Contract Obligation Tracking
An agent that extracts obligations from executed contracts, schedules reminders, and notifies owners as deadlines approach.
Workflow
- 1 Executed contract ingested
- 2 Agent extracts obligations, dates, and owners
- 3 Agent creates tracked tasks with reminders
- 4 Agent notifies owners ahead of deadlines
- 5 Owner confirms or reassigns each obligation
Governance design
- ✓Authority to create tasks and send internal reminders only.
- ✓Hard limit: never communicate externally or close an obligation.
- ✓All extractions linked to the source clause as evidence.
- ✓Monitoring tracks missed-deadline rate as the key metric.
Escalation paths
- ↗Ambiguous obligation → legal owner for interpretation.
- ↗Deadline missed despite reminders → owner and manager alerted.
- ↗Extraction confidence low → human verification before tracking.
Ownership model
Head of Legal Operations, with the contracts manager as deputy.
Lessons learned
- Restricting the agent to internal notifications kept it firmly in the Execution band, not Autonomous.
- Tracking the missed-deadline rate proved the system was adding protection rather than busywork.
Contract Obligation Tracker
A legal operations team built an agent to extract obligations from executed contracts and chase the owners.
Initial workflow
The agent extracted obligations and, to "be helpful", emailed counterparties directly about upcoming deadlines. That was an external action no one had authorised.
Risks identified
- !Unauthorised external communication with counterparties.
- !Extractions not linked to source clauses.
- !No interpretation escalation for ambiguous obligations.
- !No metric proving deadlines were actually being met.
HAL assessment
The external communication silently elevated this from Execution to Autonomous. The fix was to contain the authority, not to add more review on top of it.
Improvements made
- ✓Restricted authority to internal notifications only. No external contact.
- ✓Linked every extracted obligation to its source clause.
- ✓Escalated ambiguous obligations to a legal owner.
- ✓Tracked the missed-deadline rate as the headline metric.
| Domain | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ownership | 3 | 4 | +1 |
| Authority | 1 | 5 | +4 |
| Limits | 2 | 5 | +3 |
| Escalation | 2 | 4 | +2 |
| Evidence | 2 | 4 | +2 |
| Monitoring | 2 | 4 | +2 |
| Review | 2 | 3 | +1 |
| Liability | 1 | 3 | +2 |
Deployment recommendation
Approved as an execution system once external communication was removed. Containing authority, rather than adding more review, restored accountability.