Magic circle giant Clifford Chance has become the latest major professional services adviser to deploy Kira Systems’ machine learning contract review software, following recent similar moves by DLA Piper and Deloitte.
Clifford Chance said today (5 July) that it selected Kira both because it works ‘out of the box’ with little set up time, and because it can be easily trained by Clifford Chance lawyers to learn from the firm’s specialist expertise.
It will use Kira’s software to reduce the time spent on due diligence and potentially increase qualitative analysis by reviewing a higher number of documents.
The new partnership is the latest step of Clifford Chance’s global innovation drive, which last year saw the firm appoint Bas Boris Visser as global head of innovation and business change. He said of this latest development: “Our clients are under substantial pressure to reduce legal spend. At the same time, they need more support to manage the increasing risks and complex issues that their companies are facing. Deploying Kira is an exciting next step in helping our clients address this demand for greater value, and very much fits into our strategy of embracing innovation to ensure that we deliver the best service to our clients.”
With much the same objective DLA Piper in mid-June announced that it has partnered with Kira Systems to implement its solution globally to speed up and improve the M&A due diligence process.
While M&A is the starting point for the circa 4,000-lawyer international law firm, Kira’s tech is expected to be applied across DLA’s other practice areas, with obvious contenders including capital markets, real estate and the intellectual property and technology team. The Kira partnership is part of a wider process improvement project that began in 2013, looking at Lean Six Sigma and how to create efficiencies across the firm.
Elsewhere in March, in the largest deployment to date of an artificial intelligence solution within the professional services arena, Deloitte’s US business entered into partnership with Kira to bring its machine learning-based contract review capability directly to Deloitte’s clients.
Deloitte rolled out Kira’s contract analysis software in the autumn of 2014 across its audit and consulting business following a pilot in each. In a measure of the success of the roll out, the Big Four accounting giant already has 3,000 active users.
The alliance combines Deloitte’s business insights in cognitive technologies with Kira Systems’ advances in machine-learning in creating models that quickly “read” thousands of complex documents, extracting and structuring textual information for better analysis.
Paul Greenwood, chief information officer at Clifford Chance, said today: “The legal industry must adapt if it is to deliver what clients value most – whether that is about speed, accuracy or risk management. There are increasing numbers of intelligent tools on the market that can help law firms service clients and we want to be at the forefront of identifying and deploying those systems that will make a real difference to our clients. We are showing our commitment to emerging technology by integrating Kira into our processes and building its knowledge through teaching and training. Kira is great software, but it is the additional investment from our leading lawyers that will ensure this is a tool that is highly valuable to our clients.”