Dynamic Contract Generation for Dynamic Business Relationships

Abstract

A dynamic virtual enterprise needs to be able to create, customize, and dismantle commercial relationships among partners quickly. The need to establish legal contracts before enactment begins can undermine the benefits gained by using advanced technology to form dynamic virtual enterprises, if it cannot be done quickly when needed, efficiently, in an up-to-date manner and result in a correct contract. There is, therefore, a need for the dynamic creation of contracts to reflect these constraints. An electronic representation of the contract can be constructed rapidly and brings the added advantage of being available to other software components. The chapter presents a novel method for generating a legal contract from the description of a business agreement. This is done by breaking up the constituent parts of the contract into clauses and using matchmaking technology to determine whether a clause is relevant for a given business agreement or not. A brief overview of the matchmaking technology that is used to do the transformations of a business agreement into a contract is given. We then show one specific detailed example of this approach — the translation of a business projection agreement into the relevant agreement in the legal projection, namely, a contract.