Monday, April 23, 2018

Six Bright Gems to Shine a Light on World Book Day



Image: Pixabay.com
In this age of reality TV, Twitter and Pokemon Go (which seems to have really gone somewhere), one may be tempted to ask the question: Why read? In fact, the late Steve Jobs once famously remarked (while discounting Amazon’s Kindle reader): “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore.”

Thankfully, people continue to read—even though there are skirmishes about whether it is the printed books or the digital ones doing better (or worse) than the other. What one hopes, though, is that it is not the same book or set of books that most people end up reading—be it a JK Rowling in the West, or a Chetan Bhagat here in India (no offence to either writer, even though it may make Rowling squirm and Bhagat smirk). The diversity of both the readers and the books they read—and obviously the writers who write them—should grow, I feel. Okay, change that to must.

Having said that, I’m in a difficult position to proceed with this post. Because, out of a few hundred books I have read in my life thus far (should have been in the thousands, I know!), I’m only going to pick up six. (I promise to make a long-list of my favorites someday.)

So, without further ado, let me say something about each of them before the World Book Day gets over--and before some people might be compelled to think it is all right to skip reading books! Here goes (in no particular order):

The Old Man and the Sea: Master storyteller Ernest Hemingway indeed crafted an amazing tale of endurance in which an old fisherman is pitted against the might of the sea and one of its creatures he struggles to catch after a really long patch of bad luck. How he manages this adventure, what he says (I remember him saying something like that the fish he was trying to kill was like his brother in a setting I would never forget; you must read it to know what I mean), and how he behaves after his ‘victory’…The old man is a real-life hero and the book, a rare gem.

A Search in Secret India: Paul Brunton’s classic quest to seek out and meet the real yogis of India in the early part of the nineteenth century is largely credited with introducing Raman Maharishi to the Western audience. What endeared me to this book--besides of course the desire to know more about the Maharishi and his message of ‘Who am I?’—is the honesty of purpose and the integrity of a journalistic writer to get to the bottom of the truth (whether he did get to the truth or not is something I’m still exploring, since I haven’t read his oeuvre and am myself at a ‘seeking’ stage). He met lots of charlatans and frauds but apparently some genuine yoga practitioners as well, before finding his inner peace at the Maharishi’s ashram in southern India.

Autobiography of a Yogi: One of the most widely read books in the spirituality genre, what Paramahansa Yogananda did in this life-changing book was give a first-hand account of some of India’s sages and saints—besides a glimpse of his own tenacity to promote yoga and the teachings of his guru, Yukteshwar Giri. Not to forget the mystical, all-youthful and divine figure of Mahavatar Babaji—Google it to unlock a cornucopia of information. (Ironically, it is one of the books Steve Jobs is said to have read many times over, though we cannot be sure of how much he believed in the book’s divine incidents and miracles.)

Siddhartha (by Hermann Hesse): That this tiny book continues to engage and enchant millions of readers more than 90 years after its publication is testimony to its power and message of spiritual journey and self-discovery. It doesn't matter that it draws from ancient Indian spiritual and Buddhist thought; what matters is that it weaves in a simple narrative the recurrence of everything in our lives, the deceptive nature of our day-to-day rituals, the joys and sorrows of mundane human existence and, ultimately, the "song of the river" that keeps humming forever in our soul. Beautiful, heartfelt, ethereal, simple and profound all at the same time, Siddhartha cannot be recommended highly enough.

Atlas Shrugged: While Ayn Rand’s more famous book is The Fountainhead (which I tremendously like as well), I have picked up this one here for two reasons. One, it is the bulkier of the two and you get to stay with Rand all that bit more (if you are a Rand fan, you’ll know what I mean). Two, I found it more detailed and expressive of her philosophy of objectivism through an even more richly woven tapestry of super-solid characters: Dagny Taggert, Henry ‘Hank’ Reardon (whenever I thought of steel after reading the book, Reardon’s name reared in my head!), Francisco d’Anconia, Hugh Akston (“Contraction does not exist; check your premises”)…and, how can anyone miss it, John Galt! Check it out yourself—who is John Galt to ask you to read it?

The Outsider (also published under the title, The Stranger): This quiet reflection by Albert Camus on life and what matters--through a seemingly simplistic but profound story of a man accused of murdering his mother (the accusation resulting mainly from the observation that he did not follow the norm of crying at her death, if I remember correctly)--is one of those books that touch you gradually but deeply, irrevocably. It is all right not to be too ambitious but lead a joyful and uncomplicated life—that is the message I get again and again from the book, besides revisiting the notions of what it really means to love, be loved and lose those you love to time’s strange ways. Simply superb and highly relevant in our consumerist, gadget-obsessed times.

Like I said before, this is a woefully short list—but I’m happy to have shared it with you for what it is worth. Hope you will find at least one or two of them useful.

