Note: The client’s name has been anonymized in this case study to protect their confidentiality.
Problem
Hachette Book Group (HBG), among the world’s largest global book publishers, acquired a new company and inherited over 4,000 contracts, all stored without metadata tagging or organization. This resulted in zero visibility into critical contract details, like royalty agreements, renewal clauses, and other critical and unique terms. The company lacked the resources to manually sift through each contract, making it challenging to meet the tight three-month deadline to extract data from these thousands of contracts.
The complexity of the contracts was considerable, with around 70-75 metadata fields that needed to be tracked and managed. Recognizing the limitations of manual processes and outdated tools, HBG needed a creative solution to meet their rapidly approaching deadline.
Solution
HBG came to Execo, knowing that traditional options for contract extraction wouldn’t meet their timeline. Execo’s Intelligent Digitization service offered the solution the company needed, combining integrated AI-driven technology with expert legal oversight to efficiently and accurately complete contract extraction at scale.
Execo worked with HBG to break the contract into achievable milestones, ensuring client oversight and satisfaction at each stage. With the timeline in mind, HBG and Execo set to work.
Execo leveraged proprietary GenAI processes to extract metadata and critical contract terms across royalty agreements, renewal clauses, key licensing terms, and more. At the same time, Execo’s contract experts remained in the loop, meticulously reviewing AI-extracted data to identify inconsistencies and ensure accuracy.
Execo was uniquely poised to help HBG solve this problem due to its global talent pool. Contracting specialists across all three of Execo’s delivery centers were activated and immediately engaged in the project.
Results
Hachette Book Group emerged from this project with major wins: they not only met their tight deadline for accurately digitizing over 4,000 complex contracts but surpassed expectations by completing the task ahead of schedule.
Key results included:
- 99% accuracy in contract data extraction due to Execo’s proprietary human-in-the-loop, AI-powered extraction process.
- Extracted 70-75 different metadata fields containing critical contract insights, including royalty calculations, renewal clauses, and licensing agreements.
- All 4,000 contracts digitized ahead of schedule, finishing earlier than expected.
This work established a future-ready foundation, enabling HBG to shift into the next phase of its work with Execo—the implementation of a full-scale CLM system.