artificial intelligence touch

 

While FTI Consulting has sold its Ringtail e-discovery platform to Nuix, it's still looking to expand its technology offerings. In fact, it's even continuing to enhance the Ringtail platform itself.

Last week, FTI announced it entered into a partnership with AI technology provider Kira Systems in a bid to improve its client services business. Ryan Drimalla, managing director at FTI Consulting, said his company will look to harness Kira “to put our own managed service team on steroids… and to make our existing contract services bigger and better.”

He added that FTI looked to partner with Kira because its technology “gives us the ability to more accurately and more quickly analyze and interpret contracts, and also gives us some optionality around the types of services we can offer,” as the company looks to offer “more tech-focused solutions.”

With the partnership, FTI will use Kira technology as a standalone tool to deploy in contract review, as well as integrate the technology into other technology solutions. Though Kira technology will primarily be deployed in FTI's Contract Intelligence practice, which launched in 2017, Drimalla noted that FTI is also exploring “potentially using [Kira] across other FTI Consulting segments.”

Drimalla explained it is in FTI's “roadmap to integrate Kira with e-discovery review tools as well as contract management systems.” He added, “We've already successfully performed integration with the Ringtail product.”

FTI recently sold its Ringtail e-discovery platform to Nuix for $55 million. But Mike Kinnaman, senior managing director at FTI Consulting, said his company “will be licensing the Ringtail software back from Nuix, because we still serve a very large portion of the Ringtail market with our hosting and other services.”

He explained that the decision to sell Ringtail was motivated by a desire to focus more on FTI's consulting and service businesses, which he described as “technology agnostic”—meaning that FTI uses a variety of legal technologies depending on a project's or client's demands—and less on its software business.

The reason FTI was able to quickly integrate Kira with Ringtail, he added, was because Ringtail's integration capabilities and API were recently built, and FTI was already familiar with the platform.

FTI's partnership with Kira comes just weeks after the latter closed a $50 million minority investment in its first ever round of venture capital fundraising. Kira told The American Lawyer that it intends to use the funding to build out its AI technology's contract review capabilities so that it can review more contract provisions without the initial need of machine training.