Legal documents are often rather impenetrable affairs. I wrote recently about a new startup called Beagle that are aiming to make things slightly more digestible from the end users point of view by creating a heatmap for a contract.
The tool, which is AI based, will provide users with a graphical summary of any lengthy document, such as a legal contract, in a matter of seconds. The aim is that it will save users significant amounts of time by making lengthy documents much easier to digest.
Fact checking
Of course, the challenges posed by incredibly complex documents are not faced merely by us average Joes but by the very people that have to put them together.
It’s with this in mind that jEugene has been created. They are using intelligent software to automatically check lengthy legal documents for traditionally difficult to spot errors.
The software was created by lawyer Harry Zhuo, who took inspiration from the many tools available to software engineers when checking for errors in code.
The tool aims to detect potential mistakes in the contracts that could provide fatal to its validity. What’s more, it does it in super quick time.
It’s currently being used by the legal company White & Case LLP, and is also being trialed by a few more via the cloud based legal management software system Clio.
Error spotting
The system is incredibly valuable because even if the errors it picks up may appear somewhat innocuous, they could spell the death-knell for the validity of the document.
Users upload their documents to the system, and after a few seconds, a fully checked document is returned to them. The new document comes with handwritten markups that highlight potential mistakes in the document for the user to review and gauge whether amendments are required.
It should be said that there are one or two rivals on the market, with most coming in the form of plugins for Microsoft Word, but none appear to do as good a job as jEugene does.
The nature of the product allows it to do very sophisticated analysis of legal documents that at no point slows down the normal processes of the user.
Access to the software is likely to come via a subscription fee for each user, with the exact price dependent upon usage.
It’s certainly an interesting product, and one worth checking out if you work with legal documents.
It's increasingly impressive what algorithms can do these days. It impresses me at any rate.
Very interesting. A fascinating trend.
I love the way you write and share your niche! Very interesting and different! Keep it coming!
I was looking through appeals court procedure stuff. I’m curious about the use of ‘Masters’ and ‘Special Master’. Under what circumstances to the courts use them? If for some reason they did would the Master have reason or authority to subpoena Jeff Pash or demand the files from the Wells investigation?