Q&A with ABBYY Top Voices on LinkedIn: Leveraging AI for Contract Management

At ABBYY we strive to be at the top of our game and contribute to the greater community revolving around the different branches of business and technology. The LinkedIn Top Community Voices program is one channel where many ABBYY employees contribute to educating and sharing knowledge with peers in their field.

Two Top Voices we are highlighting are Filip Horvat, Top Voice on LinkedIn for Contract Management, and Max Vermeir, Top Voice on LinkedIn for Artificial Intelligence (AI), for an interesting take on how AI can change the game to have an efficient In-House Counsel team. To get their expert insights, we asked Max and Filip the following questions:

• How can AI help accelerate the contract review process?
• Contract provisions: how do you find the needle in the haystack?
• When leveraging AI for legal research, what are the benefits?

 

 

As an experienced professional in contract management and in-house counsel, the challenges of navigating complex legal documents and ensuring compliance are all too familiar to Filip. In recent years, AI has emerged as a game-changer, offering innovative solutions to streamline processes and enhance the overall efficiency of in-house legal teams. To specifically cater to the needs of in-house counsel, this blog will explore three key AI use cases: document sifting, contract provision extraction, and legal research.

How can AI accelerate the contract review process?

Filip: In-house legal teams often grapple with mountains of documents, ranging from contracts and agreements to regulatory filings. The traditional manual review process is not only time-consuming but also prone to human errors. AI-powered tools revolutionize this tedious task by swiftly scanning through vast document repositories, categorizing them, and flagging those requiring immediate attention. By leveraging AI tools for document sifting, legal professionals can prioritize their focus on high-priority matters, reduce the risk of oversight, and ensure a more efficient review process.

Max: When using purpose-built AI to take on document sifting, it’s not just scanning text; it’s engaging with every word through the lens of advanced natural language processing (NLP). This AI uses named entity recognition ( NER ) to pick out specific entities like names, dates, and contract specifics, making the retrieval of vital information as effortless as finding Waldo in a crowd. By leveraging small, efficient language models, ABBYY’s technology ensures swift processing, enabling real-time insights even from the densest documents. This level of interaction transforms piles of paperwork into neatly organized, easily accessible data.

Contract Provisions, how do you find the needle in the haystack?

Filip: Extracting key provisions from contracts is a meticulous task that demands both time and attention to detail. AI excels in this area by employing NLP to understand and extract specific clauses, dates, and obligations from contracts. This not only saves valuable time but also significantly reduces the margin of error associated with manual extraction.

By integrating AI-powered contract provision extraction tools into your workflow to enhance accuracy and speed, you’re allowing AI to handle routine extraction tasks, and enabling legal professionals to redirect their focus to more strategic aspects of contract analysis, negotiation, and decision-making.

Max: ABBYY’s purpose-built AI showcases its mastery through NLP, distinguishing between the myriad of legal terminologies with the precision of a skilled artist. It employs NER to highlight critical contract clauses, ensuring nothing slips through the cracks. Small language models tailored for the legal domain, enables AI to navigate the complexity of legal jargon efficiently, ensuring every relevant detail is captured and categorized with precision.

When leveraging AI for legal research, what are the benefits?

Legal research is a cornerstone of in-house counsel responsibilities. AI-driven legal research tools sift through vast databases, court rulings, and precedents to provide quick and comprehensive insights. These tools go beyond keyword searches, offering contextual understanding and analysis of legal documents to aid in more informed decision-making.

Max: In the area of legal research, ABBYY’s purpose-built AI uses a sophisticated blend of NLP and NER to navigate the vast oceans of legal documents and precedents by preparing them for retrieval augmented generation (RAG). It creates a 100% accurate digital representation of the document while keeping all of its structure intact and delivering key data points of the document as structured data. This enables generative AI to conduct thorough research at unprecedented accuracy.

ABBYY’s AI doesn’t just fetch data; it understands context, discerning between similar legal terms to provide nuanced insights that are not just relevant but also deeply insightful, offering a strategic edge in legal decision-making.

The integration of purpose-built AI into in-house counsel brings a new level of efficiency and precision. Document sifting, contract provision extraction, and legal research are just a few examples of how AI technologies can be harnessed to augment the capabilities of legal professionals. By embracing these tools, in-house counsel can not only streamline their workflows but also elevate their strategic contributions to the organizations they serve.

Be sure to subscribe to the ABBYY blog, follow Maxime Vermeir, a Top Voice for AI, and Filip Horvat, a Top Contract Negotiation Voice on LinkedIn for more timely insights.