Technology and lawyers have a peculiar relationship. Lawyers want technology to be the enablers yet many of us want to maintain a respectable distance from anything that sounds more unfamiliar than Microsoft word or case law research tool. However, the corporate world is changing faster and the lawyers need to catch up. I have heard this before but until the pandemic hit the world, the import of the change did not quite dawn on all of us. As a lawyer responsible for revenue and growth of a boutique law firm, the most difficult challenge during pandemic was to deliver more with less. Less resources, lesser fees and always quicker than earlier- all of them to help a client strike a deal in a Covid-stricken business environment.

Eat your dog food

Last month, as the first outside user, we tried Umbrella – an AI driven contract intelligence and contract management product from Riverus – a legaltech company that grew in last 3 years with Verus’ patronage. As Umbrella is now expanding its customer base, I believe that our experience with Umbrella could be a good read for law firms which are looking for ways to digitally transform their practice on account of both cost and efficiency. Here is what we learnt.

(A) Law firms sit on a valuable treasure trove of documents

Every deal brings more documents to a law firm. These documents usually sit within an inbox, online shared folder or, where available, more advanced document management systems of firms. However, this form of storage provides little opportunity for reusing the documents as templates for subsequent deals. Lawyers within a firm do remember the peculiarities of a transaction and limitation of any such knowledge or memory could come in the way of identifying the most suitable template in time of a need.

Within hours of loading the documents on the cloud based server in PDF, image or word formats, Umbrella provided us an opportunity to digitize the entire contract portfolio of our firm and presented an automatically populated dashboard detailing the salient features of the documents. Gone were the difficulties in searching; we could now seek out a document from the database by its attributes only with a couple of clicks. On top of that, we could search for clauses by their nature – e.g all indemnity clauses with cap on indemnities could be retrieved again in minutes. Given all the work around tailoring a draft to the deal points, easy identification of a good template / the right clause would go a long way to quickly progress an actual transaction within stiff timelines.

(B) Review of agreements can be converted to a standard process

Any transactional lawyer would would have come across situations where a review by junior lawyer or even the other side on a deal, missed some standard points. For example, a point around consent may need to be reviewed from the perspectives of materiality, timeline, process and exceptions. The review could miss the “gold standard” where either a clause or a perspective gets overlooked.

We learnt that if contracts are digitised, ideal clauses based on deals or clients can be earmarked. Also, using an AI driven tool even a junior lawyer can ensure that all provisions of a contract around specific deal points (they are called Business Intelligence (BI) in Umbrella) are automatically highlighted and compared - like while reviewing a confidentiality clause, the system could automatically flag out whether the clause is mutual and has any territorial restriction for operation. Finally, we learnt that it is possible to create easy workflow around standard review points that may be client or a firm specific matter (like highlight doubtful indemnity clauses to a senior lawyer).

(C) Digitisation can be an important tool for Business Development

Digitisation of contract provides an opportunity to obtain aggregated information around a firm’s clients, sectors and counter parties. Some of this are known but some of this information is difficult to obtain quickly during a pitch or a client meeting.

We realised that while we have worked across sectors, we may have done more contract work for infrastructure companies. We also realised that there are clients that we may not have touched base in a long time and obtained a good understanding of how our relationships with clients have fared across clients and their industries. A concluding thought is that while technology may have seen more adoption in larger law firms, with an appropriate costing structure, AI technologies can bring a lot of competitive advantages to medium sized and smaller law firms.

By Dipankar Bandyopadhyay