Clifford Chance Partners with EVANA AI Platform in Germany For M&A

A special subsidiary of Clifford Chance in Germany has formed a tech partnership with AI platform EVANA to focus on corporate law and M&A transactions.

The global law firm said it was doing this, via local subsidiary Clifford Chance Tech GmbH, because ‘these areas of the legal market remain heavily dependent on traditional manual work processes and therefore offer major potential for increased efficiency‘.

Over the past two years, EVANA, which started in 2015, has also worked on a pilot project with US law firm Greenberg Traurig, to develop a solution for legal due diligence in real estate transactions, they said. And, until recently it was seen primarily as a prop tech AI company, rather than a legal tech one.

The company, which now appears to be something of a competitor in Germany to LEVERTON, the most established legal/prop tech AI company in the country, said that its tech offers: ‘A combination of artificial, semantically and swarm intelligence. It enlarges with every selected document and adapts itself to the user.’

Clifford Chance is also currently known to use Kira Systems for AI doc review. How the use of EVANA will impact on the use of Kira, at least in the major market of Germany, is not yet known. It’s possible that having an AI company that is locally based, (in this case EVANA is based in Frankfurt), is seen as an additional benefit in terms of having a close working relationship.

The law firm is also using LEVERTON, which told Artificial Lawyer that it sees the arrival of EVANA as an opportunity to collaborate rather than as a competitor.

EVANA recently completed a multi-million euro A-Series financing round to fund its product development and international expansion, which included a strategic investment from PATRIZIA, the pan-European real estate investment manager. PATRIZIA is using EVANA’s artificial intelligence-based technology to analyse its entire €40 billion real estate portfolio.

EVANA CEO, Peter Moog, said: ‘We see great demand for the increased digitalisation of the legal sector. Most filing and processing of contract information, for example, is still neither standardised nor automated. We want to change that and to make processes faster and more efficient. By working closely with leading law firms such as Clifford Chance, we can calibrate EVANA’s artificial intelligence platform to the specific requirements of the legal market.’

Sandra Thiel, Corporate Partner, Best Delivery Champion and Head of Innovation at Clifford Chance Deutschland said: ‘We created Clifford Chance Tech GmbH, as part of the firm’s global Innovation and Best Delivery strategy, as a platform for our innovation and legal tech initiatives in Germany to further boost our position at the forefront of digital innovation in the legal sector.’

‘Our technology partnership with EVANA provides us with the opportunity to team-up with a leading player in the application of artificial intelligence to document analysis and complex workflows. We believe this partnership will enable us to both further improve the efficiency of our operations and the services we offer to our clients,’ she concluded.