ThoughtRiver is a contract pre-screening tool that does the first fast read of a contract and creates a summary that identifies what matters. ThoughtRiver can summarise multiple variations on similar themes, speeding up legal processes and reducing business friction around common contractual terms.
ThoughtRiver has always been a global offering. Though it only opened its first U.S. office – on Lexington Avenue in New York – in September 2019, founder and CEO Tim Pullan realised that there was a global market for automated pre-screening soon after launching ThoughtRiver in 2016. ThoughtRiver’s technology relates to meaning, not terminology, so it works in any English- speaking jurisdiction. As soon as ThoughtRiver started to feature featured in media outlets and tech roadmaps like the Legal Geek start-up map, they were contacted by people across the English-speaking contracting world and some of their first clients were in the U.S.
Where does ThoughtRiver fit into the contract analysis space?
Contract review technology divides broadly into intelligent search products which identify and extract snippets of text which relate to the examples that the user provides. These have a defined use case in due diligence and may well end up transforming eDiscovery. The ThoughtRiver proposition is to standardise contract terminology. Our founding vision was about summarising legal contracts and standardising their content – producing a digital framework for the 21st century.
How does ThoughtRiver’s technology work?
ThoughtRiver’s automated Q&A process, Lexible, is designed to understand each contract in a holistic way and present a meaningful, actionable summary back to the user. We modelled the process on how a paralegal would apply a checklist to a contract.
Lexible throws hundreds of legal questions at each document and uses the responses to build a granular summary of its core components – the things you need to know. It’s a bit like playing Battleships! Its foundation is knowing what questions to ask and putting them in the right order.
Lexible is a standardised framework. We didn’t want every client having to recreate the same questions as about 10% of each contract is unique to the arrangement(s) it is covering, but at least 80% comprises common terms and conditions.
All our clients use common components of Lexible. They can then extend the process by adding their own questions to the framework. Lexible is not AI; it is a series of questions set in a structured framework to help lawyers standardise the way they present contractual arrangements.
What does ThoughtRiver help lawyers achieve?
Lawyers are good at finding thousands of ways of saying the same thing! This creates friction in business and slows things down. Every time a lawyer expresses something differently, all parties and stakeholders have to read it carefully to make sure they’ve understood it correctly.
Meaning-based standardization, via Lexible benefits lawyers and their clients by speeding up legal process, but it also addresses a fundamental mismatch. What businesses want, effectively, is a diagram of their contract terms and conditions, rights and obligations. And lawyers give them an oil painting. By making each legal document an artisanal product and being resistant to cross-industry collaboration, lawyers are creating friction. When I was preparing for Legal Geek North America, I asked our data scientists to look at a million clauses explaining the governing law under which the contract was made. They found 335,000 variations. Imagine if there was one way of saying that simple thing! If you think about the tens of thousands of contracts on exactly the same subject being produced every year, this is a tragic waste of time on something that could be quicker and simpler.
Who is using ThoughtRiver and how?
We have clients in English-speaking jurisdictions across Asia, Europe the UK and the U.S. About half of them are provider side – so they are law firms and managed services divisions of law firms. For example, one of our earliest clients is Eversheds Konexo. The other half are large multinational corporations. They include a large U.S. bank, a large international asset management business, a large telecoms business in Asia and many more. They use ThoughtRiver to to process run-of-the-mill commercial contracts more efficiently. Our latest win in the legal services space include Legal Zoom. We are also working with PwC who are building a document pre-screening offering tailored to their global corporate customers on the ThoughtRiver platform as part of their ‘New Law’ client services technology.
What legal tech trends are you seeing?
Let me highlight three. On the provider side, the bigger players and those with legacy client relationships are starting to develop their own client solutions, focused on specific use cases. Our work with PwC is one example. Law firms aren’t becoming technology businesses, but some are hiring developers and launching tech-enabled products and services. Secondly, there is a more realistic approach to emerging tech, which is increasingly being applied to specific use cases. For example, a lot of thought and effort is going into what contracts will look like in five years’ time. Thirdly, the market is maturing, and players are different stages in the innovator’s journey. Standardisation and client solutions are the biggest trends, followed by integration and interconnectivity. And these are enablers for further innovation.
What’s the best thing about Legal Geek?
There are so many relevant people to meet. The presentations are all high quality– people tend to prepare well for Legal Geek! The challenge is to say something new that is also based on credible experiences. For us Legal Geek is about connecting, not necessarily selling, although of course we do our pitch, but it’s also about networking and raising awareness and it is always value for money.
