What the legal work runs on

Every contract step runs on a lawyer's judgment. That judgment comes from what the lawyer already knows: what the law requires, the department's position, what this party agreed to before, who can sign.

Each type of intelligence runs on its own data. Some of that data already exists and stays current, some sits locked in the department's documents until someone pulls it out, some has to be written down by lawyers, and some exists only while the work happens and vanishes unless someone captures it. Once the types and their data have names, the build conversation gets concrete.

Where a type of intelligence physically lives decides what data problem it is. That single fact shapes every row on this page.

A request comes in, and there's a reason behind it. The department pulls up its own past agreements, applies the positions it has already settled on, stays inside what the law requires, and holds to terms the market treats as normal. Then it negotiates the gaps with the other side, the right person signs, and how the deal plays out teaches the next one. The eight types below run in that order; the step numbers show where each one is used.

The flow starts and ends in the outer ring: the reason a deal exists and what it taught are the first knowledge in and the last knowledge out, and neither is captured today.

Two of these are the hard ones to get. Market terms need more comparable deals than any single company has signed. Negotiation history needs what got said in the room, which nothing writes down. Those two are where most of the real work sits; the rest is mostly extracting and maintaining what already exists.

Click any card to see which steps use it and what data it needs.

Click a step to see the intelligence it runs on, what it produces, and the data that has to exist underneath it. The filled chip is the step's primary dependency. Or click a type of intelligence above to light up every step that uses it.

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The whole page in one table. Five of the eight types already exist somewhere: two are maintained by the outside world, one is read live from the systems that own it, one is locked in documents until extracted, and one is written by lawyers. The other three exist only while the work happens. Capture them then, and each is one field on a record. Miss the moment, and they have to be dug out of email later, at real cost, and with nothing anyone can trust. The executive briefing sorts these five states into four simpler fates.

Six of the steps produce intelligence that later steps need, and most of it gets lost in inboxes and people's heads. So the team negotiates with no record of past negotiations, and renews deals without knowing how the last one turned out.