Digital, AI tools easing up legal work for companies

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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.)

A Matter of Sexual Freedom

Over the past few days I have seen a lot of excitement, rage, disappointment, disgust and several other feelings poured over the historic Delhi Hight Court ruling that decriminalizes same sex among consenting adults in the city. Now with Baba Ramdev publicly coming out against homosexuality, the debate is only going to get intense...

Even though I have taken potshots at how the new public display of affection among gay men (not women, curiously) turns me off, this post is not about my sex preferences or about Baba Ramdev's supposed powers to "cure homosexuality".

This post is simply about being progressive, rights-oriented and, in the spirit of the current buzzword, "inclusive". The new world order that we now see is one in which more people than ever before in history can make choices -- about how they live, whom they vote, what they wear or eat, among other things. And it's essential that this order include more and more people (still stuck in repressed regimes or who otherwise live on the fringes of fear and deprivation) for our continued physical, emotional and spiritual evolution. As a free citizen of a democratic country (however pathetic the democracy currently is, I still prize it) I believe that each individual has the right to choose his or her sexual inclination -- so long as he or she is not enticing minors or forcing others against their wishes. The government's job is -- should be -- to protect people from cutting each other's throat, not from cutting ice in what can be a mutually agreed and meaningful relationship.

At the same time, if Baba Ramdev wants people to approach him or his ashram and be cured of their "wayward sexual leanings" -- and if there are indeed people who do that or are willing to do that -- then we must also respect their choices and opinions. As long as we all get to exercise our choices with dignity and impartiality, it should be fine.

I only hope the courts all over the country (and the big daddy Supreme Court) do not get entangled in political opportunism of various groups -- but instead make further rules that facilitate adult informed choice while continuing to protect children and punish criminals (the real ones).