Want an indication of how much impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on eDiscovery?  In about nine months, eDiscovery Today has already published 58 blog posts that have at least some relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Have we covered every area impacted by the pandemic yet?  As this article from Compliance discusses, contract review is at least one more area that is impacted by the pandemic that many people might not think about.

In their recent article Contract Review Has Become a Lot More Important During COVID-19, Here’s What to Do About It, Compliance discusses how the pandemic has “prevented countless people, babysitters to basketball players, from fulfilling their contracts”.  When 60-80% of business transactions are governed by written contractual agreements and a typical Fortune 1000 company maintains 20,000-40,000 active contracts at any given point of time, addressing the contract issues created by the pandemic can become a huge issue.

Many of these contracts include a standard clause known as a “Force Majeure” clause, which addresses unforeseeable circumstances that prevent someone from fulfilling a contract.  But there is no ‘boilerplate’ Force Majeure clause, as each one is the subject of negotiation between the parties.

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Still, so what’s the big deal?  Litigation cases often have hundreds of thousands of documents to review.  A few thousand contracts can’t be that hard, right?  Consider this: document review for eDiscovery can result in a cost of about $1 per document for legal professional review whereas manual contract review by legal professionals can run as much as $200-$500 per contract as they can take hours, not minutes, to review each contract.

When you have that many contracts and each can cost that much to review, it certainly becomes necessary to leverage technology to assist with the review and artificial intelligence (AI) technology can certainly help with that, just like it can with document review in litigation – perhaps even more so.

So, how can AI technology help?  You can find out more in their article here.  And, please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclosure: Compliance is an Educational Partner and sponsor of eDiscovery Today

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Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the authors and speakers themselves, and do not necessarily represent the views held by my employer, my partners or my clients. eDiscovery Today is made available solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Today should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.