Thomson Reuters Brings In Legal AI Co. eBrevia In Breakthrough Development

Thomson Reuters has teamed up with eBrevia, the legal AI contract analytics platform, to help enterprises tackle large and complex contract remediation projects involving commercial contracts.

The move is a major watershed moment for the legal tech and publishing giant and marks its movement into working directly with a legal AI company for doc review. The news follows an earlier announcement that the AI company had expanded its relationship with global legal consulting company, Duff & Phelps.

The announcement is significant as Thomson Reuters has put considerable investment into its Managed Legal Services arm, which although using a strong tech backbone, has not until now publicly talked about exploiting legal AI systems to speed up and improve review.

This means that one of the larger LPO-style/ALSP groups in the world has now also adopted legal AI tech. Moreover, Thomson Reuters is a huge supplier of legal tech and other services to law firms, hence once the legal AI ‘genie’ is out of the bottle we can expect its use to spread to other parts of the business.

The company said that after expansive testing undertaken by Thomson Reuters managed services experts and technologists, eBrevia was selected.

Eric Laughlin, managing director, Thomson Reuters Legal Managed Services, said: ‘We sought an innovative partner that not only could deliver results but also could work with us to build something beyond just traditional data extraction.’

‘To make our selection, we pressure-tested emerging abstraction technologies with real world contract sets, and found that the machine learning technology employed by eBrevia delivered consistent results while offering excellent project management and quality control features,’ he addd. 

Adam Nguyen, eBrevia’s co-founder and chief operating officer, said: ‘We are pleased that eBrevia’s machine learning technology will be used by managed services professionals at Thomson Reuters to augment their deep domain expertise to deliver both time savings and increased accuracy for contract remediation and other use cases.’

In a statement the legal tech and publishing giant said that eBrevia’s AI engine powers Thomson Reuters contract remediation services by identifying three critical data points based on the client’s remediation plan: clauses needing revision, the absence of clauses required by the regulation, and the components required to generate a contract amendment. Thomson Reuters then leverages this intelligence to generate amendments in Thomson Reuters Contract Express, offering a seamless workflow for securing approval and digital signature.

This solution improves speed by at least 30%, said the company. At the same time, the combined technology and managed services offering increases control and consistency, improving efficiency when evaluating contracts against customer requirements and remediating accordingly.

Thomson Reuters Legal Managed Services provides contract management, regulatory change management, managed discovery, document review and advanced litigation services to law firms and corporate legal departments. Its contract solutions help global legal departments prepare for and meet existing and new regulatory requirements such as uncleared margin rules, MiFID II, Brexit and more.