August 19, 2021

 Dr. Daniel Martin Katz

legal tech contracts elm innovation artificial intelligence lexnlp nlp

Last week brought the news that Litera is purchasing Kira and (perhaps) winding down Kira’s engagements in the law firm space. Meanwhile, Kira’s machine learning capabilities will find a new home in Zuva.

Many of us have been on this Legal Innovation journey for quite a while. Kira, formerly known as Diligence Engine, was one of the first companies to bring modern diligence-oriented analytics to the market in the early part of the last decade, through their innovative approach to clause identification and clause extraction.

Indeed, they did an early product launch at the ReInventLaw NYC Conference that I hosted back in 2014 (seems like a lifetime ago). That’s why I agree with Richard Tromans that some of the commentary from competitors in the Legal AI space is a bit troubling, even nonsensical. We here at Elevate are excited to see other legal tech companies succeed, and we wish Noah Waisberg and his team all the best in their post-Kira endeavors. As legal innovators, the tide – whether it’s rising or ebbing – affects all boats.

Elevate continues to innovate in the machine learning space. Contract Analytics is a special type of legal document analytics, and this is reflected in our recent renaming of ContraxSuite to Analyse Documents. While not every Legal AI use case involves document analysis, most require at least some element of a document to be analyzed.

Our Analyse Documents ELM module has a proven track record of excellence, and we continue to expand its features and capabilities. As always, our legal document analytics capabilities are powered by LexNLP, our legal domain-specific natural language processing library. Analyse Documents is and has always been extensible, and can be easily used alongside the other elements of the Elevate ELM.

The products team here at Elevate is quite proud to work with both leading law departments and law firms to tackle a range of projects that combine our innovative technology with our teams of experts. The analysis of legal documents lies at the core of many of these efforts, which is why we are working to weave our Analyse Documents software, and LexNLP core engine, into the many other tools in our ELM.

Through our efforts, we have proven the efficacy of machine learning and data science techniques in the legal space. The application of machine learning methods to document analytics and document management requires dedicated teams of experts working with finely tuned technology tools. At Elevate, we continue to steer a steady course as leaders and innovators at the forefront of this dynamic marketplace.