Data rights briefing tool for onboarding a new vendor feed
Problem
When a new vendor feed is being onboarded, whoever configures the pipeline is not usually the person who read the contract. The data-sharing agreement sits as a PDF attached to a procurement email or filed away after signature, and the data engineer wiring up the connector works from the vendor's technical documentation alone. Nobody rechecks what the agreement actually permits: how long the data can be kept, whether it can be joined with other sources, whether it can feed a customer data platform, whether the sponsor whose data this is agreed to that use at all. The question only resurfaces when someone asks it directly, usually a lawyer, an auditor or a partner, months after the pipeline has been running, and by then nobody on the data team remembers which clause covered which field.
Product idea
A research agent built for one document at a time. Upload a vendor's data-sharing agreement, contract terms or league data-rights document, and it reads through for the clauses that matter to a data team: retention period, permitted downstream use, whether combination with other data sources is allowed, and who is entitled to see the result. It returns a structured briefing, one row per field or use case, each line citing the exact clause it came from. Where the document is silent on a question, it says so rather than guessing an answer that was never agreed. It does not give a legal opinion, does not check the pipeline against the briefing, and does not decide whether the feed should be onboarded. It gives whoever signs off something shorter than the contract to read.
Who it is for
Head of data and data engineers configuring a new feed, and the CRM and CDP manager who needs to know what a source can feed downstream. Sponsored by the head of data or head of IT.
Possible first version
A single-purpose tool: upload a contract or agreement as PDF or text, get back a structured briefing covering retention, permitted downstream use, data combination rules and access restrictions, each line linked to the source clause, exportable as a document. Out of scope for version one: no link to the warehouse's actual field list, so the reader still matches a briefing line to the real pipeline by hand, no legal sign-off workflow, and no integration with the vendor's technical documentation beyond the agreement itself.
- Build classification
- Micro-tool
- Rough effort
- 10 day prototype
- Roles involved
- Head of data, Data engineer, CRM and CDP manager, Head of IT
- Relevant to
- Professional club, League office, Federation / governing body, Venue & stadium operator
- Systems in play
- Data catalogues and quality monitoring, Customer data platforms and reverse ETL, Cloud data warehouses and lakehouses
- Product framing
- Research
Questions we get asked
What do you need from us to get this running on day one?
Just the document itself: the signed data-sharing agreement, contract or league data-rights terms as a PDF or text file. No connection to the warehouse, the pipeline or the vendor's system is needed to produce a briefing, which is why this can be tried on a single existing contract before anyone commits to onboarding anything new.
Does this replace our lawyer reading the contract?
No. It reads the document and produces a structured summary with citations, which is a starting point for the person who signs off, not a legal opinion. Anything that genuinely turns on interpretation, not just extraction, still goes to whoever is qualified to interpret it. The value is making the second and third reading of a contract as fast as the first.
Our legal team already reviews these agreements before we sign. Why do we need this too?
That review happens once, at signature, for the use case that was in mind at the time. The question that causes trouble comes later, when someone wants to push the same feed into a new dashboard or a customer data platform and nobody goes back to reread the contract to check whether that was covered. This exists for that second moment, not the first.
Does it check whether our actual pipeline matches what the contract allows?
No, and that is a deliberate boundary. It only reads the agreement; it has no visibility into what the pipeline actually does with the data, so it cannot confirm the two match. That comparison is a separate, harder problem involving the warehouse and catalogue, and folding it in here would make the briefing itself less trustworthy.
Is this your workflow?
Tell us one sports workflow that still runs on paper, spreadsheets, WhatsApp or an outdated system. We will map it and show you what a simpler product looks like.
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