Why “we extract key dates” is bulls***

You’re being sold a lie.

The key dates you most care about cannot be “extracted” because they are almost never in the contract.

You need to go further than extraction. You need to reverse engineer those key dates from the raw materials you extracted.

Example:

This agreement commences on 12 January 2014 for a period of 3 years, after which point it shall automatically terminate.

You can’t “extract” the Expiry Date because it doesn’t exist. Instead, you need to add 3 years to the Commencement Date.

Harder example:

This agreement commences on 12 January 2014 for a period of 3 years, and unless terminated by either party by no less than 30 days' notice prior to the end of the Initial Term or a Renewal Term, shall automatically renew for successive terms of 12 months.

We need to:

1. Reverse engineer the Renewal Date from the Commencement Date and Initial Term.
2. Work 30 days back from that to get the Renewal Notice Deadline.
3. Do that every 12 months until someone terminates the contract.

What about when the Initial Term is expressed as ending on a date (i.e. “12 January 2017”) instead of as a time period (i.e. “3 years”)? You’ll need a way to account for all the ways the same information could be expressed.

Unless your database does all of this for you, you’re either missing tons of key dates or you’re having to put in a huge amount of manual effort to do the job yourself.

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