By Partnership enables contractors to measure and compare their risk profile to their industry peers
To help their contractor clients improve their contract management and negotiation practices, AXA XL and Document Crunch have teamed up to launch a Contract Review Benchmarking service. This new service uses industry data on key contract terms to provide AXA XL’s Construction insurance clients with best practices and benchmarking comparisons, supporting their risk management efforts to minimize contractual liability.
According to Cheri Hanes, AXA XL’s Head of Innovation and Sustainability, “Effective contract review and negotiation is a vital risk management tool in the construction industry. As part of their insurance coverage, we provide our clients with insight on how their contracts stand up to others in the industry. With this, they gain a competitive edge in seeing how their contractual stance on key contract terms aligns with industry best practices and their peers.”
“Historically, construction contracting is largely done in siloes with no objective standardization to the review process,” said Josh Levy, Document Crunch’s CEO and Co-Founder. “We now have access to data, and we should be using this to make our contracts better. We’re thrilled to be partnering with AXA XL and their clients on this benchmarking initiative to help bring data insights around contract risks to the industry.”
Document Crunch is a construction-specific, contract intelligence platform that can mine current and historical contracts and extract key provisions to easily identify trends and generate insights. To initiate the review, Construction firms upload 10-15 private-contract construction agreements, dated 2019 or later, to Document Crunch’s platform. which will “crunch” the contracts and produce a summary report of the results.
In combination with Document Crunch’s evaluation, AXA XL’s construction risk engineers provide a best practice benchmarking service on key contract terms, complete with scores and customization. AXA XL’s team then combines Document Crunch’s summary report with aggregated and anonymized customer data to develop a final report, which includes:
• An empirical score against industry best practices for 11 key contract terms including Waivers/Limits of Consequential Damages, Design Responsibility, Waivers of Subrogation, among others.
• A benchmarking score against the firm’s peers who are also participating.
• A benchmarking score against a broad sampling of contracts around the industry to serve as the baseline.
• Feedback and recommendations from the AXA XL team.