Sometimes, a company is so accustomed to a process that its participants don’t realize how manual it actually is. This is commonly the case for contract management and contract review.

Many corporations rely on vastly manual processes to handle contracts, such as cutting and pasting into templates, emailing, searching for documents and saving to multiple drives. However, a manual approach for contract management can come with significant risks such as inadequate delivery to customers, failure to enforce negotiated supplier terms, time lost from disorganization and errors and additional work due to inefficient processes.

One area of particular concern is contract review. When combined with highly manual or ineffective processes, it has the potential to hinder the execution of powerful agreements that lead to increased revenue, enhanced partnerships and valuable purchases. In short, a nickel – albeit a necessary nickel for legal review – is holding up a dollar.

Contract Review and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Legal teams have long been asked to do more with fewer resources and a shrinking budget – all while taking on more work. This is not a scalable process without technology. Artificial intelligence and advancements in machine learning, natural language processing and deep learning are evolving the legal profession as we know it.

While legal professionals’ expertise and judgment will always be the core of legal processes, AI can provide pre-work much in the same way that a paralegal or junior lawyer might mark up a document or run a checklist before a partner’s final review. As a result, corporate legal departments can use AI to decrease the time it takes to review contracts, increase productivity, reduce risk and save time.

Here are five ways AI can accelerate the pre-signature contract review process.

Self-Service Contract Review

With AI, legal professionals can slash the time for a first-pass review from days or hours to mere minutes. A business user can request a standard contract or submit a third-party contract for initial review via email or a web portal. AI learns corporate standards from transaction histories and feedback and then reviews and redlines contracts and returns them in Microsoft Word – often within two minutes.

High-Volume/Low-Edit Contract Review

Some contracts, like nondisclosure agreements, require near real-time turnaround and often do not depart from standard terms. They’re high-volume and low-edit documents – prime candidates for AI review. Instead of an attorney handling contracts like this, AI can review the contract and suggest revisions to bring it to corporate standards if necessary. From there, the NDA or similar contract can be tendered directly to the other party or undergo one last round of internal review if deemed necessary. Lawyers can spend time on projects that bring more value to the company.

Complex Contract Drafting and Negotiation

Master service agreements, statements of works and other complex sales or purchase agreements can also benefit from AI. It leverages the full company playbook and clause library to guide the contract drafter and reviewer along the negotiation at agreement pass.

Third-Party Contract Risk Review

AI assesses the risk of contracts during the pre-signature phase by reviewing third-party paper against corporate standards and checklists. It then summarizes the risks, flags key issues using contract review templates and unique company clauses and suggests proper edits.

Playbook Management

Combined with a user-friendly AI platform, AI-driven contract review allows legal teams to manage, collaborate and use AI to apply corporate playbooks and precedents automatically. Legal professionals can then use the real-time data and insight provided by the platform to improve playbook standards and understand enforcement across the business.

Conclusion

Businesses want as many agreements on their contract terms and paper as possible. When a contract is on “other party paper,” it is difficult to adhere to a company’s playbook and enforce guidelines. Ultimately, it slows down contract execution. However, by relying on AI, corporate legal departments are aptly equipped to pave a rapid path to contract closure and signature and accelerate business while increasing contract compliance.

To learn more about AI and contract management, read a recent study that details how AI and contract review increases corporate legal productivity by more than 50%.

January 25, 2021/by melanie.brenneman@onit.com

Each day, the accomplishments of artificial intelligence multiply. AI recently solved Schrödinger’s equation in quantum chemistry. It regularly diagnoses medical conditions, pilots jets and fetches answers for our everyday queries. And now, it might dance better than you do.

The ever-improving abilities of AI are having marked positive impacts on a wide variety of industries and professions – especially corporate legal departments and the in-house counsel and legal operations professionals that run them. So, what can corporate legal professionals expect from AI in 2021?

Ari Kaplan, attorney, legal industry analyst, author, technologist and host of the Reinventing Professionals podcast, recently interviewed Nick Whitehouse, General Manager of the Onit AI Center of Excellence. Nick, who is the 2019 IDC DX Leader of the Year and Talent’s 2018 Most Disruptive Leader Award (as judged by Sir Richard Branson and Steve Wozniak), shared the AI trends that general counsel and legal operations professionals should keep an eye on for 2021, including:

Accelerated adoption – The pandemic has greatly affected the use of AI, spurring businesses and their corporate legal departments to recategorize it from curiosity to necessity. For example, 2020 saw many companies having to quickly reassess large numbers of contracts (such as leases). Legal AI allowed in-house teams to quickly assess their contracts and take action, helping their businesses survive and thrive.
Banishing the black box – Legal departments have historically been perceived as black boxes – work goes in and decisions come out slowly with little transparency. AI reduces the time spent on individual transactions, increasing transparency by enabling consistent use of playbooks and the ability for the business to self-serve.
Focus on solving in-house challenges – The technology has shifted from a project-based law firm focus toward products that are centered on solving in-house problems like contract lifecycle management and AI contract review. With 71% of lawyers saying they are mired in manual tasks, these AI products can drive a massive amount of value for corporate legal.
AI in the near future – In addition to the shift from law firm focused AI services to more in-house based services, corporate legal can expect a greater blending of AI into contract lifecycle management and third-party review as well as AI-assisted document automation and billing management.

Visit the Reinventing Professionals website to listen to the podcast. You can also find it (and subscribe) on Apple podcasts.

January 25, 2021/by melanie.brenneman@onit.com

Contract review and drafting can take up to 70% of an in-house legal department’s time. The process is often painfully tedious and repetitive – especially if it is paper-based or spread across multiple systems like emails and private drives. Without a more effective digital enablement, the process to review and draft contracts is slow and inconsistent, requires enormous attention to detail and continues to be prone to costly errors. These challenges directly impact a company’s ability to reach favorable contract outcomes and achieve business objectives.

With ever-increasing pressure on legal teams to do more with less, enhancing contract efficiency through automation and the latest technologies represent a significant opportunity to improve business performance.

Artificial intelligence has the power to deliver significant productivity gains and allow lawyers to utilize their skills, experience and talent on higher-value business objectives. Onit undertook a study of its AI for the pre-signature contract phase, ReviewAI, to determine just how much it can help and found commendable results (you can read more about them here.)

Key takeaways from the study include:

Testers found that ReviewAI accelerated contract reviews and approvals by up to 70% and increased user productivity by more than 50%.
New users were immediately 34% more efficient with their time and 51.5% more productive. The average midsize company employs 28 lawyers who review 4,850 contracts annually. Unlocking more capacity – up to 51.5% – means those same lawyers can now process 2,498 more contracts annually. It’s like adding nine lawyers to your team.
The team leader, a senior lawyer, was able to reallocate 15% of his time from contract work and team management to higher-value activities.
The efficiency and productivity gains from using ReviewAI increased over time, allowing corporate legal departments to optimize team performance, reallocate resources to engage the business better and reduce the amount of contract work handled by external counsel.

To learn more about artificial intelligence and contract review and drafting, read about the study’s results.

January 25, 2021/by melanie.brenneman@onit.com

It is safe to say that 2020 was a challenging and unprecedented year across all industries, not least the legal sector. Yet our altered ways of working have spawned new innovations and different ways of thinking about “business as usual.” For the legal sector, AI has become a key part of many lawyers’ arsenal, allowing them to rapidly respond to new challenges such as remote working, increased market and economic volatility and complex client demands. As we approach 2021, it is clear that this momentum in the legal sector to embrace all things tech shows no sign of stopping anytime soon.

‘Technophobia’ is no longer a viable excuse for lawyers

The pandemic has accelerated the pace of technology adoption generally, and has also opened lawyers’ eyes to the possibilities that advanced technology such as AI can herald. Technology has moved from being a ‘nice to have’ to a ‘must have’, allowing businesses and lawyers to keep pace with marketplace changes whilst also driving profitability and growth.

