Episode 1:
A short summary of Legalsifter an AI contract negotiation tool, as well as an interview with Kevin Miller, Legalsifter CEO.
Episode transcript (what does Legalsifter do?):
What are AI Contract Negotiation tools I hear you say. Well Broadly speaking these are software tools that assist you when you are redlining or negotiating a contract. They let you upload that contract to their software at which point AI will automatically locate or change language in that contract, helping the contract reviewer to negotiate a contract more effectively and efficiently.
Right first things first, now we are talking about Legalsifter specifically, so what does it do?
The most important function of LegalSifter is that it has pre-trained AI that knows how to find hundreds of legal concepts, LegalSifter uses this AI (which they call Sifters) to automatically find important parts of the contract and then simply show the user where those clauses are in a friendly interface so that the end user can find the contract sections they care about more quickly and then themselves determine acceptability or not in that particular negotiation.
You are also able to some degree incorporate your businesses specific playbook in to the version of the software that you use. Practically speaking this means that if for example you couldn’t agree to non-competes in your NDAs, you would setup that rule in a dashboard in the tool. Later on when you upload a contract, legal sifter would send you an alert telling you it found a non-compete and you can’t agree to this. It's worth noting though that this function does not review the content of a clauses for acceptable wordings, simply whether a clause in their entirety are present or not.
Moving on from the AI functionalities of the tool for a bit now, Legalsifter does also have a user interface that has been specifically been designed to assist you when redlining a contract. The interface has things that you would expect like a Word style document editor, but also provides places to store things like rationale for certain company positions or fallback language, that way if your contract reviewer needs to make an edit or understand something they have everything they need at their fingertips make those edits more quickly.
Episode transcript (who should use Legalsifter?):
Naturally some organisations will benefit more from this tool than others. Organisations that are spending more time reviewing contracts will likely find greater efficiencies. In order to justify using a tool like this directly you probably need to be reviewing thousands of contracts annually, with those that are reviewing complex 3rd party contracts finding the most benefit. However organisations with lower volumes may still be able to benefit from the technology via one of Legalsifters Law firm partners.
The second major benefit as I see it is the improved review consistency and application of your organisations contract standards. Ensuring that contract standards are being properly implemented can significantly reduce an organisations legal and commercial risk. Therefore organisations with large legal teams and teams especially one that are geographically distributed could benefit more from this than others.
About Legalsifter:
LegalSifter is dedicated to bringing affordable legal services to the world by empowering people with artificial intelligence. LegalSifter intends to achieve its mission by working with the legal profession, not against it. Headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA), LegalSifter offers its products directly to organizations as well as through and with law firms.
About Legaltech Tapas:
Legaltech Tapas is a regular podcast that serves up bite sized summaries of the latest legal tools, what they do, and why you might use them.
Each episode discusses a different legal tool, and includes an interview with a guest from that company so you can hear directly from the horses mouth why you should be using their product.
About the host:
Andrew is a legaltech enthusiast + ex mgt consultant + former Kira Systems employee.
As an early stage joiner at Kira, Andrew saw time and time again that customers struggled to understand the many new legal technologies entering the market and didn’t have good resources to go to for support.
Legaltech Tapas is his one very small effort to try and address that.
1. Legalsifter - Kevin Miller Interview