Applying a Classify-Then-Extract Pattern to Other Document-Heavy Problems

A single-pass system that tries to both figure out what kind of document it's looking at and extract specific fields from it in one step tends to make compound errors — a misclassification early on corrupts every extraction that follows. Splitting the work into a classification stage and a separate extraction stage, the way TenderMatch does, means each stage can be checked and validated on its own before the next stage trusts its output.

It helps wherever documents vary enough in structure that a single fixed template can't parse all of them reliably, but still share enough of a common purpose that a consistent field set makes sense to extract. It's less useful for genuinely uniform documents, where a simpler fixed parser would do the job without the added complexity — another reason this determination happens during Discovery rather than being assumed upfront.