Less ctrl+F, more legal assessment
How SIGNUM legal completed due diligence on more than a hundred contracts faster, with less administration and more room for legal assessment.
contracts processed
lawyers on the project
work phases from preparation to verification
secure data processing
The challenge
SIGNUM legal was handling a due diligence project involving a portfolio of more than one hundred contracts. Each document had to be reviewed against the same criteria, risks identified, compliance with legal requirements and the client’s internal rules verified, and materials prepared for legal assessment.
Using a traditional approach, two lawyers would have spent approximately a month opening documents, searching with ctrl+F, and manually copying findings into a spreadsheet. Mechanical work would have consumed time that should have gone toward preparing the checklist, reviewing results, and performing the legal analysis itself.
The approach
The team uploaded the entire contract portfolio to Praktik at once and divided the work into three phases: criteria preparation, automated extraction, and output verification.
In the first phase, the lawyers prepared a checklist and supplemented it with relevant legislation, case law, and edge cases. Since Praktik could handle the document searches themselves, they could devote more time to the quality of the questions and criteria.
In the second phase, Praktik went through all the documents and completed a row in a shared table for each one. The output was not a collection of isolated notes, but a single matrix that allowed provisions, deviations, amounts, and risk areas to be compared across the entire portfolio.
Verification
The extraction was working material, not a substitute for legal assessment. Each answer therefore remained linked to its source in the original document. With one click, a lawyer could go directly to the highlighted passage and quickly verify whether the answer was accurate and how to assess it legally.
Teamwork was also easier because reviewed cells could be marked with the name of the person who verified them. This gave the project a clear audit trail and allowed the lawyers to divide the review without duplication.
The result
The biggest change was not that the lawyers did less work. They did different work. Time that would otherwise have been spent opening files, searching, and copying clauses shifted toward preparing criteria and assessing the results.
Praktik helped streamline the administration surrounding legal work. SIGNUM legal retained responsibility for the legal assessment, but had the supporting materials ready faster, more consistently, and with clear links to the source documents.
“It results in significant savings in administrative time — the back-office work, organizing documents, and searching. And that saved time can be devoted to what really matters.”
