In a previous post, I described why Artificial Intelligence (AI) is necessary for businesses and legal professionals who are reviewing legal documents. More people are relying on powerful Machine Learning models to streamline the document review process and make decisions in a fraction of the time.

SpeedLegal is an Augmented Contract Management Platform that allows legal and business operators to understand contracts at scale in minutes rather than hours.

At SpeedLegal, we believe in products that are easy to use and accessible to everyone. Our motto is Answers to your legal concerns need to be two clicks away. The powerful AI models that help automate contract review need to work right off the shelf. Users should not need to spend time training or improving our models. On average, it takes two to three months to integrate a B2B solution; with SpeedLegal, it is a matter of minutes.

Accuracy, measured in different ways —like  F1 scores and Confusion Matrices— needs to be very high: users should not allocate additional human resources to check the results of the software. On average, it takes 13 days to be onboarded on a new software solution (i.e. book a demo, call a sales representative, call a product specialist). Our users sign-up on our website and start using SpeedLegal right away.

The way we do this is by focusing on four key areas related to contracts:

• Risks assessment
• Automatic reminders
• Manage and organize
• Analyze and deep dive

Below are some examples of how some of our users have implemented SpeedLegal.

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Risk Assessment

As a founder and business owner, I receive contracts almost on a daily basis (from NDAs, MSAs, loan agreements, etc.), and my first reaction is to skim through them reviewing the parties involved, the important dates, the contract value (if there is any), and if the contract is already signed. Then I have a couple of options: either spend at least an hour reading the contract line by line to find any specific risks or send it to the legal team or a friend who is a lawyer.

Skimming legal documents to extract the key parameters is not an easy task for a non-lawyer and assessing risks is a lengthy process even for an expert.

As a general counsel, contract manager, and legal operator, I receive multiple requests from the business teams to review contracts throughout the day. During legal due diligence, I am also expected to do long document reviews (e.g. when fundraising, M&A).

A friend of mine told me about SpeedLegal, a platform where I can upload my documents, and it automatically identifies the key parameters (i.e. important dates, financial values, parties, signatures) and highlights those parts of the document that are non-standard based on my level of risk and my internal policy (i.e. my standard provisions).

With SpeedLegal, I can spot the deviations from the standard terms and the high stake provisions for the firm. For example, I can spot contracts that have a custom change of control, employees with $250k salary and no IP assignment, and force majeure clause.

SpeedLegal will summarize the non-standard parts with coloured flags and highlight the specific parts of the contract when I click them.

As a contract manager of a scale-up startup, I can import my templates or use SpeedLegal's templates. When importing templates, SpeedLegal will automatically set up my internal policy that will be used as a standard each time I upload new documents.

SpeedLegal’s risk assessment —Red-Flag Table— works both with custom contracts and boilerplate provisions. I can easily create and export reports to present to my manager and other stakeholders within the company.

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Automatic Reminders

As a property manager, I have several units to manage and many things to keep in mind: renewals, rent amounts, parties, notice periods, service agreements, etc. I am currently using Excel files and a file cabinet to keep track of them.

As a procurement manager, I have several vendor contracts that renew every month, and I struggle to remember the different dates and notice periods to get out of the contract.

As a sales manager, I want to proactively reach out to my clients before the renewal date, so I can create deeper relationships and potentially upsell.

A colleague working for a real estate broker suggested trying SpeedLegal, a platform where I can easily access a summary of the key terms of all my lease and vendor agreements and be automatically reminded on my mobile and email of the important contract dates (e.g. renewals, notice periods, routine maintenance).

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After uploading my contracts, SpeedLegal extracts the relevant information and automatically populates three charts:

• All terminating contracts, categorized by year, month, by cumulative number, and by dollar value
• All contracts expiring and auto-renewing in the next 7, 30, 60, and 90 days
• A calendar view detailing what is coming up in the next weeks and months
  

With my current system (i.e Google docs, Excel and file cabinets), I often sign and store contracts and then forget about them. With SpeedLegal, I don’t have to worry as it will send me reminders when needed:

• It will add reminders directly to my personal and work calendars
• I will get a notification on my email and on my mobile phone
• I will be able to flag each event with a different colour (e.g. by contract type, by department)
  

In the next post, I will address the other two key areas where SpeedLegal is currently focusing: Manage and organize, Analyze and deep dive.