Case study · Publishing
Global publisher cuts rights-clearance time 70%.
An agent that reads contract clauses, royalty statements, and payment records, and cites them inline. Built for a trade and academic publisher with thousands of active authors, hundreds of millions of dollars in royalty pool, and a permissions inbox that was always behind.
faster rights-clearance turnaround
median response time (was 5–10 days)
answers include clause-level citations
FTE-equivalents freed per month
The problem
"Rights inquiries bounce between three teams and take a week."
A global publishing house, trade fiction, academic monographs, journal articles, was losing days on what should have been minutes of work. A typical inquiry: an author's agent emails asking whether reversion rights are available on a 2014 title, or whether the publisher controls foreign-language audio rights, or whether a recent royalty statement reflects the correct subsidiary-rights split. Each question lived inside a long-tail contract, with amendments, addenda, exhibit-A schedules, and three different royalty-payment systems that didn't talk to each other.
The actual research was straightforward for a senior rights manager. The problem was scale: hundreds of inquiries per week, three teams (rights, royalty accounting, editorial) involved in different proportions per question, and a 5–10 business-day median because no one inquiry ever had a complete owner.
The approach
An agent that reads contracts the way the rights manager would.
We built a rights-clearance agent with three primary skills: locate the right contract (and its amendments), interpret the relevant clauses against the inquiry's specific question, and pull the relevant royalty statements and payment records as evidence. Every answer it produces includes inline citations, clause numbers, statement IDs, payment record references, that a human can verify in seconds.
- Contract corpus. The full active-contract library, with amendments and exhibits, indexed in a vector store with structured metadata (title, author, contract date, territories, format rights, term length, reversion clauses).
- Royalty and payment integration. Read-only connectors to the publisher's royalty system (Klopotek) and finance system, scoped per contract.
- Drafting layer. Initial responses drafted in the publisher's house voice; cited clauses surfaced as quoted excerpts inline; rights manager approves before send.
- Escalation logic. Genuine ambiguity (rare reversion language, conflicting addenda, contested foreign-language clauses) routes to a senior rights manager with the agent's reasoning attached.
Architecture
- LLM gateway. Anthropic Claude (frontier tier) via AWS Bedrock in the publisher's own AWS account, contract review needs nuance and long-context comprehension; manuscripts and contracts never leave the publisher's perimeter.
- RAG layer. Postgres + pgvector for contract clauses, with hierarchical retrieval (find the contract first, then retrieve relevant clauses with section context). Custom re-ranker tuned for legal language.
- Integrations. Klopotek (royalty), Salesforce (author / agent CRM), Zendesk (inquiry inbox), house-style guide for response drafting.
- Audit. Every clause cited, every system queried, every approval logged. Compliance and licensor-audit ready.
The result
Faster responses, calmer authors, no more triple-handed inquiries.
Median time-to-response dropped from 5–10 business days to under 24 hours. Inquiry volume per team didn't change, but the routing did. Rights managers now spend their time on genuine ambiguities and high-stakes negotiations instead of three-day back-and-forth on questions whose answer was always in the contract.
Two adjacent wins emerged that the original scope didn't include:
- Audit prep got dramatically faster. Licensor audits used to take weeks to assemble evidence for. The agent's answer log is the evidence file, already cited, already cross-referenced.
- Author satisfaction improved. Authors and agents stopped chasing the publisher for updates. Same-week responses changed the relationship tone with the catalog's most active authors.