Linklaters has become the first Magic Circle law firm to openly sign up with an artificial intelligence provider, in a deal with RAVN Systems.
The 2,600-lawyer firm has been known to be in talks with RAVN for some months but a spokesperson for the firm this week said: “We have a master services agreement in place with RAVN, which was signed recently. Having this agreement will enable us to create statements of work and use the technology if it is likely to be of benefit to us and or our clients.”
Linklaters is the second law firm to sign up with RAVN, after Berwin Leighton Paisner in September 2015 became the first law firm to sign up to its Applied Cognitive Engine (RAVN ACE) solution.
ACE is a cognitive computing platform that powers a number of applications to search through unstructured data to retrieve and summarise specific information.
BLP is using ACE to search Land Registry documents to pick out company names and charges on titles, inserting them into a spreadsheet in order to issue light obstruction notices. ACE – which has been nicknamed Lonald by the BLP real estate team – also crosschecks for duplication and sends queries direct to Companies House when discrepancies are discovered.
While ACE is currently being used by BLP for a relatively narrow task, it is anticipated that it will be rolled out more widely within the firm’s flagship real estate department and to other practice areas.
RAVN has also signed up a number corporate clients and is currently speaking to the likes of real estate giant Jones Lang Lasalle, also known as JLL.
Corporates with huge numbers of contracts or leases can use ACE to search for key terms and expiration dates, ordinarily a lengthy and tedious manual task.
The deal with Linklaters will present RAVN with significant opportunities in light of the volume of data held by the firm.