How will the new Icertis, Harvey and Evisort ménage à trois work? Can a CLM company partner with two legal AI providers for contract analysis at the same time? Bernadette Bulacan, Chief Evangelist at Icertis, explains to Artificial Lawyer how the Harvey and Evisort relationships will work
First, how did this come about? In May this year Icertis surprised the market by announcing a close partnership with Evisort, a legal AI pioneer which is also a CLM business – and with some overlapping clients with Icertis. Both companies extolled the virtues of the partnership, as Evisort would bring much-needed AI expertise, and Icertis had the scale, the workflows and a huge client base (see story).
Both companies said they would see how things developed, but were excited to see what they could do together. In fact, at the time, Evisort CEO, Jerry Ting, told this site that the CLM market was now overcrowded with players and that there would have to be some ‘shake-out’, especially as more and more young startups targeted the contract needs of corporates. And so, such a combination made a lot of sense.
Then, yesterday, Harvey – a newer legal tech business, founded on the use of LLMs and which can also help a lot with doc analysis – was announced as a new partner of Icertis (see story). In short, Icertis now had partnerships with two companies doing the same things – using AI to crunch contracts – albeit their internal tech architecture is different.
Was Evisort about to be given a ‘Dear John…’ letter? And if so, that would be a big deal, given they only signed the partnership agreement in May, just over three months ago and some (including this site) had wondered out-loud whether this was a precursor to a merger.
So, how will it all work? This is how Bernadette Bulacan, Chief Evangelist at Icertis, responded to several questions put to her by AL:
Why has Icertis done this?
Icertis is committed to helping customers maximize the value of their business relationships, and generative AI language models are powerful tools to surface insights from language-dense contracts.
The Icertis ExploreAI service is architected to support multiple LLMs with the security and scalability enterprises require, and as language models gain and demonstrate domain expertise, as Harvey has done, Icertis can seamlessly deliver these capabilities in our platform.
By partnering with companies like Harvey, Icertis can bring the latest domain-specific models to drive value on top of our platform, creating a win-win-win situation for our customers, Harvey, and Icertis.
What will happen with Evisort?
There is no change to the partnership between Icertis and Evisort; like Harvey, Evisort offers a domain-specific language model that can be delivered securely via Icertis ExploreAI to enhance customer value.
The speed of AI innovation is rapid, and Icertis’ strategy, platform architecture, and ExploreAI service are built to support multiple large language models as they gain expertise and enable customer choice as we deliver value across the contract lifecycle.
How will the integration work?
The Icertis ExploreAI service is built to enable multiple large language models to power contract intelligence. Working with Harvey, we will render its capabilities seamlessly in the Icertis platform using our ExploreAI service.
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So, there you go. Icertis sees no problems here. The multiple deals will simply offer clients more choice. Of course, this then puts a lot more pressure on Evisort, as the incumbent in the relationship, to maintain the Icertis-connected client links.
Here is what Evisort told this site when asked about what this all meant:
‘Evisort continues to partner closely with Icertis as it does with many others. And we also continue to expand our partnership ecosystem with a focus on delivering the best value to our customers by meeting them where they are.
Icertis is also seeking to expand their LLM integration strategy which is not a new strategy, but rather something they have been focused on for a long time. Bottom line – we are close partners working together on many clients and we see no reason that this partnership would not continue well into the future.’
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So, there you go also.
And to top it off, Evisort has just announced an upgraded genAI experience for its clients, which ‘intelligently orchestrates its application of traditional and generative AI tools, including [its own] Evisort LLM, to achieve the most accurate, scalable results for any contract management use case’.
Their methodology, called Document X-Ray, ‘selects the best LLM for each specific request from among the proprietary, contract-specific Evisort LLM and a number of best-of-breed generic LLMs leveraged directly in the Evisort platform’.
The company added that: ‘Notably, this patent-pending technology also recommends optimized language for each AI prompt to achieve the most accurate results, as gauged by a simple user feedback experience. This innovative use of AI ensures that Evisort customers gain the greatest possible value without technical skills or training. By delivering customers unparalleled precision and efficiency, Document X-Ray sets a new standard in AI customization.’
Meanwhile, with regard to Harvey, Icertis said: ‘This new integration will provide enhanced speed and accuracy as Icertis users leverage Harvey to extract key contract terms and clauses, analyze them based on playbooks, and determine the level of risk and review required.
Harvey’s legal specific foundation models can understand and extract all relevant information from any type of enterprise contract so they can be leveraged in downstream workflows.’
In short, and as noted, Icertis now has two legal AI companies going head to head via its now three-way contract analysis partnership.
Conclusion
When Icertis did the deal with Evisort it seemed like the only question was how the relationship would go: well and perhaps even lead to a merger; or not so well and both parties might go their own ways. What was not expected was for Icertis to bring a new challenger in the legal AI market, OpenAI-backed Harvey, into the mix.
Is more customer choice a good thing? For sure. But, equally, one could see the initial partnership in May between Evisort and Icertis as a way for the former to help combat the effects of an increasingly busy market for CLM and legal AI capabilities. Adding Harvey to the mix has just upped the ante for Evisort.
One other question is will Harvey look to become a legal AI supplier to other CLM companies? Perhaps there are CLMs out there that need their extra LLM strength, or already have some AI abilities but realise they cannot compete with what Harvey is offering? Harvey has not commented on that point, but it may not be out of the question.
Also, it has to be said that for Harvey this makes total sense. After receiving large amounts of funding the genAI-first startup needs all the client activity it can get. Icertis has multiple massive customers, from Microsoft to Johnson & Johnson, Mercedes-Benz, and JP Morgan Chase.
However the deal with Icertis is structured, if those companies choose the Icertis and Harvey combo to handle their contracts – and they certainly have plenty of those – then Harvey will benefit accordingly, adding to its annual revenues.
Plus, Icertis prides itself on working with a lot more than just the legal teams of companies, and helps to handle document needs across multiple departments. So, another avenue there for Harvey as well.
Overall, this once again shows how generative AI is not just a new wave of technology, it’s also having unexpected market impacts and shaking up relationships and approaches to how existing legal tech companies operate.
It will also no doubt make some other CLM companies whose AI credentials are not so advanced to undergo some serious introspection and to consider what they should do next. So, expect some more strategic reactions in the months to come from Icertis’s competitors.
And, finally, with Harvey now breaking into the CLM market, on top of recently targeting mid-size law firms after their success with Big Law firms, one can only ask: what other segment of the market will they target next?
GenAI is truly leading to interesting times for the legal market.