Summary
Cenza was pleased and excited to announce this week our partnership with Kira Systems, a leading provider of machine learning software that accelerates contract review and analysis.
We started our business last century extracting information from documents in litigation. At the time, the state of the art was humans reviewed every document to manually input a few key fields (e.g., author, title and date) in a database. Times and technology has changed – often dramatically – but our goal remains the same: to help our clients make sense of their data and documents.
When it comes to contracts, organizations of all sizes and types face similar challenges. They must figure out what their contracts across the enterprise say. Once an organization has more than a few dozen contracts, this problem becomes harder than it sounds: find the contracts, extract the relevant provisions, interpret provisions that are not facially obvious, and systematically manage the rights and obligations created by those provisions.
When Cenza started helping our clients manage contracts years ago, the process was largely manual. Our teams would have to read each contract, find the provisions, and then re-type them (or copy and paste). Our team members trained as lawyers would also have to interpret more complex provisions.
Kira’s machine learning software changes the equation. Now, Kira does a significant portion of the previously manual work. It automatically extracts contract provisions. When we use Kira on projects, the work of our team shifts. We are able to process a significantly higher volume of contracts in the same amount of time. We move from finding and typing to quality control, exception processing, interpreting, and managing rights and obligations. We discussed the power of a humans team combined with tech in our July blog post, The Last Mile of Contracts: Why Human Teams Are Still Essential.
We are in good company in using Kira. As Kira’s July 2017 press release notes, “more than 200 firms, [work] on over a thousand concurrent projects monthly”
We are excited that we can now offer organizations a faster, more efficient, and more effective way to manage their contracts.
The partnership has been widely circulated to various news portals around the world. Here are a few links:
