How Legal Startup Evisort Is Saving Businesses Money

If one were to ask a lawyer what they spend the majority of their day doing, the least expected practical answer would probably be "reading." Nor would the average layman anticipate that the reading was very hard work - surely, anyone who had passed a bar exam would be more than capable? But the twist is that this reading involves researching contracts. Hundreds of them, each dozen pages long, in the space of a month, sometimes a couple dozen per day.

It turns out that computers, when they entered the legal profession somewhere in the middle of the 20th century, solved just one problem: writing documents. Legal software is able to take a few names and figures and generate pages of boilerplate contracts automatically. But decades later, that sea of printed paper is forming a cognitive burden that swamps the legal industry. We haven't developed a solution to the other problem: reading.

Being able to read a contract quickly means that you can pull out answers to questions about a contract's indemnity, jurisdiction, termination clauses, exclusions, confidentiality, dispute resolution procedures, exceptions, and even expiration dates. All this would be preferable to do on the spot, but instead, our present practice has been to have a waiting period while a research team gets back to the query in a few days.

Now that we know what the problem is, enter Evisort. The brainchild of Harvard Law graduates Jerry Ting and Jake Sussman joining forces with MIT graduate Anime Anon, Evisort is a cloud-based software that employs deep-learning artificial intelligence to apply a knowledge system for the legal profession. In other words, it "reads" contracts. Not only that, but it can digest those contracts into their intrinsic legal facts, easily retrieving those legal clauses at the press of a button.

Founder Jerry Ting tells of the reaction when he markets his software as being able to fetch the terms from a 30-page contract in seconds: Lawyers inevitably say "Why did I spend ten years of my life doing that?" Ting says his motivation was to use AI technology to cut out "the boring parts" of being a lawyer, leaving the profession free to devote more time for helping businesses navigate the ins and outs of complex legal requirements. This new standard of automated contract management has proven to be something that literally every legal department in every company wants.

Evisort, launched in 2016, has amassed a portfolio of clients that stretch from Fortune 500 enterprise to hopeful Silicon Valley start-ups. Evisort's technology assists law firms and legal departments in performing functions like:

• Due diligence reviews - knowing what obligations a company has

• Drafting new contracts - using old examples as a template

• Risk assessment - knowing how much liability a firm is exposed to at any point

• Litigation analysis - knowing what judges typically rule on contract clauses

• Compliance detection - finding breaches, disputes, and other legal red flags

In short, Evisort functions as a super-intelligent paralegal research assistant, at least as far as reading and interpreting contract terms go. But beyond merely cutting needless hours of tedium, Evisort makes it possible to get faster answers to questions on the spot. CEOs, managers, sales representatives, agents, human resources, and other functional departments can now check with the legal department with a question and get an answer back with the other party still on the line. This enables a company to make nimbler moves and faster, more efficient decisions, instead of missing opportunities because the necessary knowledge was concealed in a stack of paperwork.

Since Evisort is cloud-enabled, a company team can quickly access contract data on the ground while at meetings and negotiation tables. The system is also capable of automated alerts when contracts are up for renewal, so even gaps in contractual coverage can be eliminated.

The field of AI holds promise for many industries in the same way. Far from replacing jobs, AI knowledge systems just make existing jobs a great deal easier.