Let’s take the example of M&A due diligence- whilst years ago, the number of contracts to review for a transaction was a lengthy yet reasonable task, an explosion in enterprise data has rendered this process practically unfeasible. Indeed, hiring armies of junior lawyers to manually trawl through endless volumes of contracts in order to find a crucial ‘Change of Control’ clause is increasingly becoming recognised as a waste of resources and an inefficient use of legal talent.

And this is where AI comes in: Luminance is able to rapidly read and form an understanding of legal data, instantly surfacing crucial clauses, datapoints and anomalies at the click of a button. Not only does this instil lawyers with the greatest confidence that nothing has been missed in their review, but by enabling them to cut through the admin-heavy, mundane work, advisors are once again able to focus on adding value where it matters: the analysis. As Gavin Williams, Partner at Holland & Knight said to me at a recent Luminance webinar, “Luminance allows young lawyers to push skills faster, resulting in better quality and better work product which is closer to being ‘client ready’ than ever before.”

Another example is the sudden switch to remote working in 2020. With many offices now remote working for the foreseeable future and some organisations reimagining how offices will function after that, it seems that increased remote working or flexi-working is here to stay. Luminance’s easy cloud-deployment and advanced collaboration tools such as the ability to allocate tasks and track work progression are invaluable for the seamless coordination of legal teams. We have had customers such as VdA, Norburg & Scherp and The 36 Group use the tool to coordinate teams in connection with large review projects.

Clearly, the real, practical value of AI can no longer be overlooked and as we enter 2021, it is clear that AI is integral to the infrastructure of all organisations.

Clients expect more- tech is part of the answer

Client demands and expectations have always been high on the agenda for law firms yet increased economic volatility and steepening competition will once again push these demands into the spotlight in 2021. Indeed, recent research by Luminance found that decreased client budgets are the biggest concern for senior lawyers. Clients are increasingly savvy as to the technology that is available to lawyers as well as the benefits in terms of efficiency, insight and cost.

This year, for example, the Dubai office of Dentons were tasked with a time-sensitive review of 200 documents. This number quickly swelled to over 180,000 documents, all of which had to be reviewed in just two weeks. After consulting with their client, Dentons opted to deploy Luminance and were able to review the entire dataset within the timeline set by the client and with huge cost-savings. Results like this show that by embracing technology, lawyers are able to not just meet but exceed the expectations of their clients and this is something that we predict will continue far into 2021.

The year that in-house teams embrace technology

The last few years have seen a growth in the role and scope of in-house legal professionals. Indeed, in-house lawyers are not just subject matter specialists that are only to be consulted on specific legal matters but are instead now expected to play a significant and proactive role in wider legal matters, including ensuring compliance, examining potential business risk and being key members of the corporate decision-making team.

Consistent with this trend, this year there has been a 65% increase in the uptake of our technology by in-house teams in order to streamline work such as the review of outside counsel guidelines, employment contracts and regulatory compliance reviews in the face of data protection regulations such as the GDPR and CCPA. We expect to see a continued acceleration in this trend in 2021, with these lawyers becoming more tech-savvy, efficient and sophisticated in the projects they manage in-house in order to better control costs during uncertain economic times. Recently, we welcomed Featurespace, a market-leader in enterprise financial crime prevention software, as a customer in order to help the company’s in-house legal team to gain more control over their in-house processes.

2021: The year that AI got real in the legal industry?

This year has marked a turning point for the legal industry’s adoption of AI technology. At Luminance, we have seen an astonishing 40% increase in the uptake of our technology since the beginning of the year, with Luminance’s customer base now reaching nearly 300 firms and organisations. In 2021, AI will be a fundamental component of every law firm and business and to that end, the future of the industry.

January 15, 2021/by Jason Brennan

More than 80% of lawyers now view technology adoption as essential for the future of their firm and three quarters view the future adoption of AI specifically as key. Yet in increasingly uncertain economic times, the return on investment or ‘ROI’ of any outlay an organisation makes is going to be highly scrutinised. Crucially, lawyers need technologies that they can trust to get the results they need, not only to maintain business stability but also to take their work to the next level.

Take on more projects with Luminance

The legal and business marketplace is becoming increasingly competitive: law firms and in-house legal departments are tightening their belts to maintain profitability while clients are demanding increased expertise, efficiency and transparency from their lawyers.

