LegalTech Soapbox: eBrevia.

1. What is the story behind eBrevia? 

eBrevia by DFIN was founded by two corporate attorneys who had experienced firsthand the inefficiency and inaccuracy associated with contract review in the M&A due diligence process. The company partnered with Columbia University’s Data Science Institute to develop its initial contract analytics software and was joined by its third co-founder, a machine learning engineer. As described below, eBrevia is utilized to accelerate contract review in a wide variety of use cases by corporate legal departments, law firms, audit / consulting firms, alternative legal service providers, and financial institutions. In December 2018, eBrevia was acquired by public company DFIN, a leader in risk and compliance solutions.

2. What are the services/products that eBrevia provides?

eBrevia’s contract analytics software doesn’t replace attorneys but rather helps them perform their work 30 – 90% faster and 10 – 60% more accurately. The eBrevia platform is used to analyze and extract data from contracts for purposes of contract management & digitization, M&A due diligence both on the buy-side and the sell-side, post-merger contract migration, audit & compliance work, LIBOR remediation, bankruptcy & restructuring work, and lease abstraction. Non-technical users can even train the software to extract custom information to meet their specific needs.

3. How does eBrevia help optimise the daily operations of an in-house legal team?

eBrevia helps in-house legal teams perform contract review more efficiently, accurately, and cost-effectively. Using natural language processing and machine learning technology the software is able to identify granular data points and complex legal concepts regardless of the vocabulary used to express them or where they might be buried in a document. With the release of eBrevia’s new QuickPick feature, the software can also provide yes/no, drop-down and multi-selectable answers to questions about provisions in the contract. eBrevia optimizes contract review for companies whether the software and its related workflow tools are being used by the in-house team or by outside service providers.

4. What do you believe will be the most significant change in how in-house legal teams use technology in the next 10 years?

Legal work will become more fragmented over the next ten years and allocated to the resource best placed to handle it most efficiently while leveraging the best tool(s) for the job. Sometimes that will mean bringing work back in-house while other times it will mean utilizing a broader range of service providers. As a result, legal technology will need to become more adept at fostering collaboration among these parties. At the same time, integrations between tools will become even more critical as corporate legal departments adopt the best-in-class solutions that most closely align with their specific needs.