We speak to Travers Smith’s head of legal technology Shawn Curran about Etatonna, the contract labelling tool for which Travers Smith won the coveted CogX ‘Best AI Product in Legal.’
In a significant private practice win at leading AI conference CogX, UK top 50 law firm Travers Smith has been awarded best AI product in legal award for Etatonna, a contract labelling tool developed in-house by Travers’ legal technology team.
CogX is a leading global AI conference, and its award recognises the best AI-backed product for the legal sector, with a particular focus on technology that solves real world problems that are unique to legal professionals. Etatonna, which launched in October 2020, makes it possible to easily label concepts in contracts to create readable, structured datasets. Past CogX winners include Luminance and eBrevia.
The award was given in March but was celebrated this week at the annual CogX festival in London. Travers Smith was a finalist for the award last year.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, head of legal technology Shawn Curran said: “Since building Etatonna we have had a large number of labellers across the firm. If anyone has spare capacity, they go into the document management system and label documents to help train the AI. Now we have 200,000 clauses across many different document types. We have 1,500 tags and that is growing all the time.”
Over the past year, Curran says that Travers has over the past year built Etatonna into an end-to-end contract analysis platform. The difference between Travers’ system and those available from third party vendors is that decisions are easily traced and explainable, avoiding concerns over ‘black box AI’.
Curran said: “We are showing the lawyers how results are reached and if we get it wrong, we can explain it, and explain that we won’t get it wrong again.” He adds: “That’s really important in order to get lawyers comfortable with and trusting the technology.”
Travers Smith open sourced Etatonna and Curran says that around 30 law firms have taken advantage of the code.