CLM LinkSquares Recycles NLP To Join Pre-Signature Review Club

NLP-driven CLM LinkSquares has launched a pre-signature contract review tool for inhouse counsel. It joins a growing number of legal tech vendors that now provide a variety of approaches for the flagging of issues during the negotiation phase of a contract.

CEO and co-founder, Vishal Sunak, told Artificial Lawyer that the Boston-based company would be leveraging its own NLP capability, which it first developed for post-signature contract data extraction as part of its CLM offering. The company launched back in 2015.

In effect they are repurposing the software they already have. Sunak noted: ‘We are reusing the AI engine that we made, but for pre-signature. We are recycling it. This will add a review of the redline version; a first pass review of the contract, which could be your own paper, or 3rd party paper.’

What it can now do is:

  • ‘Quickly surface clauses that require attention and speed the contracting process,
  • Eliminate manual reviews and time-consuming processes to focus on negotiations and high-value strategy instead,
  • Minimize risk with the assurance that legal teams have reviewed every important term and clause within third-party contracts.’

However, it won’t yet have client playbooks automatically synched into the system to help with things like providing alternative text. Sunak told this site that working closely with playbooks ‘is something they are moving toward’.

The new feature adds further energy to an already frenetic CLM sector, with companies regularly announcing new capabilities every few months as the battle for a share of this market continues.

Sunak added that the company, which received $40m in funding last year, was growing rapidly and had doubled its staff headcount.

More broadly this site asked how Sunak viewed the CLM market long-term. Sunak replied that he believed ‘to get to $1 billion revenues for a CLM company is possible [and] there will be up to 10 CLMs worth over $1 billion each’ at some point in the future.

His overall view was that CLM – despite being around as a segment for a long time already – remains a vast market area with huge room for growth in the years ahead.