Episode summary:
A short summary of Scissero an AI contract negotiation tool, as well as an interview with Mathias Strasser, Scissero CEO.
Episode transcript (What does Scissero do?):
Just as a quick refresher for you, tools in the AI Contract Negotiation category are tools intended to help with the back and forth negotiation/redlining of day to day contracts, with the aim of helping you do that more quickly, more consistently and with hopefully less error.
Now, Scissero is a little different to some of the other Negotiation tools, so what is it that it actually does?
Similar to other tools in the space Scissero uses a combination of AI and data science to automatically find clauses in a contract you upload to the tool. Right now Scissero is focused on finding clauses in a smaller set of day to day contracts things like NDAs and Hold Harmless Letters, but no doubt the range of contracts and clauses it can find will only increase over time as the the company grows.
Where Scissero gets interesting though is that it claims to be the first tool that goes one step further than using AI to simply just find a clause, but also then automatically makes wording edits to clauses in a counter-party contract or in response to counter-party redlines.
If you are wondering how the tool knows what changes to make, it has initially been trained by Scissero’s partner law firm, so that is how it knows how to identify clauses and also what wordings would be considered best practice. Scissero does say though they can train the tool to make edits based on your specific standards, but at present it is something they would have to do for you, its not a self service option, so this would be an upfront activity you’d need to work out with them
Finally, Scissero does still have most of the workflow features you’d expect in a negotiation tool, like doc editing and places to save guidance/language for your contract reviewers, just in case you still feel like doing some of the work yourself.
Episode transcript (Who should use Scissero?):
The value of using AI to locate clauses is a well tested one, it speeds up contract review and reduces the chance of reviewer error. However to find an ROI from this my guess is you pwould need to be an organisation that is reviewing a meaningful number of contracts.
When it comes to the automated redlining however, this is certainly newer to the market and I honestly just don’t know how much efficiency people will get from this feature. But I can see how having a machine make contracts edits in a systematic way would help a company to maintain consistent application of their contract standards.
One further thing to consider is that if you do want to tailor the tool, training it for your specific standards, you are going to have to commit some time and also have a reasonable amount of training data to teach the tool. This leads me to suspect that this tool will work best for medium or large organisations that have access to training data and resources.
About Scissero:
Scissero is a cloud-based legal AI platform that can read, draft and mark up legal agreements to a standard that is (almost) indistinguishable from human lawyers. It enhances traditional machine learning approaches with deep domain knowledge to create a legal AI platform that can solve difficult, real-world problems. Scissero has been designed to automatically mark up routine legal agreements (e.g., NDAs) and thus cut both the time needed to negotiate such agreements. Scissero's data extraction technologies can also be used for large-scale repapering exercises and due diligence reporting, such as the impending move from interbank offered rates (IBORs) to alternative risk free rates (RFRs).
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.
2. Scissero - Mathias Strasser Interview