Happy reading :)

Friday, April 13, 2018

Digital, AI tools easing up legal work for companies

Image: Pixabay.com
When Vaishali Lotlikar joined Wanbury Ltd’s legal department sometime in 2014, little did she know that locating a particular contract or assembling a legal brief would involve sifting through piles of documents, and wastage of precious hours and money in the process. “There was a lot of employee churn in the legal and marketing departments. Nobody really knew where the contracts were kept and what was there in each for the company to keep an eye on,” she recalls.

To streamline operations, Lotlikar and her team gathered all the contracts, digitized the same and put them into a document management system after tagging them for keywords, so that they could be easily searched when accessed from the firm’s servers by authorized personnel. The tool was purchased from PracticeLeague Legaltech Pvt. Ltd, a specialized provider of software and cloud-based solutions for law firms and corporate legal departments.

“I had used their technology at Glenmark and USV,” says Lotlikar, adding that the familiarity helped her get up to speed. “Today, if our international business head wants to know the particulars of a contract, I can get those details within minutes on my laptop—irrespective of the city I’m in.”

This is simply a case in point. As the volume of compliance and other legal requirements increases for companies across industries, technology tools that can ease the legal burden are in great demand. Khaitan and Co., for instance, has been experimenting with technology for quite some time now, according to its chief operating officer Nilanjan Ghose. “We were the first among law firms in India to use software for accounting. Around 2007, we started working with PracticeLeague to develop our own time and billing solution, which is core to our operations.” Over time, he says, the billing solution morphed into what is now known in legal circles as practice management software (PMS). He likens it to an enterprise resource planning software used for operational management by a majority of companies.

For Khaitan and Co., PMS helps in all kinds of processes, including accounting, billing, collections, administration and human resource functions. The company is now integrating new modules into it—an attendance module, for instance.

Digital tools are also helping law firms expand in size or scope. “Many of our clients acknowledge that it is because of technology that they could grow from a 50-60 person law firm to one employing 500-600,” says Parimal Chanchani, founder and director of PracticeLeague. And while there are several technology providers operating in the legal space—LexisNexis, LegalSoft, Thomson Reuters (ProLaw), Jurisnet and dozens of others—Chanchani says “nearly 60% of the corporate law departments and over 40 top law firms in India” use its software.

“You cannot manage a compliance workflow through Excel sheets; everything is now getting automated,” says Chanchani. “What we have is a complete, cloud-based solution sitting on Microsoft servers (Azure cloud). Customers can simply start using any module by just plugging into the platform.”

Role of artificial intelligence (AI)
PracticeLeague has also begun embedding AI into its software. For this, it has opted for Watson—an AI tool developed by International Business Machines Corp. (IBM). Praveen Kulkarni, who heads technology design and delivery at PracticeLeague, says Watson is implemented if a client wants to analyse a contract sent to it by, say, one of its suppliers.

For instance, if a firm wants to become the supplier of a pharma company, it will be required to submit several documents. Based on these submissions, the pharma company will send it back several documents to sign such as a non-disclosure agreement or a supplier registration agreement. If done manually, a person from the legal department would need to pick up the relevant content (from the submitted documents) and “draft and redraft the agreement that would take several hours”. With PracticeLeague’s Document Assembly, a Web link is sent to the supplier. “Once the required documents are uploaded through the link, the tool starts asking questions such as the category of supplier, payment terms, etc. After these questions are answered, a ready contract is automatically prepared through the system for the legal department to review and approve,” says Kulkarni.

However, if the pharma company wants an analysis or summary of the multiple documents it receives from suppliers themselves--the documents are exchanged by both parties for signing--then PracticeLeague uses Watson. What Watson does, explains Kulkarni, is “extract certain portions” of the agreement—for instance, contract type, liabilities or jurisdiction, or a termination clause. “So instead of manually picking up these details, they appear on the screen in front of the person reviewing them,” he adds.

But what if the system fails to understand any particular detail? For such situations, PracticeLeague has built an interface through which the reviewer can feed additional information back into the system so that the same can be picked up correctly by Watson the next time. “AI gets better with more and more data fed into it,” says Kulkarni.

Wanbury and Khaitan and Co. are yet to start using the AI tool, but acknowledge the role AI can play in further improving efficiencies for them. “While I have not used the AI tool, I believe it can automate repetitive tasks performed by legal professionals and also suggest the possible options to be taken in a legal case,” says Lotlikar of Wanbury. Nevertheless, she adds that while all of that can be done in the legal field, “strategies thought of by human beings are also important and cannot be fed into a system”.

“AI can help us in faster turnaround times for cases and in due diligence on contracts,” concurs Ghose of Khaitan and Co., but adds that human intervention and checking will also be required. “For example, certain words could be misspelt and thus be unreadable by the machine, or certain clauses could be interpreted differently. So you need somebody to go through the clauses manually,” he adds.

Other law firms using AI include Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas which signed up with Canada-based Kira Systems for the latter’s AI technology in January 2017. On its part, PracticeLeague is now working with Google and Amazon to integrate their AI technology into its solution and, after that, plans to work with Microsoft as well.

(Note: The above article first appeared on Livemint.com.)