ThoughtRiver + WorldCC to Productise Contract Standards

NLP-driven doc review system, ThoughtRiver, and the World Commerce & Contracting (WorldCC) group, have joined forces to productise contract standards. They will begin with NDAs and then move onto other types of legal agreement.

Unlike the OneNDA project, WorldCC provides contract principles, rather than complete model documents, or model clauses. These principles have now been integrated into how ThoughtRiver analyses contracts for risk and to highlight unusual terms. In this first case, it will be for NDAs.

By doing this, ThoughtRiver is taking best practice ideas about how contracts should be worded and integrating these into their tool, which can now automatically apply them. This also helps WorldCC’s principles to be put into action.

Paula Doyle, Chief Legal Innovation Officer at WorldCC, (pictured), told Artificial Lawyer: ‘As soon as we met ThoughtRiver we clicked and saw that working with them would be a way to bring our principles to life.

‘There is an appetite [among inhouse teams] to move away from burning time on contract terms, especially when both parties end up at the middle point anyway, and so working with ThoughtRiver will help companies cut out some of this noise and reach a balanced position.’

‘After NDAs we will look at other contracts, likely focusing on commercial service agreements,’ she added.

Artificial Lawyer has to say this is a great idea. Having standards sitting on a website is fine – and they may indeed be very well thought out standards – but the challenge is always going to be with implementation. This project solves the implementation problem and productises those standards into a directly applicable software tool.

Angus Chudleigh, VP, Go To Market at ThoughtRiver, added: ‘We want to make all contracts easy to understand for everyone. By doing this we can help to productise what are the gold standard principles for contracts.’

He added that the new approach would work ‘out of the box’. He also said that they had started talking about nine months ago and he noted that ‘no negotiations were needed as both wanted to do this’.

Artificial Lawyer then had to ask if when they were making the agreement did they sign an NDA and how did they review it? Chudleigh said they did – and they used WorldCC’s NDA and also ran it through ThoughtRiver before signing.

This site also asked Doyle what she thought about the OneNDA project, which as mentioned is creating model contracts. She replied that WorldCC was a big supporter and that the model NDA had been informed by WorldCC’s standards. They had also awarded the model NDA a five star mark in terms of meeting good contract standards.

‘We support anything that makes trade easier and simpler,’ Doyle concluded.