Kira Systems has unveiled a differential privacy algorithm that it says will protect its clients from privacy attacks such as reverse engineering and facilitate new service delivery models thanks to sharing lawyers’ knowledge in new ways.
By applying the privacy algorithm each time a smart field (a machine learning model within Kira) is shared with others using Kira’s Smart Field Sharing feature, Kira says an adversary cannot reverse engineer any of the words (including numbers and symbols) used to train it, no matter how much insider knowledge of the training documents they have.
This is understood to be a first-of-its-kind in the contract analysis technology space.
Kira comes pre-built with over 1,000 machine learning models (called smart fields) that identify common clauses, provisions, and data points in contracts and documents, such as change of control clauses or early payment discounts. This Built-In Intelligence is trained by Kira Systems’ team of in-house lawyers and subject matter experts, who span across many legal areas and industries, to unlock the insights and value hidden in contract data.
However when professionals embed their know-how and experience into machine learning models by training them on confidential documents, they want to be sure these remain confidential.
Alexander Hudek, CTO & Co-Founder at Kira Systems said: “Confidentiality is a cornerstone for relationships between law firms and their clients. Differential Privacy is the only technique available today that can guarantee the privacy required by law firms.
“Adding this capability to our products allows law firms to finally be able to share trained AI securely. I’m looking forward to seeing how people use this to further transform legal work.”
Steve Obenski, Kira Systems’ CSO, added: “This opens up a whole range of possibilities in legal tech. For example, let’s say a lawyer specializing in hospital mergers uses data from past transactions to train a Kira smart field on patient rights requirements. That lawyer could share that Patient Rights smart field with a client, say, the acquiring hospital, who might use it for purposes of not just post-merger integration but also ongoing compliance.
“This smart field could continue to do its work even when that lawyer who originally trained it is not around. This ‘virtual secondment’ of that lawyer’s knowledge and experience to the client hospital offers an entirely new service delivery model that simply wasn’t possible before now.”