Using AI for Legal Contracts

Was just reminded of this effort: NAnalyze

Using Artificial Intelligence for Legal Contracts

" ... We made our first dive into how artificial intelligence is changing law practices a couple of years ago. At the time we noted that the $437 billion U.S. legal services market and the 1.3 million attorneys in this country aren’t going away just because of artificial intelligence and a few handy chatbots. Instead, AI will pick up the slack – initially – in tedious, repetitive jobs where it can be more efficient than humans. That brings us to legal contracts.

In an excellent analysis in the Harvard Business Review on how AI is changing contracts, writer Beverly Rich notes that the main challenge is the sheer number of contracts that law firms must track, many of which “lack uniformity” and are “difficult to organize, manage, and update.” That sounds like a job for natural language processing (NLP), a field of AI that deals with how machines understand (NLU) and generate language (NLG). The combined technologies help AI extract and understand unstructured and structured data. Part of the goal is for the machine to recognize context, which is a very hard thing for a machine to get because of the subtleties of our different languages.

Rich goes on to spell out the use cases and applications in using artificial intelligence for legal contracts:

“It can let companies review contracts more rapidly, organize and locate large amounts of contract data more easily, decrease the potential for contract disputes (and antagonistic contract negotiations), and increase the volume of contracts it is able to negotiate and execute… 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.”





AI Beats Human Lawyers at Their Own Game

Last year we published an article about how AI startups are coming for some white-collar jobs, including lawyers. We profiled an Israeli company called LawGeex, which has since raised another $12 million, bringing its total funding to $21.5 million for its AI-driven contract reviewing software. In a study sponsored by the startup, it pitted its AI against 20 experienced, U.S.-trained lawyers on reviewing five non-disclosure agreements. The contest showed that the AI was better at identifying risk, 94% versus 85% for the human attorneys. The machine was also a wee bit faster reviewing the contracts – less than 30 seconds against an average of more than 90 minutes. We wonder if LawGeex handles divorces online.

AI Startups Using Artificial Intelligence for Legal Contracts
Now let’s take a look at some other AI contracts lawyers trying to show up their human counterparts.

AI Search Engine for Legal Contracts

Click for company websiteFounded in 2010, San Francisco-based Seal Software has raised $58 million in disclosed funding, and just today announced a $15 million investment by DocuSign, an eSignature and documents management company that Seal Software has worked with since last year. The company had also raised a $30 million round last June. The next month, the startup made its first acquisition – a Charlotte, North Carolina startup called Apogee Legal that had developed contract analytics using AI for specific applications such as procurement and data privacy, as well as more niche products like Brexit. Seal’s own flagship product, Intelligent Content Analytics AI solution, works like a search engine. Users can ask it various questions about contracts and get an answer to queries about legal contracts ranging from payment terms to liability and incentives to lease agreements. .... "