LegalOn, which started in Japan and more recently has expanded to the US, is now launching AI-driven review for English law contracts in what is a major expansion for the company.
LegalOn’s UK launch follows a period of rapid global growth. The company has added 1,000 customers in just five months and now serves over 6,000 organisations worldwide. LegalOn’s customers already include over 100 companies doing business in the UK.
Daniel Lewis, CEO, told Artificial Lawyer that the move is part of a longer-term strategy to provide contract review to other English-speaking jurisdictions around the world. It also makes sense to launch in the UK as it is the second-largest legal market, he added.
Initially they will cover 12 contract types and the review will be informed by local legal content. The company, which now has over 550 staff worldwide, will also provide practical guidance on drafting related to the different contract types.
Lewis (pictured above left) added that despite their focus on inhouse teams they also help a significant number of smaller law firms in the US and Japan with contract review needs.
‘Coming to the UK made sense,’ Lewis noted, ‘it’s English language, it’s the next largest legal market after the US, there are some similarities in terms of the law, and there are similar pain points [in relation to doc review and drafting].’
They won’t be opening an office in London just yet, but that may happen as the client group on this side of the Atlantic grows.
As to its features, it offers:
- ‘Review: Instantly review first and third-party contracts with AI tailored to your risk preferences and playbook positions.
- Revise: Generate precise, word-by-word redlines in seconds, ensuring consistency and accuracy.
- Assistant: Draft new clauses, summarize complex language and redlines, and answer contract-related queries with a generative AI legal assistant.
- Collaboration: Work more easily as a team with robust version tracking, clause comparison, and an intuitive contract dashboard.
- Search, Store, & Comparison: Compare contracts, find necessary clauses, and search your contracts with ease.
- Access Management & SSO: Ensure security and control with advanced access management features and seamless single sign-on integration.’
In terms of the tech, like many early pioneers in legal AI doc review they started with ML/NLP, but are also incorporating genAI, especially in areas such as using Q&A for interrogating a document, or making summarizations.
‘This approach gives us the best of both worlds,’ Lewis noted.
More broadly, Lewis – who was also an early pioneer in legal AI and created RAVEL which was sold to LexisNexis, before later joining LegalOn in 2022 – commented that the inhouse world’s desire for legal tech was increasing and that was perhaps inspired by genAI’s arrival.
He also concluded that inhouse lawyers ‘stand in the middle of a river of everyday contracts that are coming into the business’, but they wanted ‘to get to the other side of that river of contracts so they can do more strategic projects’.
LegalOn’s aim is to help those inhouse lawyers to cross that river by leveraging AI.
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Legal Innovators UK Conference – November 6 + 7, London.
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