Standard-setting organisation World Commerce & Contracting (WorldCC) and TermScout, the NLP-assisted contract rating company, have entered into a partnership that will provide the tech company’s offering to WorldCC’s 70,000 members for free.
The members will now get access to thousands of publicly reviewed and rated contracts, primarily related to software companies. It’s kind of like a Consumer Reports, or Which?, approach to contracts and provides a mass of information about them. Especially useful is the way it compares them to what is currently ‘market’ on a clause by clause level. If you’d like to see what level of contract rating detail TermScout provides, check out this short AL TV Walk Through.
Sally Guyer, Global CEO of WorldCC, commented: ‘Our goal is to leverage TermScout’s vast database of contract data to create a shared understanding of what’s market for contract terms.’
The two organisations added that WorldCC and TermScout have a shared mission: ‘To make contracting frictionless and improve business relationships. The partnership is an important step towards realising this mission.’
Artificial Lawyer connected with TermScout CEO, Otto Hanson (pictured above), to find out some more.
– What does it mean to have an organisation such as WorldCC recognise your product’s usefulness?
Our mission is to make the contracts of the world simple and useful – a mission very much aligned with that of the WorldCC. A key pillar of accomplishing that mission is helping the world develop a shared understanding of what’s market for contract terms.
This is a huge step forward for our shared mission, as it stands to enable any of the WorldCC’s more than 70,000 members to access advanced functionality and rich market data on our platform as a benefit of their membership.
– Where will this eventually lead?
We hope that this marks the beginning of the end of an era in contract negotiations that was chiefly characterised by references to flawed anecdotal data.
When negotiators have access to real market data on what is actually being agreed to in negotiated contracts, references to their own experiences become less relevant, and rightly so, because each of our experiences are statistically incapable of offering us a representative understanding of what’s actually ‘market’ for any contract term.
– And for international readers: how much does TermScout cover non-US agreements?
TermScout’s platform today primarily focuses on software agreements in the English language, without prejudice to where the parties are located.
The data does largely come from US-based companies, but what’s market for things like indemnities and limits on liability doesn’t tend to vary widely from the UK to the US as far as we can tell.
Thanks Otto!