[legalxml-econtracts] Data Consortium Contract Schema Requirements

legalxml-econtracts message

Subject: [legalxml-econtracts] Data Consortium Contract Schema Requirements

As promised, a more complete rendition of Data Consortium requirements for an electronic contract schema is available. Now, it contains information about the terms of a contract -- about 300 requirements. I am updating the document for Charges, Discounts, Escalations, and Taxes; for better definitions of some contract terms (Billing and Reimbursement); for a relationship of terms with "policies"; and for contract signatures. Given resolution of these matters, the document will be officially submitted for your consideration. I would like to complete this prior to the next Wednesday's Conference Call, and perhaps publish a draft of the scenario I've mentioned that is concerned with markup of contract text to facilitate its subsequent data extraction.

This version is a major milestone however. Commercial Transactions are decomposed into a set of 20 discrete events, and a term is provided for each (AcceptanceTerm, ...., UseTerm, PrePaymentTerm, ..., ReimbursementTerm). A set of terms is also provided for default events, that is, applicable to when a particular event does NOT occur during the contract (e.g., AcceptanceFailureTerm). Further, schemas are provided to enable statements that any of these 20 events actually did or did not occur prior to execution of the contract or addendum.

A comment was made that these Requirements may be better fit to a "real estate contract" than to a "core" contract... I agree in the sense that many of the Data Consortium requirements apply to Commercial Agreements, while not applicable to, say, Labor Agreements. This suggests that there is a "core" set of elements common to sub-types of Agreements -- supposedly all the structural items, plus a few generic Terms, are prime candidates for the "core" contract elements. Nevertheless, I encourage the Technical Committee to publish at the same time a schema for the all-important Commercial Agreement should a "core" schema be published separately so that, at a minimum, we are delivering standards that immediately address real-life project requirements.