The central contract registry

Contracts in paper folders, drawers and scattered mailboxes are expensive: they cost hours in a crisis and deadlines no one can locate any more. LEGALinhouse solves this with a central, searchable registry where every contract is held with structured metadata — not just as a PDF attachment.

Per contract we hold: contract party, contract type, start and end date, term, termination notice period, renewal logic, contract value, payment terms, responsible persons, status and a free notes area. Through the central search you find every contract in seconds — by party, by end date, by contract type, by full-text keyword.

AI-assisted PDF import

A new contract arrives as a PDF — and usually someone manually types it into the system. In LEGALinhouse the AI reads the contract and proposes the metadata:

Upload PDF → OCR (if scan) → AI extraction: party · term · termination notice · renewal · contract value → Human reviews and corrects the suggestion → Contract enters the registry

This saves time but does not replace legal review. The AI delivers a draft of the master data — final entry is confirmed by an employee. Before the AI processing, the 3-phase anonymization runs: contract-party names are pseudonymized before the language model sees them.

AI-free? Also works.

For highly sensitive contracts (M&A documents, employment agreements, whistleblower NDAs) the AI import can be switched off. The contract is filed and made searchable; the metadata you enter manually.

Termination tracking & warnings

The biggest hidden damage in contract management is missed termination notice periods — the contract automatically renews for twelve months because nobody looked in time. LEGALinhouse calculates every contract automatically:

  • Termination date is calculated from contract end, notice period and renewal clause.
  • Advance reminder per contract is configurable (e.g. 90 days before the termination date).
  • Daily notification to the responsible employee as soon as an advance reminder triggers.
  • Escalation if an advance reminder was exceeded without a documented decision in the system.

To terminate a contract, click "Terminate" inside the contract — LEGALinhouse generates a DIN 5008 letter, suggests the letterhead and sets a deadline on the mailing.

Contract types & structuring

Contracts are not all the same. A lease is evaluated differently from a DPA, a supplier contract differently from an employment contract. LEGALinhouse supports user-defined contract types with custom fields and search logic. Typical standard types that ship out of the box: leases, supplier contracts, employment contracts, consulting agreements, DPAs (data processing agreements), NDAs, license agreements.

Each type can define mandatory fields — e.g. for a DPA: TOMs annex present, sub-processors reviewed, data categories recorded. Contract management thus becomes a compliance tool at the same time.

Links to matters and deadlines

A contract does not stand alone. From a contract dispute a matter emerges, and the matter references the contract. A termination deadline appears in the central deadline calendar next to court dates. A dunning notice for outstanding contract payments ends up in receivables with a reference to the contract.

In practice: whoever writes a dunning notice sees the underlying contract. Whoever follows a contract dispute sees all correspondence, all deadlines and all payment events — without module switching.