eBrevia Launches Box Integration, Could Widen Customer Base

Legal AI pioneer, eBrevia, which is part of Donnelley Financial Solutions, has formed a deep integration with well-known cloud content management platform, Box.

It is hoped the move will make it easier for a wider range of corporate clients to leverage eBrevia’s NLP-driven document analysis capabilities, given that Box has over 100,000 customers, which includes the likes of GE, Morgan Stanley, and pharma company AstraZeneca.

In fact, it’s also clear that Box, for its part, is now taking aim at corporate legal departments, adding competition to a market space already well-served by doc collaboration, DMS and CLM companies that have grown up primarily in the legal tech sector.

And as explored below, the move has some echoes of what DocuSign is trying to achieve with Seal Software – although in this case it’s only a software integration, not the two entities coming together.

Box puts a big emphasis on security and that’s perhaps one reason why it’s won many major corporations. In turn, those customers increasingly want to analyse their contracts, whether for a standalone and event-driven need, e.g. a compliance review, or as part of a long-running CLM project that is looking to extract key data from stored contracts.

eBrevia explained: ‘The integration allows eBrevia clients to seamlessly access and analyze business-critical content that is securely stored and centrally managed in Box.’

Box also makes it easier for members of a team to collaborate in real-time from any device, while eBrevia provides those teams with its contract-focused NLP capabilities.

Ned Gannon, co-founder and President of eBrevia, said: ‘We want to provide clients with the ability to analyse contracts wherever they’re stored. In this case, many of our existing enterprise clients already use Box, and this integration provides greater efficiencies and streamlined workflows for their teams.’

While Rand Wacker, VP Industry Solutions at Box, added: ‘This integration between Box and eBrevia makes it easier for customers to have a single place to manage, secure, and collaborate on their content, a key benefit for legal teams. Box’s extensive set of integrations – from legal technology solutions to productivity and business applications – is helping make our platform a key part of the tech stack used in many firms and corporate legal departments.’

With the eBrevia/Box integration, users can:

  • Analyze documents from Box with eBrevia’s AI data extraction technology, which has been pre-trained to extract numerous legal and business concepts
  • Customize data extraction with eBrevia’s bespoke training feature, designed with non-technical users in mind
  • Assign documents from Box to eBrevia users for review and action, utilizing a number of built-in workflow tools
  • Compare multiple versions of documents from Box by selecting individual versions for comparison within eBrevia
  • Generate data reports on legal and business concepts in documents from Box and review project KPIs and progress in eBrevia’s dashboard.

Is this a big deal? Integrations with legal tech companies are a regular event, but this one could be more important than some if it results in the hoped for flow of corporate documents from major businesses to eBrevia’s NLP technology.

Of course, just because a company using Box can now seamlessly work with eBrevia doesn’t mean they will. But, at least they’ve knocked down one of the key barriers that may have prevented them from doing that before.

It’s also interesting to see Box explicitly mention corporate legal departments. Very large collaboration platforms like this, that serve the wider business world, are not always so granular about the market segments they’re targeting.

In some ways it reminds this site of the DocuSign and Seal Software deal – although in that case the AI company was bought out. DocuSign is trying to make a platform that does esignatures – of course – but also that helps companies to store documents and then analyse them with NLP.

And so it’s intriguing that Box has just bought esignature startup SignRequest for $55 million this month.

Overall, what this tells us is that NLP contract analysis tech is becoming more visible to companies that service the broader market – and now they are looking at ways to bring that capability to their customers. This helps the legal AI companies and also moves such technology into the wider market.

2 Comments

  1. Read this with interest from the perspective of a small law office preparing for competition from national or regional accounting firms in the corporate law area. How can eBrevia integrate services with SmallLaw? There’s a big market out here….

  2. Thanks for your comment Rene! If you reach out through the contact form on the eBrevia website, a member of our team will get back to you shortly. We’d be happy to discuss your needs.

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