A system, method and program product for commerce management, especially
for managing contingency agreements or contracts. An agreement is entered
into the system, logging conditions for the agreement and identifying
potential responses to satisfy each condition. A location may also be
identified for each identified potential response, e.g. a HTML link to an
internet web site. Milestones are set to determine when to check whether
conditions have been satisfied. As each milestone is encountered
information is retrieved from the locations or provided manually. The
retrieved information is checked to determine whether the agreement is
determinate, i.e., all of the conditions have been satisfied or, the
agreement has failed because one condition will not be satisfied. If more
conditions remain unsatisfied and are identified with subsequent
milestones, the most recent milestone is recorded. The contracting
parties are notified regarding status of the agreement and of passing any
milestone. Notification and reminders may be by electronic mail (e-mail)
or by more traditional mail.