AI solution design · Knowledge and RAG
Contract search and Q&A
Find renewal dates, notice periods and liability caps across hundreds of contracts, and ask questions with the clause shown in the answer.
Talk about something like thisThe situation
A commercial team holds several hundred supplier and customer contracts, many of them scanned PDFs. Finding a renewal date or a termination clause means opening documents one at a time, and renewals are sometimes missed.
How it works
Step by step
- 1
Read the documents
Scanned contracts are run through OCR so the text can be searched, keeping the page and layout.
- 2
Split by clause
Each contract is divided into clauses with their headings, so an answer can point to the exact one.
- 3
Pull out the key terms
Dates, parties, notice periods, payment terms and liability caps are extracted into a table, each with a confidence score.
- 4
Answer questions
"Which contracts renew before March?" is answered from the table, and "What does clause 12 say about termination?" from the clause text, with the clause shown.
- 5
A person checks
Low-confidence extractions go to a reviewer, and corrections feed back into the table.
What it is built from
- Azure AI Document Intelligence
- OCR and layout of scanned contracts
- Azure AI Search
- Clause-level search
- Azure OpenAI
- Extracts terms and answers questions
- SQL Server
- Holds the extracted terms, reviewer corrections and renewal dates
Safeguards
- The clause text is always shown beside the answer, so nobody relies on a paraphrase
- Extracted values carry a confidence score, and anything doubtful is reviewed
- The tool finds and summarises. It does not give legal advice
- Contracts stay in your own Azure subscription
What you end up with
- A searchable contract library
- A renewal and notice calendar built from the extracted dates
- A question box over the whole set
- A review queue with a record of every correction
Where to start
Start with a sample of 50 to 100 contracts, measure how many terms it reads correctly, then scale.
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