Using AI to Ensure Reliable Supply Chains: Legal Relation Extraction for Sustainable and Transparent Contract Automation

Efficient contract management is essential for ensuring sustainable and reliable supply chains; yet, traditional methods remain manual, error-prone, and inefficient, leading to delays, financial risks, and compliance challenges. AI and blockchain technology offer a transformative alternative, enabling the establishment of automated, transparent, and self-executing smart contracts that enhance efficiency and sustainability. As part of AI-driven smart contract automation, we previously implemented contractual clause extraction using question answering (QA) and named entity recognition (NER). This paper presents the next step in the information extraction process, relation extraction (RE), which aims to identify relationships between key legal entities and convert them into structured business rules for smart contract execution. To address RE in legal contracts, we present a novel hierarchical transformer model that captures sentence- and document-level dependencies. It incorporates global and segment-based attention mechanisms to extract complex legal relationships spanning multiple sentences. Given the scarcity of publicly available contractual datasets, we also introduce the contractual relation extraction (ContRE) dataset, specifically curated to support relation extraction tasks in legal contracts, that we use to evaluate the proposed model. Together, these contributions enable the structured automation of legal rules from unstructured contract text, advancing the development of AI-powered smart contracts.