to start

1. Report on more than turnaround time. Where do large deals slow down: in security review or in budget approval?
2. Run a quarterly retrospective. Review what you signed, record language that helped close difficult deals, and use it to update your playbooks.

The answers are already in your contracts. What makes a legal team valuable to the business is being able to find and use them.