BlackBoiler’s Automated Contract Markup Capability – Product Walk Through

BlackBoiler is an NLP-based legal tech company that provides lawyers with automated contract markups, based on the previous work product of the legal team. Sounds useful, but how does it work? There was only one way to find out, so AL TV decided to do a Product Walk Through.

In this video with CEO and Co-Founder, Dan Broderick, we explore what BlackBoiler can really do. As Broderick explains, the platform is not just comparing what is in a contract with a company’s playbook of preferred legal language, it’s actually ‘learning from the human work product’, i.e. its machine learning software is focused on picking up what lawyers in a team have marked up before.

In fact, to train the system you simply send over as many marked-up contracts as you’ve got of a particular type and away the system goes. Because of its user-enabled machine learning feedback loop the NLP grows smarter with each additional use. I.e. it learns from additional work as you go along.

And this makes a lot of sense. After all, why start from scratch every time you review a contract? That type of contract has probably been reviewed before. The institutional knowledge, i.e. the legal team’s knowledge capital, has already been formed, why not just use it….? Of course, in the past this was hard to do. But machine learning and NLP tools make this kind of approach possible.

BlackBoiler estimates their approach reduces contract review time by 75%. Now, they are possibly being a bit optimistic for that to apply in all cases, but even if we reduce time on average to, let’s say a 50% saving, it would still have a huge positive impact across the working day of a busy lawyer.

Broderick also noted that unlike some companies, there is no group of human reviewers doing a lot of manual analysis of the documents for the company. It’s just software on their side. That shows a confidence in the system. It’s also a practical necessity as the markup results need to be returned in a couple of minutes. There is no time for a human intermediary to get involved before the results are returned to the lawyer.

So, there you go. As mentioned, to really understand how it works it’s useful to see it in action. The AL TV Product Walk Through is about 14 mins. Press play to watch inside the page. Enjoy!

AL TV Productions. Feb 2021.

Thanks to Dan for taking part in the AL TV Walk Through.