About C&S Companies

Founded in 1968, the C&S Companies are known nationwide for client-focused engineering, architecture, planning, environmental, and construction services. Clients across the country trust C&S to deliver successful projects time and time again. Their staff of more than 400 has the expertise to handle almost any challenge. The diversity of C&S’s services is unique in the industry, with professionals in a wide range of specialized and unique disciplines. This enables them to support an incredible range of project types and specialties in house. With a focus on quality, C&S Companies works toward the common goal of planning, designing, constructing, and maintaining the built and natural environments. Their experts support each other by collaborating on projects, combining their knowledge to deliver the best solutions to each client. This internal partnership means that they are as proficient at managing complex, multi-million dollar projects requiring myriad services as they are at small projects involving only one specialty.

The Problem

C&S Companies has more than 400 staff leading important projects across the country but only a very small legal department. Before using Document Crunch, there were just two attorneys and a paralegal. One of those attorneys retired in early 2022 and the team didn’t have a replacement lined up immediately and were therefore looking to be more efficient as just a single attorney and a paralegal. Document and contract review takes up most of the time for the legal department who review documents such as construction contracts, engineering contracts and NDA’s on a daily basis. Since most of the contract knowledge lived in the legal department, this meant that the attorney and paralegal would be frequently contacted with questions regarding the contract that only they could answer. This inability to effectively communicate key contract information with team members easily led to increased workload for the already time-strapped legal department.

Document Crunch’s Solution

C&S Companies first heard about Document Crunch through the local AGC and immediately became intrigued by how this solution could help supercharge their legal department. The team was amazed by how easy it was to get started using Document Crunch. After just one initial training session, the legal department had what they needed to begin crunching contracts. If any questions arose, the team was able to easily get in-touch with Document Crunch, who responded in a timely manner and helped answer any questions.

The legal department was pleasantly surprised to see that Document Crunch’s ability to read contracts and pull out key information, replicated the very actions that previously the attorney would have had to do manually. This comprehensive review has made a significant impact in reducing the time the legal team is spending on contract review each week. In addition, thanks to Document Crunch’s Playbook feature, project managers working in the field now have access to important contract information that helps them better perform at their jobs.

The Results

Since using Document Crunch, the legal department at C&S Companies estimates that they have reduced the time they spend on contract review by at least a third. What’s more, the machine learning element of Document Crunch’s platform has led to continual growth and improvement. The C&S legal team says that the more they’ve used Document Crunch, the faster they have been able to complete the contract review process as the solution becomes more familiar with what specifically C&S is looking for.

“The speed and accuracy of Document Crunch is truly remarkable” said Jennifer Smith, General Counsel at C&S Companies, “I think I’ve had some version of document crunching living in my head over the past 15 years I’ve been reviewing construction contracts. After some time, I wouldn’t need to review every word of the contract and could just focus on certain sections. Document Crunch does all of that with the click of a button. It has drastically reduced the time I spend reviewing contracts each week and has helped our team better manage projects.”

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