1. A system for automatically extracting contract data from electronic contracts, comprising: an administrator module configured to provide templates for inputting document patterns and a list of contract data tags for each of a plurality of contract document types, said document patterns being based on at least one predetermined region of a document, one of said regions including the first line of the document; a processor having a parser configured to convert an electronic contract document into a contract text document and reformat the contract text document to provide a pattern for the contract text document; a pattern recognition engine configured to determine a list of contract document types in the electronic contract by comparing and matching patterns of all known contract document types with the pattern of the contract text document; and a contract data extraction engine configured to extract contract data for each contract document type on the list.