If you’d told Artificial Lawyer a few years ago that no-code automation pioneer Bryter would be offering AI-driven contract review it would have fallen off its digital sofa. But, that is what is happening.
Now, it’s not totally out of the blue. The Germany-based company, which grew very fast during a surge of interest in no-code rules-based systems at law firms and among inhouse teams from 2018 to 2022, had recently added genAI to its capabilities, including some limited agentic properties.
This change towards using AI in addition to its original rules-based architecture has been driven by the market reality that LLMs have overtaken many key no-code use cases, e.g. building an interface to surface information from an expert knowledge data base. So, Bryter has had to explore new territory within the legal tech market.
Now, Bryter is really going all in on AI and is going after that core use case that was once pioneered early on by companies such as Kira and eBrevia, namely doc review and extraction.
Here’s their new offering: Extract Agent.
They explain it this way: ‘By combining large language models with their own AI, BRYTER’s Extract Agent expands the range of use cases suitable for data extraction by making it easier for law firms and corporate legal teams to use this technology.
‘Traditionally, contract review and extraction software were only suitable for large deals and transactions given the high up-front investment needed to configure and train the extraction software for the relevant documents.
‘BRYTER’s new AI Extract Agent changes this. BRYTER’s software can be used out-of-the-box with little effort and minimal configuration: enabling law firms and corporate legal departments to leverage AI powered extraction in a wider range of use cases, saving thousands of hours previously spent manually reviewing contracts and other documents.’
Michael Grupp, CEO, BRYTER, commented: ‘There has been a lot of interest in legal AI, but there has also been some disappointment as the realization dawns: ChatGPT for lawyers isn’t enough. Innovation and IT teams have real use cases that need to be solved with a range of tools: combining AI with workflows. That’s where BRYTER comes in. Using our new Extract Agent, together with our no-code platform, law firms and legal teams can solve real business problem, like repapering, end-to-end.’
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All well and good. But, from a market change perspective, what is most interesting is this: can a company that really started out focused on X, become a company offering a solution all about Y, which is based on a very different type of technology?
The short answer is: yes. Bryter is not the first, nor will it be the last, company to pivot and/or significantly add to its product offering in order to roll with the changing environment.
In fact, many of the most successful companies in the world have changed and changed again what they did. IBM once made cash registers long before it made laptops, and then it gave that up too and focused on consulting, AI and mega-computing projects. And there are many other examples.
So, although this site is surprised, it’s a totally understandable move in the rapidly changing legal tech market.
But, there is another point: how many companies can there be that now offer similar or overlapping capabilities in the field of doc analysis? (Given that there are already loads and loads of them now.)
This is one of the challenges of genAI. The ‘engine’, i.e. the LLMs involved, don’t have to be built by the legal tech companies, they just need to build ‘on top of’, and ‘around’ them. This is great as it lowers infrastructure costs for the startup / scaleup, but it also lowers the barrier to entry for a whole range of ‘skills’ that perhaps previously would have been the preserve of very specialised providers in the past.
Conversely, in a ‘flat market’ there is also no barrier to expansion other than the direct competition for market share from other companies also selling the same offering – often as a segment of a much wider range of ‘skills’. In short, it’s a busy, free-for-all, where there is much market share to be gained by the winners of this particular ‘legal AI war’.
How will this all pan out?
Well, that’s another story and you’ll have to read Artificial Lawyer to find out…. But, right now we can say this: the legal tech market is reshaping at present in ways that seemed highly unlikely even just a couple of years ago and there will likely be many more market surprises to come.