Bloomberg Law is best known for its legal research and market information offerings, but it’s now embracing genAI to expand what its recently developed contract capabilities can do. The move helps the company to align more competitively against the likes of Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis and vLex, all of which have embraced genAI-based ‘skills’ to widen what they offer across research and contracting work.
The new ‘Contract Assistant’ is aimed at inhouse lawyers and is for now only being released in beta, they added.
In this case, the new LLM-based contract assistant builds upon Bloomberg Law Contract Solutions, which launched in 2023 and features ‘a secure centralized repository, seamless integration with Microsoft Word, advanced analysis tools, and AI-powered extraction of key contractual terms’.
So, what is it? It’s all about what LLMs can do well at, or as Bloomberg Law puts it: ‘Contract Assistant is a new generative AI conversational search tool [that] quickly surfaces key information from lengthy contracts, identifies and summarizes the key provisions, and gives the user the option to learn about specific areas of a contract such as amendments, expiration dates, and renewals.’
‘It also allows users to pose questions about a contract in its entirety, such as ‘as the representative for the buyer in this agreement, which provisions should I pay closest attention to during negotiations and why?’’
In short it does all of those things that LLMs are able to perform with relative ease, e.g. summaries and allowing you to interrogate a document. (See example below.)
Todd Barton, vice president of product, Bloomberg Law, said: ‘Contract Assistant not only simplifies the contract review process but also boosts the operational efficiency of legal teams, enabling more precise and effective contract analysis and negotiation. This addition to Bloomberg Law Contract Solutions underscores our dedication to continuous innovation and to addressing the dynamic needs of in-house counsel.’
Is this a big deal? It’s further proof of LLM-driven convergence, i.e. not just that companies start to offer the same thing, but rather that because genAI lowers the barrier to so many different skills that companies that did X now can more easily also do Y.
Then, because it’s relatively easy to make that stretch, a lot of a company’s peers also make that move, leading to similar offerings. In short, for this site convergence isn’t just about having multiple offerings – that happened before with platformization – it’s about how genAI enables feature spread.
And we can expect more multi-skill convergence moves across the legal tech market, that’s for sure.