Duff & Phelps Rolls Out eBrevia Legal AI Tech Across Business

Duff & Phelps, the legal consulting and corporate finance firm, has announced it is expanding its use of US-based eBrevia’s legal AI tech throughout its global business.

Duff & Phelps has already been using the software for large-scale contract review projects. The advisory and consulting firm said it will now ‘leverage the software for a variety of use cases as it advises clients on a range of strategic and complex business challenges’.

Ned Gannon, co-founder of doc review specialists, eBrevia, told Artificial Lawyer that this was an important step for the AI company, which already has a growing number of corporates and consulting businesses as clients, with around 30% of its clients being law firms, including Baker McKenzie.

‘This is significant for many reasons. Duff & Phelps will be using machine learning technology at scale, not just for due diligence,’ he said.

Gannon explained that Duff & Phelps, as well as doing work such as high volume doc review, as a law firm or LPO might do, also helps corporates with optimising their Contract Management Systems (CMS), often in cases where a large business has bought a new system, but hasn’t the internal capacity to populate and index it properly so that it can deliver value.

‘eBrevia helps them to extract key data and summaries of the documents, which then helps to complete the CMS,’ Gannon added.

He said that Duff & Phelps would also seek to leverage the natural language processing capabilities of eBrevia for IFRS 15 / 16 reviews of documents for accounting purposes, as well as GDPR reviews.

And that is no doubt just the beginning. The key point here is that as a business becomes more used to legal AI review tech they begin to see many other ways that it can be leveraged. Duff & Phelps is a case in point.

Gannon went on to say that the company, which Artificial Lawyer profiled last year, had an incredible 2017 and saw a surge in new clients. This has been helped by forming partnerships with other companies. One example is Donnelley Financial Solutions, with which it has a strategic partnership and which is an investor in the company. Donnelley both uses the tech and also recommends it to others.

The company has also seen several examples of corporates, which are the licence holders, asking their key external law firms to use eBrevia’s platform for review work.

Tyler Marion, Managing Director, Duff & Phelps, added: ‘Using eBrevia’s software enables us to scale our domain expertise to more efficiently serve the needs of our global clients. Duff & Phelps is known for being on the cutting edge of innovation. Machine learning technology is playing an increasingly prominent role in knowledge work. eBrevia is on the forefront of this movement in the contract analytics space.’