Is NLP suitable for my legal contract parsing problem?
Here's what I would have done.

extract raw data from the the pdfs.
use rule based NER from spacy(it's quite fast), but it will require some manual pattern making.
Also apply multiprocessing if you can.
https://spacy.io/usage/rule-based-matching
You can also write a document classification to segregate the templates and send the templates to appropriate code,running parallely.
Also checkout blackstone library for legal texts, it might be of some use https://spacy.io/universe/project/blackstone