Contractual information can quite often be quite relational in nature. I have worked for organisations that had custom contracts and custom sales documentation (different industries) that were based on templates that could be filled in from a database.
In some cases, the companies were successful in storing the relevant information in a database and use that to generate the documents required based on document templates. This is not hard, but it can be tedious to set up. The companies also have to have a will to walk down that path and many do not see a benefit to this kind of process.
It takes a very insightful designer to manage and lead this process as well as a client who has an incentive to move in this direction. One of the considerations is that the approved contract must be in some unalterable form that can be tested against the contract generation process from the information within the database. So that there is always a means of ensuring that any information in the database cannot be corrupted (in a legal sense). That is a matter of safeguards not database information storage capabilities and there are many different ways to do this kind of security.
The problem of sharing of data and replication is not often thought through properly. Oft times, I have seen replication being performed wholesale instead of piecemeal. Similarly for data sharing and the consequences have been less than efficient. Oft times, the actual requirements for sharing and repliation are very small and it is a matter of understanding what is actually required and what is desired for the business.
Finally, very little data is unstructured if you look at it correctly. Many times, I have seen people talk about unstructured data (including documents of all kinds) and when you look at the data, it is highly structured. It becomes a matter of seeing what that structure is and working out what is variable and what is constant data within the structure.