Thomson Reuters has announced a new partnership with artificial intelligence (AI) contract analytics platforms eBrevia, where the company's legal managed services team will use eBrevia's technology for its contract remediation projects and train it to be used in broader use cases.

The move comes less than a year after Baker McKenzie announced it was bringing in eBrevia to handle transactional due diligence in North America, Europe and Asia. The AI contract platform also received funding from Donnelley Financial Solutions in late 2016.

Rebecca Thorkildsen, global director of legal solutions at Thomson Reuters Legal Managed Services, noted that though Thomson Reuters often builds its own proprietary legal technology solutions, “what we didn't want to do was recreate something that has already been built.”

“So what we thought would be the best way to handle this was to really look for the technology we seek and then apply our own thereafter,” she added.

Thorkildsen explained that while the company will deploy the eBrevia as is it currently developed, it will also look at to expand its scope.

“We have several initiatives where we are taking the eBrevia platform and we are extending it beyond the common use cases of automated extraction and due diligence to look at use cases that are very specific to legal managed service clients,” she said.

Specifically, the platform will be trained to tackle “what we call business as usual contract review and negotiation,” as well as in “contract risk management and obligation management,” Thorkildsen added.

Thomson Reuters will also leverage eBrevia's ability to extract contract data and intelligence to help power the company's Contract Express platform, which generates clauses for contract drafting.

Thomson Reuters selected eBrevia as an AI contract analytics partner from a wider pool of similar technology platforms using three main criteria: the speed and efficiency of the tool, its accuracy and its ability to handle nontraditional content. “Bad scans and tables can often represent problems for these technologies,” Thorkildsen said.

Still, she added that “all platforms require some level of human intervention and expertise,” so Thomson Reuters also took into consideration how the eBrevia team would work in tandem with TR's own teams in supporting the platforms deployment and further training.

Of course, Thomson Reuters is far from the only legal managed services provider partnering with or developing AI and automated contract review tools for its clients. Wolters Kluwer, Pramata, Riverview Law, and FTI Consulting, for instance, all offer similar AI contract services, whether tailored to a specific contract due diligence areas, such as M&A, or more broadly packed into contract management offerings.

Thorkildsen, however, believes Thomson Reuters stands out because of the subject matter expertise it brings to the process. Such expertise, she notes, is not only through its in-house staff, but the amount of legal data it holds on which to accurately train the eBrevia's AI.

“One of the things we bring to the table that many of the other companies cannot is the content that underpins the technology,” she said.