We built a French legal NLP platform over 13 weeks. (1) French Contract Ingestion Engine: processing all 42,000 contracts from 5 systems. The engine: extracting text from French PDF contracts (including older scanned documents — OCR with 98.8% accuracy for French text), classifying contracts by type (contrat de prestation de services, contrat de vente, bail commercial, contrat de travail, accord de confidentialité, licence — 22 French contract categories, with 95.4% classification accuracy), identifying parties with French entity resolution (matching "Société Générale SA" with "SG" and "Soc. Gén." as the same entity, handling French company type abbreviations — SA, SAS, SARL, SCI), and establishing contract metadata (date de signature, durée, droit applicable, juridiction compétente). (2) French Legal Clause Extraction Engine: extracting 40 clause categories from French legal text.
The NLP models understood French legal concepts: obligations — distinguishing obligation de résultat from obligation de moyens, extracting specific performance requirements, delivery deadlines, and service levels, conditions — conditions suspensives (conditions that must be met before the contract takes effect) and conditions résolutoires (conditions whose occurrence terminates the contract), garanties (warranties) — French warranty provisions including garantie des vices cachés (hidden defect warranty — a Code Civil concept), garantie d'éviction, and contractual warranties, clauses pénales (penalty clauses) — extracting penalty amounts, triggers, and applicability (noting that French courts can modify disproportionate penalty clauses per Code Civil art.
1231-5), reconduction tacite (automatic renewal) — identifying renewal terms, préavis period, and termination window, propriété intellectuelle (IP provisions) — licence grants, cession de droits d'auteur (copyright assignment — requiring specific French copyright law formalities per Code de la propriété intellectuelle), and clauses de non-concurrence — non-compete scope, duration, geographic limitation, and financial counterpart (contrepartie financière — required in employment contracts per French case law). Extraction accuracy: 93.6% F1 across all clause categories. For high-impact provisions (reconduction tacite, clauses pénales, non-concurrence): 96.2%. (3) Obligation and Renewal Tracking System: monitoring all time-sensitive contract events. The system: identified all reconduction tacite provisions and calculated optimal termination notification dates (préavis period before automatic renewal), tracked échéances (milestones, payment dates, performance deadlines), generated renewal alerts at 90, 60, and 30 days before the préavis deadline, and produced renewal analysis packages (current terms, market comparisons, negotiation recommendations).
(4) Regulatory Impact Analyser: assessing contract portfolio exposure to regulatory changes. The system: mapped Sapin II requirements to contract categories (identifying agent agreements, intermediary contracts, and public procurement contracts with corruption risk indicators), identified RGPD-affected contracts (data processing provisions, DPA requirements, international transfer mechanisms), flagged devoir de vigilance (duty of care) implications across the supply chain contract portfolio, and generated regulatory compliance reports with contract-level detail. (5) M&A Due Diligence Accelerator: processing acquisition target contract portfolios. The system: ingested and classified target company contract portfolios (5,000-15,000 contracts per target), extracted key terms across all contracts (financial terms, change-of-control provisions, non-compete restrictions, IP assignments), identified risk provisions (unlimited liability, broad indemnification, unfavourable dispute resolution, long-term non-cancellable commitments), and generated due diligence reports with issue lists, risk scoring, and source citations.