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Legal industry experts often predict the next generation of lawyers, younger people who have grown up with and around technology, will usher in a new wave of innovation for the practice of law.

That's certainly the intention for Andrew Antos, a Czech Republic native who recently completed his Master of Laws at Harvard Law School. After spending a few years doing technology-centered M&A work at Squire Patton Boggs in Prague as a registered legal trainee, effectively a junior associate, Antos saw some obvious uses for technology in modern legal practice. He decided to pursue the matter by applying to U.S.-based LL.M. programs, landing eventually at one of the most prestigious law schools in the country.

It wasn't really Harvard, however, that Antos was after. “The first thing I did when I got to Harvard was to cross-register at MIT,” he said.

Antos took a “New Enterprises” course at MIT, where he ended up working with computer science major Nischal Nadhamuni on a classlong project applying natural language processing and artificial intelligence to contracts.

That class project became the basis for Klarity, a new contract analysis startup that Antos, Nadhamuni and MIT senior Logan Ford hope to push into the legal sphere. Klarity is a cloud-based tool that reads through contracts and matches them to company contractual standards to help companies determine whether a contract can be signed or needs further review.

Antos explained, “One of the things we find is a really pressing need is the sales side for [business-to-business] companies when they're negotiating custom contracts with different customers.” Often, he said, companies find sales contracts tied in legal review, even while corporate legal teams are simply looking to see if contracts meet simple standardized criteria.

As a result, Klarity's target market bypasses Big Law and aims straight at corporate legal departments. “It's typically mid- to large corporations, mostly in the enterprise software and tech space. We're optimizing their sales and legal operations,” he said.

Parsing and analyzing contract data is quickly become a fairly crowded field within legal technology—companies like LegalSifter, LawGeex, Kira Systems, Microsystems, eBrevia and Luminance, not to mention long-standing legal technology vendors like LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters, have all taken various approaches to contract analysis in products released over the last few years.

Klarity hopes to differentiate itself through specific industry focus. The tool looks primarily at sales-side agreements, like nondisclosure agreements, which Antos believes gives the company the ability to refine and expedite processing. “When you focus on the industry vertical, you can go very much in depth; you can streamline,” Antos noted.

The product also integrates into Microsoft Office, where attorneys still do the vast majority of their work. “All the competing products in the space have their own [user interfaces] that compete for your time and your screen real estate, whereas we're just in the background,” he said.

Antos has high hopes for Klarity's technology into the future. The company is already experimenting with using its technology to help blockchain-based smart contract companies convert contract data into functional formats. The company also sees some potential down the line to act as an arbiter between company policy standards, easing the burden on attorneys to do intense contract negotiation for every agreement.

“The more data you have about what's acceptable to different companies on both sides, you can start offering services where you can generate contracts for companies because you can cross-match their policies,” Antos said.

“Ultimately we see ourselves becoming a clearinghouse for legal operations. There's so much time spent on even negotiating the most simple things,” Antos added.