Skip to content
Multigrid

Insurance policies and contracts

Coverage limits, exclusions and the clause types whose absence matters as much as their text.

A policy and a commercial contract are not documents in the sense that an invoice is a document. They are assemblies. The operative text of an insurance policy is a printed base form, amended by a stack of endorsements listed by number on a page that does not contain them; the operative text of an agreement is a body, amended by exhibits, statements of work and side letters that may or may not take precedence over it. Extracting a field means resolving that assembly, not reading a page.

Which is why the interesting output of an extraction over these documents is often a negative. A schedule that names an endorsement the file does not contain, a claims-made policy with no retroactive date, an indemnity with no cap, an agreement with no order-of-precedence clause — each is a fact about the document that no field-by-field reading produces. These pages are about getting the fields out and about knowing, arithmetically or structurally, when what you got out is wrong. They are about parsing. What any of it means for a particular matter is a question for somebody qualified to answer it.

Extracting Claim Numbers and Dates of Loss From an Insurance Claim Form

How to pull the identifiers and the date of loss off a first notice of loss when four different numbers on the page look identical and none of them has a check digit.

10 min read

Extracting Coverage Limits and Deductibles From an Insurance Policy

Why a limit is printed in two places that can disagree, and how deductible, sub-limit, retention and coinsurance differ as arithmetic.

11 min read

Extracting Exclusions From an Insurance Policy Document

Exclusions arrive by endorsement number rather than inline, so extraction is a reference-chain resolution and a missing endorsement is itself the finding.

11 min read

Extracting an Explanation of Benefits Into Structured Fields

A per-line schema for billed, allowed, paid and patient responsibility, with the arithmetic that must reconcile and the cases where it legitimately will not.

11 min read

Extracting Renewal and Effective Dates From an Insurance Policy

Five dates print within an inch of each other on a declarations page, the policy period does not start at midnight, and one of them may not be there at all.

10 min read

Extracting Governing Law and Jurisdiction Clauses From a Contract

Three different clauses live in one section and answer three different questions, and the wording that separates them is narrower than it looks.

10 min read

Extracting Termination Clauses From a Contract

For cause and for convenience are different rights with different notice, and the cure period is the number most often extracted into the wrong field.

10 min read

Extracting Indemnification Language From a Contract

The indemnity clause does not contain its own cap, the parties are usually defined terms rather than names, and the duty to defend is a separate obligation.

11 min read

Extracting Payment Terms From a Services Contract

The clause states the mechanics and an exhibit states the amounts, they can contradict each other, and an order-of-precedence clause decides which wins.

10 min read

Extracting Auto-Renewal Terms From a Contract

How to turn an evergreen clause into a cancel-by date, and why the same clause yields two different deadlines depending on how the term end is read.

9 min read

Extracting Non-Compete Terms From an Employment Agreement

Why a restrictive covenants section is a list of covenants with different durations rather than one field, and how to split scope, duration and geography without inventing precision.

9 min read

Extracting Confidentiality Obligations From an NDA

How to tell a mutual NDA from a one-way NDA by clause structure rather than by title, and which sub-fields the obligation actually decomposes into.

10 min read

Extracting the Term and Survival Period From an NDA

Why one NDA contains two unrelated durations, how the three common survival architectures produce different last-obligation dates, and when that date is not computable at all.

9 min read

Extracting Parties and Signature Dates From an NDA

Why party names appear two or three times in one NDA and disagree, and how to pick an effective date when the preamble is blank and two signatures carry different dates.

9 min read

Extracting Rent Escalation Schedules From a Lease

How to turn a mixed flat, percentage and CPI escalation clause into a year-by-year rent table, and why compounding and the anniversary date change the answer.

10 min read

Extracting Square Footage and Premises Description From a Lease

Why one suite has two correct square footage numbers, how the load factor relates them, and what conflating them does to a per-square-foot rent.

8 min read

Extracting Option-to-Renew Terms From a Commercial Lease

How to derive the exercise window from a commencement date, why an option has two deadlines rather than one, and what conditions precedent do to the extracted record.

9 min read

Extracting Security Deposit Terms From a Residential Lease

Why a deposit stated as a multiple of rent is not a number, what fields the holding and return terms decompose into, and why jurisdiction has to be an extracted field.

9 min read

Other topics