Antipodean AI, McCarthyFinch, Launches AuthorDocs For Legal Drafting

New Zealand-based legal AI company McCarthyFinch, which is part-owned by the local legal practice MinterEllisonRuddWatts and boutique VC fund Goat Ventures, has launched a new capability, AuthorDocs, which allows a lawyer to quickly review and perfect the drafting of individual contracts.

The move follows the company’s launch back in September last year, when they brought their main legal AI review platform to market under the ‘Author’ brand name. The new AuthorDocs capability is reminiscent of several AI applications on the market, although it has its own particular take (see below) on the challenge of quickly reviewing and improving the drafting of a single contract that a lawyer may be dealing with at their desk. It’s also designed to integrate smoothly with Word.

Perhaps the key takeaway here is that it shows there is still sufficient unmet demand globally for tech tools of this type for multiple companies to operate in this market segment. McCarthyFinch is also well-placed to take market share in the Asia-Pacific region. They have also made headway in the US.

Artificial Lawyer asked founder and CEO, Nick Whitehouse, if he could explain a bit more.

How does this fit in with what you have developed already?

We released the platform authorAI late last year, this provided access to a number of our cognitive services that read, write and reason like a lawyer. AuthorDOCS is part of a suite of generalised modular ‘off the shelf’ applications that we’ve built on top of this platform.

Is this like a LawGeex type of product, i.e. for a single doc review/negotiation phase?

It’s more like the best bits of LawGeex, Litera and HotDocs. It’s designed for everyday use, helping inhouse lawyers, firm lawyers, and even DIY bush lawyers who spend most of their day in contracts.

How do you train it?

It’s comes trained out of the box. Users can download a range ‘review packs’ to mix, match and add more skills (like Neo in the Matrix). These ‘review packs’ can be configured within the app by the user and explicitly and implicitly tuned through use.

How is it all going generally, how has uptake been of the main AI system?

Generally great, we’ve had an incredible past nine months since [we attended] TechCrunch, and not always as we had planned.

We’ve got a large number of users around the world (mostly US, Australia, and NZ) already using AuthorDOCS and this daily engagement has been crucial in developing the features that matter most to users.

Some of the application’s capabilities.

If you’d like to know a bit more, check out the short video below.