Once Cascade has extracted the changes in your document, you can run an analysis on any individual change to uncover its knock-on effects across the contract.
Select a change to analyse from the list of changes in the Cascade panel:
Select the change (for example, clause 27.16 Disposals).
Click Run Analysis.
Cascade will then begin analysing the impact of that specific change across the rest of the document.
What happens during the analysis
During the analysis, Cascade maps your contract using the same advanced technology that powers Definely Draft/Definely Read. It then looks through this map at three different levels to comprehensively identify all possible knock-on effects:
It first identifies where else in the contract may be directly impacted by the change.
Then it looks at what else may flow on as a result of those direct impacts.
Finally, it traces the consequences further still, up to three levels deep, both by following definitions and cross-references and from a semantic standpoint, so it understands the meaning and context of the change within the contract as well as the structural links.
This combination of structural and semantic analysis is what allows Cascade to surface the second- and third-order consequences that are easy to miss on a manual review.
Streaming results
While the analysis is running, Cascade streams the results as they become ready. You don't need to wait for the whole document to be processed before you start reviewing, you can begin working through the earliest affected locations while Cascade continues to process the rest in the background.
Reading the results
Once the analysis is complete, Cascade presents:
A list of all potentially affected areas across the contract.
A Summary of Impact statement at the top, giving you a high-level view of how the change ripples through the document. Hit the expand dropdown to see the full summary and how the change may affect the wider document.
The results give you a full map of interrelated definitions and clauses, showing both the direct impacts of the change and the flow-on consequences that follow from them.
A worked example
Take the example of a change made to the Disposals clause. Running the analysis shows that the change:
Affects the Permitted Disposal definition directly, and
Has a knock-on impact on the Disposing Company definition as a result.
Without Cascade, the impact on Disposing Company is the kind of second-order consequence that's easy to miss, and you'd need to manually trace each definition through the document to spot it.
What's next
In the next article in this series, we'll look at how to review the affected locations in detail and decide what action, if any, you need to take in each. Visit Amending in context to find out more.