Luminance brings machine learning to the legal profession, uniquely combining supervised and unsupervised machine learning to read and form an understanding of data, instantly surfacing crucial information such as clauses and datapoints. By reducing the amount of time and legal professionals needed to find the key data within documents, lawyers can choose to spend more time on higher-value analysis work, or can instead redirect resource to undertake additional projects.

For example, Luminance customer, Burness Paull, is using the Luminance ‘Discovery’ platform to conduct DSARs (Data Subject Access Requests) arising from data protection regulations like the GDPR. Without Luminance, the resource needed to fully comply with each DSAR means that the service is often not economically viable for lawyers to offer their clients or, in the case of in-house teams, without the support of external counsel. Yet with the assistance of Luminance’s technology, firms can dramatically reduce the time spend on each review. For instance, the first time that Burness Paull used Luminance to conduct a DSAR of 6,000 documents they saw 50% time savings, thus ensuring profitability when offering this service to their clients.

Meeting the spectrum of client demands

Not only can Luminance help lawyers to attract new business, but it can help provide an enhanced service to existing clients, too. By using flexible machine learning technology, Luminance can be used across a wide range of projects, enabling them to proactively respond to new challenges and in turn, expand their client service offering. For example, ‘Big Four’ accounting firm, Ernst & Young (EY) Law Belgium are using Luminance’s flexible technology to help their clients with Brexit compliance and now LIBOR transition projects. As Stéphanie De Smet, a Corporate Lawyer at EY Law Belgium, put it, “With many of our clients concerned about the impact and cost of a LIBOR review, Luminance’s powerful machine learning is fundamental to our legal practice.”

Flexible pricing for lawyer and client

Luminance has a range of commercial models from pay-as-you-go model to subscriptions options for larger data usage. This ensures that the platform can benefit firms and organisations of every size, from boutique law firms right through to the Big Four. Further, Luminance requires little-to-no set-up time before use, with most customers up and running within a matter of hours. Indeed, with Luminance’s intuitive and easy-to-use system, no bespoke user training is required and legal teams can see real results from day one.

When it comes to recouping their initial outlay on technology spend, some law firms choose to pass on the cost of their investment directly to their clients as a technology fee. Other firms choose to pass on some of the cost savings to their clients, offering competitive pricing in order to win additional business: one ‘Global Top 100’ law firm recently used Luminance to conduct a review of employment contracts and were able to save their client $800,000, representing an impressive 90% cost saving. And other firms might choose to maintain the same fees, keeping lawyers working the same hours on the project but with more time spent on analysis rather than sifting through the data. The range of ways firms might maximise the value of their technological investment is covered in our white paper.

Try Luminance for free today

Legal professionals are at a pivotal point- with advanced technology available and more accessible than ever, lawyers have tools at their fingertips that will allow them to do more with less resources, keep up with the accelerating pace of their business and use time more effectively. Luminance offers a two-week free pilot today so users can the the transformative potential of Luminance’s technology at work in their organisation.

For more information, please read the Luminance Business Case White Paper or contact info@luminance.com.

January 14, 2021/by Luminance

LITERA INTRODUCES ANONYMIZE FOR CLAUSE COMPANION, ALLOWING LAWYERS TO SAFELY REUSE THEIR PREFERRED WORK

February 5, 2020 – Today, Litera introduced Clause Companion’s newest feature, Anonymize. The solution’s new save and anonymize workflow allows lawyers to reuse content from their prior work to safely create new documents faster.

“Clause Companion is a necessity at our firm,” a CIO with a Global 100 firm said. “It is easy, fast, and changes the game for lawyers. Not only does it empower them to provide practical guidance on how to use preferred phrases and content, but the new “Anonymize” function provides a flexible solution for document creation. Now, all lawyers — not just transactional folks — can save, reuse, and leverage their best content without needing to be a document expert or interrupting their workflow.”

