Digital Transformation for Attorneys: How ContractPodAI is using AI for legal companies

For a highly analytical and numerical industry, legal companies could benefit substantially with the application of AI. The use of artificial intelligence for mundane or repetitive tasks could save a lot of time and hence, improve efficiency. ContractPodAI is one such company with a phenomenal experience of using AI for its contract management services.   

After its inception in 2012, the company has evolved tremendously as a legal tech provider in 6 years. Using AI they have digitally transformed the contract management processed of organizations such as EY, Total Petroleum, Bosch Siemens and Pennon Group. Just last year, they powered their contract analyst E: V which is powered by IBM Watson and tested thoroughly. 

In an exclusive conversation with Express Computer, Sarvarth Misra, CEO and co-founder of ContractPodAI, has answered key industry questions and explained the growing relevance of AI in the legal industry. Keep Reading!

Contract management processes require thorough scrutiny. How does your legal AI solution benefit this process? 

A Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) system like ContractPodAI’s helps in-house legal counsel by improving the organization’s structures and processes. 

Part of this legal digital transformation journey is automating the mundane tasks that many attorneys attend to today. For example, the system’s Auto-Contract Desk (ACD) function lets non-attorneys create standardized contracts, that would have taken precious time of an in-house attorney. 

Now, the attorney can focus their time and effort on the more complex and strategic projects, instead of the standard. In effect, the AI solution lets the corporate lawyers focus their time and scrutiny on the strategically important and potentially more challenging projects. 

Are you using Blockchain, since immutability is a must-have for any contract to run its course? 

Blockchain is an important concept in contracts. However, it is in the very early stages of deployment in industries. As such, ContractPodAi is watching and experimenting with SmartContracts, and Blockchain technologies – within contracts. 

As this area matures, we look forward to deploying the appropriate processes and technology to help our clients adapt to this new field. 

Do you know of any long-running litigations of improper contract formulation? How can a solution offered by ContractPodAI avert this at the inception stage? 

We cannot disclose any such litigations at this time. However, ContractPodAi’s system provides analytics that help identify the most common clauses, terms, and conditions in contracts for a company. 

This way, it allows in-house counsel to ensure even simple contracts are tightly controlled and worded to avoid such improper contract formulation. In addition, a CLM system like ContractPodAI’s provides a Smart Centralized Repository for all contracts. Given that the vast majority of corporate litigations are based on contract disputes – it is imperative that a contract never be misplaced, incorrectly filed, or lost. ContractPodAi ensures that a company’s contracts can easily be found.

Legal AI would make a lot of jobs redundant. What kind of jobs are these and what is your opinion on the same? 

Legal AI technology like ContractPodAi’s makes the legal department much more efficient. As such, the corporate attorney’s can delegate more tasks to non-attorneys. This clears their workload of more mundane and standard tasks. 

This then allows the attorneys to focus on strategic and more difficult issues – that help guide the business more effectively. As such, it is highly debatable whether Legal AI technology takes away jobs. Rather – it makes the legal departments considerably more effective.

What does the future hold for ContractPodAI’s AI- contract analytics solution? Are there any expected updates?

ContractPodAI’s CLM solution and contract analytics solution is continually evolving. A great example is the major step forward in contract automation – just announced a few days ago https://contractpod.com/news/new-automated-template-based-contract-generation-feature/.   We are continually releasing automatic updates to our systems to our existing clients. As such, an investment in a system like ContractPodAI, is an investment in a continually evolving system … and an investment in your future. 

 How do you think technology will transform the legal sector? What does 2020 look like? 

Our job is to make help the legal department digitally transform. This brings tremendous efficiency gains to the legal teams. This brings the true impact of a technology-enabled legal team to organizations. As such, we see our job as inspiring Legal’s new Digital Revolution!  2020 is the start of a tremendous future for the legal space. There are many new developments that will unfold in the coming months with ContractPodAi.