Disruption defines the startupled and technology-driven landscape today. And perhaps the most disruptive technology across several industries is cognitive computing. Not only does artificial intelligence (AI) build upon existing systems and support everyday functions, but it also affords professionals the time to focus on more important tasks. In fact, AI may even permit the creation of entirely new roles - roles that are completely unfathomable now but will matter most in the years to come
Disruption defines the startupled and technology-driven landscape today. And perhaps the most disruptive technology across several industries is cognitive computing. Not only does artificial intelligence (AI) build upon existing systems and support everyday functions, but it also affords professionals the time to focus on more important tasks. In fact, AI may even permit the creation of entirely new roles - roles that are completely unfathomable now but will matter most in the years to come
Most legal technology solutions on the market today include perhaps one or two dimensions of AI. However, the wide range of core functionalities that end-to-end contract management systems (CMS) need to offer means that multidimensional AI must play a vital part in legal tech platforms.
Combining advanced, proprietary algorithms with enhanced legal engineering capabilities goes a long way in developing AI-powered contract management solutions. Such holistic approaches are validated by Gartner, a leading global researcher, as they “embed AI into the fundamental steps of the contracting process.” It notes that these holistic approaches are in stark contrast to most vendors “which apply AI only to one or two specific tasks, such as automating third-party contract reviews.”
In a 2019 report on legal and compliance automation, Gartner highlighted vendors “that use process design, content services and user experience to improve established legal and compliance workflows.” The report recognizes that legal departments can benefit significantly from implementing contract management platforms that include AI and advanced analytics. That is not all, however — the Gartner report recommends that legal and compliance leads focus on achieving the most critical outcomes: accelerating contract review, improving training and validation, and ensuring information compliance across the business.
With that in mind, we can then consider five most important dimensions of AI capabilities. These should be top of mind for GCs and legal teams, too, when considering advanced contract management solutions:
1. AI-Powered Obligation Management: By using best-in-class natural language processing (NLP) technology and an embedded legal language knowledge studio, you can analyze and interpret legal obligations and abstract the obligations automatically. This cuts down any manual abstraction - or manual entry - that could otherwise take countless human hours to complete. And with AI-powered obligation management, you can produce reports on all your contractual obligations, including those that have been added to the system with AI technology and those that were input by hand in previous years.
2. Third-Party Contract Risk and Compliance: Element classification AI tech helps you to review third-party contracts against your company’s — or your client’s — pre-defined contractual playbooks. Third-party contract risk and compliance lets you analyze particular contracts to identify risk issues and non-compliant contractual text. It allows you to negotiate contracts much quicker and ensure better contractual compliance overall. What is more, a properlyimplemented, AI-based CMS can assist with evaluating the dangers lurking in agreements, by alerting legal teams to the potential exposure and “risk-scoring” each contract.
3. Cognitive Discovery Search: With auto-complete, geospatial search, filtering, and faceting capabilities, advanced cognitive searchability reads all contracts in a repository and supports accurate advanced searches. AI search capabilities — not simply OCR, but rather enhanced key phrase extraction, fuzzy searches, text repopulation, and named entity recognition —are built right into the system. The AI uses an “extract and enrich” approach, pulling out information and structures from large undifferentiated text or image files comprised of unstructured data. And these are made indexable and findable during full-text search queries.
4. Contract Analyst Chatbot: Proprietary chatbots are virtual contract analysts completely powered by NLP technology. Embedded at the contract record level, contract analyst chatbots interpret and respond to any one of your contract-related queries. That means you do not have to open contract documents every single time you have a question. You can simply call up, print out, and email individual reports - all generated by the AI.
5. Full Document Translation: Cognitive document translation is among the most advanced technologies for in-house legal departments presently on the market. With the assistance of an AI technology called neural machine translation, you can translate whole contracts and ancillary contractual documentation in a multitude of languages — all while preserving context and understanding. You can make contract-related queries in your preferred language as the AI translates searches into more than 40 languages It then provides the results in your preferred language, along with the visualization of translated clauses within contracts.
Ultimately, the goal of attorneys and legal paraprofessionals is to discover, strengthen, and build upon the very best of organizations in a contractual sense. This breathes new life into the organization and motivates employees from the top down. Core to this goal— across any organization — is exceptional contract management capabilities backed by artificial intelligence and human ingenuity. Combined, these technologies have enormous potential to impact companies’ and customers’ individual successes, as well as the legal sector as a whole.
Theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking once famously stated that “every aspect of our lives will be transformed [by artificial intelligence].” Imagine multidimensional AI, along the lines of the first legal digital revolution.
Jerry Levine is the Chief Evangelist and General Counsel at ContractPodAi. He uses his experience to support ContractPodAi’s continued product and delivery innovation in legal technology and digital transformation.
