A post by Davis Wright Tremaine proposes that professional services and particularly IT outsourcing agreements provide a better model for analytical artificial intelligence services than the widely used cloud services contracts.

“AI services have already become an important component of the IT portfolio for many large and small businesses,” writes Patrick E. Basinski. “The easy application of existing cloud services agreements as a contractual structure for AI services has helped accelerate AI’s adoption. As the reach of AI expands, new structures are needed to drive adoption of a set of potentially valuable AI solutions.”

Read the article.

Recent technological developments like artificial intelligence (AI) are now helping companies overcome many of the challenges to contracting, points out Beverly Rich in an article posted in the Harvard Business Review.

“The use of AI contracting software has the potential to improve how all firms contract – and it will do so in three ways: by changing the tools firms use to contract, influencing the content of contracts, and affecting the processes by which firms contract,” she writes.

She adds that – right now – AI contracting tools may offer the most value to companies with large volumes of contracts by reducing time spent in review and drafting. But as the technology develops, it will one day be useful to all firms.

Read the article.

LawGeex, developer of an AI contract review platform for businesses, has launched product enhancements that provide more control, speed and consistency than ever before.

LawGeex combines machine learning algorithms and text analytics to quickly review and approve everyday contracts, helping businesses answer the question “Can I sign this?”

The new features and significant design upgrade empower customers to have deeper and wider control of their AI-powered reviews, contract editing and approval process, the company said in a release.

One of the main features of the latest release is more granular control when creating legal policies in the LawGeex Policy Center. The introduction of specific variations of legal concepts allows businesses more granular control in clause concepts they want to see — and do not want to see — in contracts before signing them. Based on these pre-set policies, the LawGeex’s AI can automatically accept, red flag or reject clauses in incoming contracts., and a revamp of LawGeex’s Action Center.

Another feature of the new release is a revamp of LawGeex’s action center — where the contract can be edited after the AI’s first line of defense. When reviewing a contract within LawGeex, customers can now clearly see which of their policies were applied to each clause and can red-line the contract within the platform, instantly inserting their company’s standard clause language with one click (LawGeex also provides default language). Users also have full visibility on their company’s clause definitions, fallback positions, tips, and more, during the editing process, bringing an unparalleled transparency and cohesiveness between a company’s policies and the actual contract review. The enhancements also include improved layout for LawGeex AI-reviewed contracts. Clauses are grouped simply by their status as “Missing” or “Present”, and reviewers are simply able to manually override the acceptance or rejection of clauses.

Read more about the release.

The use of artificial intelligence technology, though still in its infancy, is gaining traction with law firms, helping to provide better outcomes for clients, faster, writes Russell Kostelak in Proskauer Rose’s Minding Your Business blog.

His article discusses the use of AI in the many phases of contract review: contract creation, contract analysis, and contract due diligence.

“While many law firms rely on templates for initial drafts of a contract, there is no one-size-fits-all template for the intricacies of each situation. AI systems can scan a law firm’s contract library and generate spreadsheet reports sorting and categorizing the underlying data within the contract library,” writes Kostelak.

Read the article.

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Pierre Mitchell, writing for Spend Matters, continues his series on artificial intelligence (AI) in contract management by discussing AI and knowledge representation.

“Intelligence is meaningless without knowledge, and vice versa. Albert Einstein as a baby (high intelligence, low knowledge) would be as bad at chess as Wikipedia (high knowledge, low intelligence),” he explains. “Expertise is built on knowledge that adequately models the richness of a certain domain, but high intelligence allows the knowledge to be more effectively and efficiently applied to solve problems.”

He adds his “second main step in a CLM journey is to ‘derive key intelligence from within your contract data … to decipher the legalese down to a granular contract clause level (including metadata).'”

Read the article.

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LawGeex has published a case study showing how social media company Brandwatch uses artificial intelligence to reduce costs and speed up the contract review process.

The case study focuses on Dylan Marvin, Brandwatch’s general counsel. His company employs more than 350 people.

He worked closely with LawGeex to build his own customized solution, resulting in:

• 80% reduction in time spent reviewing routine contracts
• 90% cost saving compared to using outside counsel or hiring new staff
• Legal department no longer a bottleneck
• 3 times faster deal closing

Download the case study.

London-based venture firm Invoke Capital is betting that a startup using artificial intelligence to process legal documents and automate due diligence in mergers and acquisitions can replace the armies of lawyers needed to close billion-dollar deals, reports Bloomberg Law.

On its website, Luminance says its product “pairs the computing power of artificial intelligence with human training and experience. Luminance can process large, complex and fragmented data sets within an hour, and presents the entirety of the data room in an intuitive visualiser.”

Reporter Jeremy Kahn writes that CEO Emily Foges said in a statement that “the software can highlight important information without needing to be told what specifically to look for, according to Foges. Rather than employing attorneys to scan through thousands of documents to identify possible issues, these lawyers can now devote their time to analyzing the software’s findings and negotiating deal terms, Foges said.”

“Luminance has been trained to think like a lawyer,” Foges said in a statement.

Read the article.

LawGeex has launched new A.I. Contract Review technology designed to help in-house counsel read, review and understand contracts.

The company says the technology features artificial intelligence that reviews contracts and highlights any issues, reviews contracts based on the user’s own legal checklist, reviews other people’s changes to standard contracts, can review any contract custom built for any industry,  and automatically manages contract approvals and escalations.

The streamlined workflows between sales, operations and legal can save users 80 percent of the time and 90 percent of the costs while cutting the time to close deals by two-thirds, the company reports.

The artificial intelligence program can recognize when any clauses are rare, missing, or potentially problematic, and provide a plain English report.

• Interactive contract reports with recommended fixes
• Lightning fast turnaround – 80% time saved reviewing and approving contracts
• Legal speak translated into simple English
• Checked by real life lawyers for quality and accuracy

Learn more.