Decoding contract data: Smart Values in LinkSquares
Your legal team packs a lot of data into the contracts they draft, but pulling out that information to uncover actionable insights can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. The ability to quickly run portfolio-wide searches and report on the data in your contracts is crucial for in-house teams. With around one in three legal professionals aiming to do more with less this year, having critical contract data at your fingertips is crucial to making informed decisions without manually combing through documents.
That’s why LinkSquares uses Smart Values – key pieces of contract data extracted by AI – to break down contracts into reportable information. Think of it as turning a contract document into a spreadsheet you can sort and reorganize. Smart Values are what occupy the cells of that spreadsheet, comprising everything from dates to governing jurisdictions to entire contract clauses. Some Smart Values, however, are more vital than others.
Of the more than 100 standard Smart Values that LinkSquares AI extracts, a handful are more closely watched than the rest. Curious what contract terms matter the most to in-house teams today? We crunched the numbers and uncovered the top 10 Smart Values that are most commonly added to saved reports in LinkSquares. In this guide, we’ll delve into why these top 10 areas of contract language matter the most to legal teams and how they use them in their day-to-day work.
The top 10 values legal teams track
1. Termination date
Termination date is the date at which a contract ceases to be in effect. In some cases, the termination date is explicitly laid out in the text of the agreement, like "This contract will cease to be in force on 31 December, 2025."
In other cases, the date can be calculated based on the contract language. For example, "this agreement shall be considered null and void 365 days from date of execution." LinkSquares can identify both explicit and calculated termination dates to deliver a numeric, trackable date.
2. Effective date
The effective date is the date upon which a legal agreement becomes enforceable; it's when the contract "starts." Like termination dates, these can be explicit, such as "this contract will take effect on June 1st, 2025," or calculated, such as "this agreement shall take effect seven (7) days after signature." LinkSquares can identify both explicit and calculated effective dates and perform the calculations.
3. Parties
Parties are the individuals, groups, or organizations involved in a contract. They have specific responsibilities and benefits outlined in the agreement. In LinkSquares, legal teams can track obligations to or from the same party across multiple agreements.
4. Renewal date
A renewal date is the date at which the contract ends one effective term and begins (or doesn't begin) a subsequent term. Renewal dates can be explicit or calculated, such as "this contract will renew 365 days after the effective date.”
5. Automatic renewal
Automatic Renewal means a contract will automatically renew for another term unless one or more parties explicitly cancels it. This stipulation is extremely common in leases and subscriptions.
6. Salesforce
Finally, a Smart Value you won't find in a legal textbook. The Salesforce Smart Value tracks whether a contract was uploaded directly to LinkSquares or through the LinkSquares Salesforce Integration.
Salesforce users can draft and manage contracts without leaving their Salesforce workflows, making drafting easier and enhancing security in some cases. This value is often shorthand for whether a contract was drafted by a sales representative (using Salesforce) rather than a legal team member (using LinkSquares).
7. Auto-renewal opt out
This value shows how many days before a Renewal Date a party must give notice of their intent not to renew. In other words, it tells you how much advance warning is required to opt out.
8. Execution date
The execution date is when the final party signs a contract, fully executing it. While each signature on a contract has its own date, only the final required signature determines the execution date. This date is usually populated by an e-signature application like LinkSquares Sign, DocuSign, or Adobe Sign.
9. Contract terms
This Smart Value indicates the number of months a contract will be in effect. If the contract renews for "an additional term," this value will tell you how many months that term will be.
10. Contract type
Contract type refers to the category of agreement. Many legal teams define their own list of contract types, but common examples include Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs), Scopes of Work (SOWs), Master Services Agreements (MSAs), property leases, and employee offer letters.
Sorting by contract type is helpful when building reports or workflows, as the details that matter in an NDA often differ significantly from the clause details in a sales contract.
Delving into dates
Why are there so many dates in the top 10 contract terms?
Many legal teams are concerned with prioritizing work, both for themselves and their counterparts across the business. Knowing when a contract is in effect is a good place to start, and knowing when that same contract is up for renewal is even more important. These are the contracts you need to focus on because their obligations are in force and you have to decide whether that should continue.
Legal professionals use these dates to drive their task lists and often integrate their legal tech with business tools so sales, marketing, and customer success teams can encourage contract renewals. These parameters help ensure your outbound teams focus on reaching out to the right customers at the right time.
Without a contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution to extract and organize this data, legal can't help those revenue teams combat customer churn. Key contract data like Smart Values are the first step towards your legal team helping to drive revenue.
Beyond prioritizing work, Smart Values highlight the parts of contracts that are always changing. We know legal teams rightfully stress over the use of non-standard language. But even when every word in a contract is standard, details like parties, effective dates, termination dates, renewal dates, and opt-out windows all vary from one agreement to the next. That’s why these values are the perfect starting point for organizing and reporting on your contract repository.
Reliable reporting: the right tech for your team
Key contract details like these top 10 Smart Values are essential for organizing your contracts. They’re the data points that legal professionals use to drive contract work both within and outside the legal department. Needless to say, they have to be accurate, and you need to get them fast.
That comes down to your CLM solution.
You need a tool that can consistently, quickly, and accurately extract these values from all your contracts – because getting them wrong or getting them too late could have serious consequences. The days of paying paralegals or outside legal service-providers to manually read and document all your contracts are over.
The LinkSquares AI behind Smart Values is the best that money can buy because it's designed specifically for legal teams (not for writing college essays, pretending to be a customer service rep, or generating deepfake videos). It’s easy to use your Smart Values and agreement content to search for and report on what’s in your contracts.
LinkSquares isn't just the best way to identify every Smart Value in your contracts; it’s also the best way to share that data with your organization and demonstrate the value the legal team delivers to the business every day.
If you're ready to start tracking the contract data that matters most with the CLM platform that does it best, contact LinkSquares today.