A multinational energy company asked if we could help them speed up their contract review process ahead of a planned joint venture deal. They needed an answer that would be faster than doing it by hand and which would work across documents in multiple languages. In other words, the latest AI-driven legaltech solution. We could.
This is urgent, we need to know fast
The challenge the company faced was that they needed a thorough contract review to prepare for a joint-venture transaction. In particular, they needed to assess the impact of the JV structure on the joint business going forward. With tight deadlines and a real need to keep the ball rolling, a fully manual review process would take too long. Speed and efficiency were essential. At the same time, so too were completeness, consistency and quality.
The company wanted us to perform sell-side due diligence on approximately 5,000 of their business contracts. This would involve identifying and extracting every change of control provision from this huge batch of documents. There was only one way: call on the assistance of Artificial Intelligence.
Today, AI contract analytics has reached the point where it can be of major support in M&A preparation. In this case, we could promise them a solution that would automatically recognise and extract the required information in English and Dutch, plus create clear and detailed reports. Fast, efficient, complete and consistent. A high-quality solution.
High-speed document collation
Working with the company and their international legal team, we identified the legal question that needed an answer and used the AI system to identify the contracts we wanted to check. These ranged from Loan Agreements to Maintenance and Service Agreements.
We let our AI system do its thing: automatically classifying the contracts by type and title and extract the relevant clauses. Not only was this faster than doing the same by hand, but it also enabled the legal team to organise every document quickly and easily and assign the relevant contracts to the appropriate members of the legal team to make a final review and validation of the outcome.
In addition to teaching and controlling the AI system, we worked closely with the international legal team and law firms involved to create tailor made analytics reports for our mutual client. We also provided support as necessary to deliver a more effective and efficient in-depth review process.
More efficient human analysis
The combination of bulk review and in-depth analysis by Legadex and the legal team of the client worked well for everyone involved. Using AI-based contract analytics meant document identification, structuring and bundling was completed in about a quarter of the time it would have taken to do it manually. Overall, including human analysis, the efficiency gain across the entire review project was about 40%. For the client, using AI made it possible to complete a high-quality review within a tight deadline. The added value derived from AI-driven contract analytics had three main components:
- Management Workflow: our client enjoyed a level of workflow oversight that a decentralised review could never match. The client could follow both the progress of each team member and the quality of their work.
- Individual Workflow: the workflow for each user was enhanced because reviewers could simply click to the next agreement, mark up items easily and compile all the data and findings in a simple export.
- Enhanced Speed and Accuracy: using AI to enhance attorney-level reviews meant the client felt more confident about the results and benefited from the increased efficiency of the process.
An impossible deadline – met with AI
In a project in which the ability to quickly review, analyse and align large volumes of contract data was paramount to meeting a tight deadline, employing Legadex and our AI-based legaltech solution was pivotal to its success.