Businesses have long been seeking digital solutions to managing their legal contracts — which can cover everything from supply deals to non-disclosure agreements and government outsourcing. And accurate, efficient systems are important because, as Christina Demetriades, general counsel for Europe at consultancy Accenture, puts it: “The lifeblood of all corporates is the contract.”
Over the past decade, many of the more laborious tasks involved — such as reviewing large contract documents to find clauses that contravene legal policy or to check compliance with financial and data regulations — have been automated through the use of artificial intelligence. It is included in contract lifecycle management software, which helps to draft, store, search, and manage a company’s agreements. Among the advantages is simple speed. “Our platform produces in minutes what takes a lawyer typically four hours,” says Tim Pullan, chief executive of ThoughtRiver, which writes contract software.
But, now, businesses and their software providers are turning to new generative AI tools to automate the review of contracts. Since generative AI chatbots — such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT — launched late last year, corporate interest has grown in wider applications of this new tech, which uses natural language processing of vast amounts of data to learn how to produce new text and images.