Analyzing Contracts: State of the Field, Mixed-Methods Guiding Steps, and an Illustrative Example

Abstract

Contracts are the underpinning of functional business, governmental, organizational, and inter-personal relations across the developed world. It is a methodological advance for contractual research scholars to transform qualitative contractual information into quantitative data to analyze if, how, and why the law is reflected and reproduced in contracts—potentially explaining the continuation or amelioration of social injustices—and/or if contractual content informs human behavior or vice versa. However, efforts to “quantitize” contracts and statistically study them are scattered across subfields without much methodological guidance. The linguistic complexity of many legal contacts, paired with few repositories, makes their comparative quantitative analysis challenging. Prior attempts to quantitatively analyze contracts often lack shared systematic methods for measuring specified textual content, transforming this information into a quantitative format, or statistically analyzing the produced data set. This article presents the power and promise of transforming legal contracts and other similar documents into quantitative data for analysis, reviews the research to date that does so in different ways, and then provides concrete guiding steps and an illustrative example of how to transform contractual content into quantitative data that are valid, reliable, and reproducible, increasing the quality of the data produced and supporting the important socio-legal conclusions that can be derived from their analysis.