Clause Companion’s Anonymize feature offers users several benefits:

Automatically anonymizes content by detecting and replacing deal-specific data with the choice of blanks, symbols, or variables
Anonymized documents can be saved to the Clause Companion library as easily accessible, ready-to-go templates
Allows lawyers to safely reuse these documents and their preferred content faster, without ever leaving Microsoft Word

“Lawyers often use the fastest process to draft high-quality documents – by starting from an existing document that they’re familiar with,” Avaneesh Marwaha, CEO of Litera, said. “Sorting through content libraries to identify the best, most current documents and replacing the critical details in them takes substantial time that could be better spent on higher-value tasks. Anonymize helps lawyers by making this process smarter, faster, and more secure.”

Learn more by watching our video on Clause Companion.

About Litera
Litera is the leading provider of software for managing transactions and drafting, proofreading, comparing, repairing, cleaning, and securing documents in legal and corporate industries worldwide. Our core products empower users to generate, review, and distribute high-quality content quickly and securely, from any device. Today, Litera supports thousands of document-intensive organizations across the globe, helping them satisfy the complex demands of clients and regulators.

February 6, 2020/by Litera

According to the “12^th Annual Law Department Operations Survey,” released last month, business process improvement is the leading current and expected challenge for corporate legal departments, followed closely by the need to stay abreast of law department technology.

The survey produced by the Blickstein Group is created via an advisory board consisting of law department operations professionals from Fortune 500 companies and other consultants.

The good news from the report is that more corporate legal professionals (70.2%) are reporting that they have the right technology to do their jobs than in the previous survey (68.6%). And more specifically, 57.4% said they had plans to update, evaluate, or implement a document management system (DMS) in the next 12 months to extend that upswing.

However, on a scale of 1 to 10, respondents ranked the effectiveness of DMS technology in general at a 6.7—well behind the 7.1 average score for all legal information technologies. While up from a 5.9 in the previous year’s survey, the 2019 report lists a few reasons for this perceived lack of effectiveness, notedly insufficient training, poor implementation, and underuse.

Here are 3 ways law departments can overcome these and other challenges with DMS and improve their business processes:

Enable better search in a DMS

It’s clear from the low effectiveness scores for DMS technology that traditional products aren’t meeting the needs of contemporary legal departments. One way that this can be improved is to enable better search in your DMS.

Users need to more effectively save and search a large volume of documents, emails, and messages that flow through the legal department. Modern DMS offers suggested filing locations and personalized search that delivers more accurate results by remembering what you search for most often.

While 47.4% of survey respondents indicated they don’t use Artificial Intelligence in their legal departments, this technology is ripe for improving DMS effectiveness. By enabling improved user document search and even extraction of specific datasets buried in documents with AI, legal departments can significantly improve their business processes. Nearly 27% of survey respondents indicated they’re using AI for e-discovery or document review, while 13% indicated they’re using it for insight or predictions.

Offer a better DMS experience to users and the organization

As suggested in the survey, DMS effectiveness often is hindered by underuse. One strategy to overcome this challenge is to offer legal departments a more consumer-like experience with these technologies. Modern DMS empowers professionals to work more productively while enabling legal departments to be more efficient, agile, and responsive to the changing business environment.

It does so by mirroring consumer applications like Amazon and Google, with intuitive features that work the way users want to work on any device, while requiring minimal training. It anticipates user actions, and integrates with other tools that legal professionals use, such as matter management, conflict management, and workflow software.

Further, a modern DMS offers benefits at the organization level, with cloud delivery models to enhance organizational agility with rapid deployment, automated updates, and the flexibility to add new functionality as needed.

Offer comprehensive security in a DMS

Legal organizations have unique requirements for securing documents for all their different clients. This only becomes more complex when they must also meet the various legal requirements for all the countries in which they do business. So, it’s no surprise that handling global issues ranked 6th in top challenges legal departments face according to the survey, while compliance issues and data protection came in 9^th.

Modern DMS delivers comprehensive security, built on established industry best practices, to protect information assets. These protections are augmented by comprehensive governance, security, and risk mitigation features including need-to-know security and ethical walls, to govern information access.

Learn more about how a modern DMS can help your legal department improve its business processes here.

