We are not a document processing solution

There are many products out there pitching themselves as “document processing”. A lot of them even mention working with contracts.

However, there is no comparison with Nomio.

“Document processing” companies deal with large volumes of documents that pretty much look the same. Usually transactional documents generated by a computer, like invoices or insurance policies where the only differences are the numbers that were entered into the template. You simply show the software the template a few times and it learns how to pull out the numbers you care about. Then it automatically sends those numbers over to some other application that wants to use them. Because that information is easily represented, you barely need much of an interface to display all of it.

This works very well, provided your documents fit into the precise shape that the system expects.

However, when dealing with anything other than very simple contracts, this doesn’t work. Contracts are full of negotiations, irregularities, and are often bespoke for important deals. They go too far away from any template. And the meaning of numbers and basic phrases can easily be lost without taking the surrounding linguistic context into account. Lots of what you care about can’t even be boiled down to a simple number or phrase, like a Force Majeure clause. That also makes it much harder to visualise and explore the information.

You need a real contract database, not a document processing solution.