Law Department Management Blog
If a law department participates in a project to collect and organize the contracts of a company, one of the headaches can be to translate historical contracts into a similar format. Legacy contract conversion presents a challenge for a law department to the degree people had stored contracts and forms in different places, saved executed contracts in different formats, kept different pieces of metadata about them, and allowed different practices regarding retention of contracts.
It is well appreciated, and often rued, that conversion of matter information from one database to another can be a costly nightmare (See my post of April 7, 2006: the full cost of a new matter management system should include conversion of data.). Consulting teams love the detail and depth; clients abhor the delays and dollars.
A similar struggle can take place, apparently, when a new contract administration system comes on the scene. This much I gleaned from a brochure of UpSideContract. If you want to sweep the tangled past into your new contracts database, you might have to slog through months of knotty contract conversion.