08 Aug 2019

FLOW: Forensics, technology and the future of legal services 07: Contract Clause Analysis

Contract analysis has traditionally been a laborious process, reliant on manual extraction of specific terms into spreadsheets or tables, and then manual review to compare and make notes. This inefficient process is highly time-intensive. We have developed workflows for our contract analysis which help our lawyers review contract clauses more efficiently, saving time for our lawyers and money for our clients.

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Clayton Utz communications are intended to provide commentary and general information. They should not be relied upon as legal advice. Formal legal advice should be sought in particular transactions or on matters of interest arising from this communication. Persons listed may not be admitted in all States and Territories.

Transcript

Our clients have complex multifactorial problems with legal dimensions, geographic dimensions and technology dimensions.  We work with our clients to help solve these problems, we deploy innovative technology and people.  One of the solutions that we've deployed on top of the Relativity platform to expand its functionality is a platform called Heretik Deepak, tell us a little bit about Heretik.

Heretik is a platform that we've added on to Relativity to help us analyse contracts.  A large part of the work that lawyers do is analysing contracts and they spend a significant amount of time on it analysing and going through to find relevant information.  Heretik is a tool that uses natural language processing, firstly to help identify sections in a contract, so the lawyers can go straight away and identify things such as a right to audit clause.  It then also then has the ability to extract information which we then use to help generate templates and documents which can then be used as part of the deliverables for the client.  The advantage of Heretik as well, it's got a flexible machine learning back end to it as well meaning that we can feed it more and more contracts to help it to understand the type of contracts that our clients are actually using.  We've used this in the past to actually help some of our clients and we've identified efficiencies through its use.  In one particular example we looked at analysing a contract the traditional way which took about 2 hours, using the Heretik tool it actually reduced that to about 45 minutes.  I'll show you a bit of an example of how we actually use Heretik.  Firstly Heretik is able to classify types of contracts.  As you can see on the right pie graph the majority of contracts in this workspace are employment agreements, on the left hand side we also have classifications of the type of sections within the contract and you can see the most commonly used type of section is a confidentiality agreement.  As I go into a contract you can see Heretik has a separate viewer that allows the lawyers to analyse a contract very efficiently.  On the left hand side, what Heretik has been able to do is identify the sections within the contract.  The lawyer is able to select any section and quickly go to that section to try and review that type of information. 

In addition Heretik has data points.  Data points allow a lawyer to identify specific type of information.  For example here we look at duration, Heretik can identify the type of durations and the specific sections that those durations occur in.  For example here we have 7 days which has been identified in the securities clause, this way if a lawyer is looking for specific type of information they can quickly identify it.  On the right hand side we actually have a review pane, this is where the lawyer is able to identify information and copy it quickly into a pane to be able to then generate documents.  For example they can highlight a complete section within the contract and send it to any of the review fields that have been identified.  Here they'll be able to save that information and generate any documents. 

One of the other features I want to show in Heretik as well is the compare feature.  This is where you can take several contracts of different versions and identify the differences between each of the contracts, for example I will take several contracts over here called Flower 12 to 14, these are different versions of the contract that have occurred over various years.  When I click the compare feature Heretik will now bring up a comparison tool, here I can select a base contract and then identify the differences from the base contract to the other contracts.  On the right hand side here you can see that Heretik has provided a score to identify how similar another document is.  If I go into the compare documents you can see that Heretik brings up a viewer that can identify the specific sections that I've changed.  In this example you can see base salary from one year has changed from $450,000 to $480,000.  As you can see from that demonstration that's just a couple of examples how we've used that tool to help solve our client problems, we're always thinking of more innovative ways that we can integrate some of these new technologies into our Relativity platform.

Thanks Deepak.