Michael Mills, the Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer at of legal AI company, Neota Logic, discusses a diagram that set him on a path to revolutionizing the in-house legal world.
Mills, a former lawyer turned tech entrepreneur, sketched the above image after a conversation with a General Counsel at a big bank. He explains: “My partners and I started the company seven years ago, in the midst of discussions with in-house legal departments and law firms about how they perceived their world changing around them.
“First of all, the CEO and CFO were driving down costs by saying things like ‘cut your budget by 5%, I don’t care how you do it, and 10% the next year’. Secondly, due to global competition, they were facing a much larger and more complex business environment.
The CEO and CFO were driving down costs by saying things like ‘cut your budget by 5%, I don’t care how you do it, and 10% the next year’
“Thirdly, there is pressure from regulators, and then, finally, the business itself was growing more complex and larger. Those forces together were driving corporate legal departments and their outside counsel to face what we now call the ‘more for less’ conundrum.”
A recent LawGeex-hosted Webinar, The Startups that Revolutionized the In-House Legal World, focused on five startups responding to these challenges. Leverton (contract due diligence); LawGeex (contract review automation); Onna (eDiscovery); Neota Logic (expertise automation) and Logikcull (eDiscovery) are a snapshot of legal technology providers transforming everyday legal tasks and processes for enterprises.
Here are five quotes from the recent session from tech leaders at these companies highlighting the challenges and opportunities for technology within law departments.
Abhinav Somani, CEO LEVERTON
What do they do?
LEVERTON develops and applies AI to extract and manage data from corporate documents in several languages and has more than 100 global corporate and investor clients, with a particular specialization in property contracts.
Somani says:”Many of you know you have become better counsel because of the experiences you have garnered over time at reviewing various different types of documents, different grammatical syntax, structure, different types of documentation and structures. That’s what’s allowed you over time to assess the risks and vulnerability within a contract, or to make modifications. What we can do with modern advances of technology is teach our machines to do a lot of the same tasks which are pretty mundane or rudimentary.”
Shmuli Goldberg, VP Marketing, LawGeex
What do they do?
LawGeex uses AI to automate the review and approval process of everyday business contracts. Its AI reviews uploaded contracts, approving them if they match a pre-defined legal playbook or escalating them to the legal team if issues are found. LawGeex answers the question “Can I sign this?” within one hour, reducing legal bottlenecks and shortening contract turnaround time.
Goldberg says: “We believe this market has exploded and the revolution you have been seeing has already affected the way that every single in-house company works, be it basic cloud solutions all the way to full eDiscovery stacks.
“A lot of changes has happened over the last 3-5 years in the legal technology space. What used to be a very established market has been radically disrupted by very high-end technology, big data, and AI. There has been an increase in ability to collect and collate a much larger amount of data in a much faster amount of time. The departments who have felt this most strongly are in-house which in some cases have radically changed the way they work on a daily basis because of this new technology and opportunities open to them.”
Nicole Thompson, Head of Customer Experience, Onna
What do they do?
Onna centralizes organizations’ most common information platforms like Confluence, Slack, Gmail, and Dropbox. It provides real-time search across multiple repositories and aids legal teams with eDiscovery.
Thompson says: “On average, large enterprises are using around 1,000 different cloud services. For those involved in managing information or discovery, those are 1,000 places where relevant information can potentially be found, 1,000 places where legal hold potentially has to be applied, and 1,000 places where collections need to happen. Getting data from these is necessary for several use cases, from eDiscovery to populating data rooms, even for identifying where your company’s contracts are. Onna is a data integration platform that lets companies virtually integrate any source and empowers them on these use cases.”
Michael Mills, co-founder and chief strategy officer, Neota Logic
What do they do?
Neota Logic is an AI-driven platform for the intelligent automation of expertise, processes, and documents.
Mills says: “In our work with in-house legal departments, we have focused on understanding the full range of work that legal departments do, and the full range of work they must bring to bear to solve the problems of their corporations. Problems range in complexity or risk from the very small to the very large and those risks can be mapped both against the technologies and the people who need to do them.”
Earl Watts, Director of the Enterprise Division, Logikcull
What do they do?
Logikcull builds cloud-based instant discovery that helps modern legal teams tackle investigations, discovery requests, and subpoena responses.
Watts says: “What we are seeing today is an explosion of data, and it is coming from everywhere. It is coming from the cloud – so your systems, your applications, your documents. It is coming from your employees, their phones, their messages and their computers. It is also coming from your customers. Because of this continual explosion in information, corporations are seeing a steep rise in the risks and costs associated with these data-intensive activities like discovery and investigations.”
Listen to the full webinar for free here: The Startups that Revolutionized the In-House Legal World
Download the In-House Counsel’s LegalTech Buyer’s Guide 2018 Here
