Cognitiv+ is using AI for contract analysis and tracking – TechCrunch

Another legal tech startup coming out of the UK: Cognitiv+is applying artificial intelligence to automate contract analysis and management, offering businesses a way to automate staying on top of legal risks, obligations and changing regulatory landscapes.

Co-founder Vasilis Tsolis might therefore be forgiven for viewingBrexit as a sizableopportunity for his startup though he more tactfully describes it as a legislative challenge that we can help out with.

Theres going to be a lot of changes in legislation, theres going to be a lot of changes in regulation,and you really need to know whats going to happen to your contracts and if you need to do any changes on your legal documents or not. So its going to be a huge challenge, he says of Brexit.

I think this is going to happen more and more often, he adds, pointing to another incoming EU regulation that will be upping businesses compliance needs in the near future: aka the GDPR, coming into force (including in the UK) in May 2018.

Because you see legislation changing so fast and its getting so much bigger that actually its impossible to monitor and impossible to read it. Who can read half million of pages?

This is about day-to-day contract management but we think that compliance is going to be more and more strict, and its going to be much more difficult there are so many new regulations, about Slavery Act, about GDPR, MiFid II and so many other compliances that all thisaccumulated risk analysis from your contracts we think its not possible to be viable for humans anymore you need to bring the robots, he adds.

Cognitiv+s data-parsing toolis not being designed to interpret legislation but rather to monitor it in a structured fashion, combining that tracking with analysis of a companys own contracts with a view to flagging compliance risks and requirements.

The overarching thesis is that contract analysis space/legal process outsourcing has yet to be disrupted by technology.Tsolishas both an engineering and a legal background, as youd hope give the natureof the startup. Other co-founder, Achilleas Michos, background is in computer science.

When you do contract analysis and compliance and when you do regulatory analysis theres a lot of repetition, and the majority of the people spend a lot of time perhaps the majority of the time looking for basic stuff Legal but also admin assignments. So the majority of those tasks can be accelerated by automation, argues Tsolis.

Cognitiv+ is using what he describes as a number of AI technologies to perform the contract analysis at near real-time speeds, leaning on open source algorithms for the coretech. But hedescribes theIP as the process and all the stages we take for analyzing a contract, the training so, in other words,the legal expertise needed to get a proper handle on compliance.

We use machine learning, we use NLP [natural language processing], we use neural networks We aim to be a risk management tool; we identify as much as possible that the machine can do, he tells TechCrunch. When it comes to [analyzing an area such as] limit of liability if the contract is not very well drafted then obviously we cannot help you on this one but we can help you for the vast majority of the contracts that you have on your library.

Presumably the techmight also be able to flag up a badly drafted contract.

Contracts areuploaded to thesystem for analysis and tracking, with examples of the sorts ofcritical information Cognitiv+ can extract including the parties of the contract; the limit of liability; renewal and termination information; and jurisdiction.

Users are deliveredintel on an ongoing basis viareports, dashboards and notifications. The tool is generally being designed for use by in-house lawyers, commercial staff, procurement, financial and compliance departments.

The current industryfocus for the team is procurement in the financial sector, but next year itplans to expand to target the insurance, real estate and engineering industries too. Theyre currently also only tracking UK-related compliance, but are intending to add EU and US in the coming months.

Given the financial services focus, theyre alsolooking at how thetech could be used tohelp combat financial crime, according to Tsolis.

The early stage startup has been bootstrapping since being founded in late 2015, and has just gone through Londons Winton Labs accelerator for data-focused businesses. Its also in the midst of closing a seed round, and is running pilots of v1 of itscontract-parsing platform with a small number of UK companies.

Tsolis says the first version is a fairly generic analytical tool, but a more vertical-specific v2 is coming in September forfinancial and procurement users and anotherversion planned for March 2018 will target the other three target sectors. The aimisto begin revenue generating this year, via a SaaS business model.

Could the tech also be applied for drafting contracts in future, not just analyzing them? UK startup Juro, for example, already offers both contract authoring and management, though itlooks to have a bit of a different focus(on marketplaces and sales contracts).

The legal world is a long livedworld for centuries now, and its a very traditional sector. And actually I think you need to disrupt it step by step, saysTsolis, emphasizing the need tobring together all the stakeholders to ensure buy-in.

Its not just the lawyers a lot of people read contracts, like the financial people, commercial, procurement, compliance, so you need to bring all the stakeholders together to ensure that people understand what the machine does. And move on to new ways of interacting with the machine and NLP and new technologies.

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Cognitiv+ is using AI for contract analysis and tracking - TechCrunch