Peer to Peer Magazine

31 WWW.ILTANET.ORG Contract Analysis: Soware That Learns CASE STUDIES and explain what's in it for them, when you get that opportunity to show them, they're on board," says Tominna. The in-person meetings also provided the opportunity to address those who were concerned about the technology's potential impact on their career. "Kira doesn't practice law, but you do," Tominna responded. "You're the lawyer, so it's going to augment your ability to practice law. It does that, and it does it well, but it's still up to you to drive the process, advise the client and make sure everything is right." Many of DLA Piper's partners and associates welcomed the innovation. "We've trained literally hundreds of aorneys around the globe," he says. "We have hundreds of projects and deals that are being worked on, and they're telling us that there are savings of anywhere to from 10 to 50 percent on the deals that they've used it on." On one maer, the project team trained the Kira soware on a particular provision using a sample set of 60 contracts supplied by the client. That process took about 10 hours over the course of a week. Then they turned Kira loose on another 1000 documents, and the soware was able to identify that provision virtually 100 percent of the time, making the client very happy. As a result of the efficiency gained through process improvement and applied technology, the firm has been able to win work that clients had previously been doing in-house because Kira allows the firm to do it more quickly and efficiently. The firm also has multiple examples of instances where demonstrating the technology to existing and potential clients was a significant factor in winning business. certain ways, it should recognize it as a particular concept or provision. "Kira can learn a very complex legal concept with as lile as 30 examples, which is part of what makes the algorithm so interesting and powerful." Pilot In order to pilot Kira, DLA Piper's M&A team tested the soware not only on four new deals but also on four deals that had recently closed. This allowed the team to compare Kira's results with the aorney-produced results that had already been delivered to clients Kira passed the test with flying colors. DLA Piper found that the soware correctly identifies provisions at about a 90-percent rate. The soware also builds a document summarizing all the provisions, another task that no longer needs to be done by an associate, which saves time and money. Aer a three to four month pilot phase, the team decided they had found their solution. Implementation "Once the contract with Kira was signed, the implementation was simple," says Tominna, "because Kira runs on a cloud-based platform. When we wanted to start the pilot, they were ready to go in 12 hours." "Loading the data, and geing the contracts ready to load is really the hardest part," Tominna continues. "Once it gets into Kira, it's fine and it works, and it does what they say it's going to do, but it's important to be mindful of 'garbage in, garbage out.' You need to make sure you have the right contracts, and the right format from the right place, and be sure that you've uploaded all of them." He compares the process to loading documents into an ediscovery platform, and says the firm might look to adopt a similar paradigm with Kira going forward. Buy-In and Training Once the soware was live, the next step was to communicate to the firm. A plan was put together for several ways to deliver the message about Kira, including large and small group meetings, team meetings, location-based meetings, and one-on-one meetings. "When you have all your ducks in a row A Partnership for the Future, Now When asked about the reasons behind the success of the Kira adoption, Tominna points to the fact that the project was designed to meet a need that the aorneys were hearing about directly from their clients: that the due diligence needed to be as efficient as possible. He also believes that mapping out and understanding the process the aorneys were using was critical, rather than having the technology drive the process. "The Kira folks would even say that the reason we are so far ahead of any other firm in implementing Kira with the number of deals, the number of lawyers and the number of documents, is that we had it situated inside of our process, and that it worked for the lawyers—it works the way lawyers work. So I think that's the key to all of this. When it meets their needs, when you're talking their language, it almost becomes a no-brainer. It's been one of the most successful rollouts of technology that we've done because of those factors." P2P JOE DAVIS Joe Davis has spent 17 years in legal IT and is a member of ILTA's Program Planning Council. A frequent speaker and author on artificial intelligence, blockchain and enterprise content management, Joe has led applications teams at several law firms and is currently consulting with a large corporate legal department. Prior to his IT career, Joe was a teacher, an entrepreneur and a DJ in a flea market. Contact him at joe@josephpdavis.com.

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