February 4, 2020/by Clint Crosier

Mutual Mobile is very proud to attend Legal Week for the first time and introduce ourselves to the legal tech community.

John Paul Sommer is the Vice President of XR (Extended Reality) at Mutual Mobile. Throughout his career, he has held leadership positions at elite game companies like EA, Zynga, Midway, and Microsoft. His extensive background in visual design and interactive software development spans over twenty five years, incorporating many different platforms including PC, Console, Mobile, and now XR.

Over the last several years, John has co-founded a VR Entertainment Company, as well as designed and produced over 20 XR experiences for some of the world’s largest brands like Walmart, Nestle, Toyota, Salesforce, Lockheed Martin, and Royal Caribbean. John plays a key role at Mutual Mobile in driving successful business development for emerging XR technologies.

John will be delivering 20-min lightning talks on Wednesday in LITE theatre on the 2nd level right outside of Rhinelander Hall.

Trial Prep in VR: Help reduce fear and anxiety to perform confidently under pressure.

Wednesday, 1:30 pm

February 4, 2020/by Mutual Mobile

The legal industry is defined by precision with each move made by law firms and legal professionals determined by well-defined rules of engagement. It is meticulously documented by an army of paralegals and legal assistants and as a result, law firms are buried under a veritable mountain of paperwork.
Tarter Krinsky & Drogin, the mid-size law firm based in New York increased productivity and efficiency, saved significantly on storage costs and reduced the pressure on the company’s IT team from adopting ScanSnap with Worldox solution.

February 1, 2020/by hgrossman@worldox.com

LawPay is essential to the Smith & Vinson Law Firm

BACKGROUND

The Smith & Vinson Law Firm is a criminal defense firm founded in Austin, Texas in 2016. They are 100 percent focused on criminal defense, representing individuals in cases involving DWI, domestic violence, assault, sex crimes, weapons charges, and other criminal justice matters. “Our mission is to do everything possible to help the client out,” said Brad Vinson, one of the founding partners at Smith & Vinson. “We want you to know that we’re here to fight for you, no matter what.”

ONLINE PAYMENTS FROM DAY ONE

Smith & Vinson knew from the very beginning that they wanted to accept online payments in their firm. For Jarrod Smith, founding partner at Smith & Vinson, LawPay was his first choice. “We actually started with LawPay. It was recommended by our state bar, and by other lawyers, as the best payment processor.” Brad Vinson did some research on online payment processors, but after reviewing several options that were available, the answer was clear. “We talked to our bank and a couple other banks about the services they offered. No one really compared to what LawPay was putting on the table.”

While the firm still accepts other forms of payments, LawPay’s online payments solution quickly became their clients’ preferred way to pay. Brad Vinson said that “probably 80 percent of the transactions that clients make with us come from LawPay.” Jarrod Smith concurred, “our clients love LawPay!”

PAYMENT FLEXIBILITY

Smith & Vinson appreciated how LawPay allowed them to get a payment request out the door as soon as one came up. “In criminal defense, clients often want to pay you outside of their payment schedule,” said Brad Vinson. “We have requests at any given moment for a payment, and we want to be able to send one right away.”

Jarrod Smith particularly liked how LawPay’s Quick Bill feature streamlined Smith & Vinson’s practice. “Quick Bill has been essential. It has made our practice more efficient, and it saves us time and money by being able to send out payments so quickly.”

KEEPING TRACK OF PAYMENTS

Another standout LawPay feature for Smith & Vinson is its robust reporting system. “Being able to quickly go in and see on a month-to-month basis how much money is coming in through LawPay is something we really like,” said Brad Vinson. “Also, being able to see more specific criteria, like picking a date range and seeing how much income had come in during that time period. We really like it.” Jarrod Smith echoed his partner’s praise of LawPay’s reporting features. “They allow me and my legal assistant to quickly see who has paid and who hasn’t.” In all, Smith & Vinson feel they couldn’t have made a better choice by going with LawPay. As Brad Vinson put it, “between the speed of doing a transaction, the fees associated with them, the ease of use—we felt comfortable that LawPay was the way to go.”

January 31, 2020/by Amy Mann