signing contract

Legal services and tech provider Elevate announced last week that it had expanded its range of contract support capabilities with the acquisition of contract management and technology company Sumati Group.

Coming along for the ride are 20-plus contract lifecycle management (CLM) services and more than 200 Sumati lawyers and technologists to help with contract review and analysis.

“What [Summit has] been able to bring to the table from a strategic perspective is our ability to strengthen our depth and bring us capabilities in contract services as well as the technology side,” said Kunoor Chopra, Elevate's vice president of legal services.

She's noted that Sumati's capabilities in CLM and contract mitigation and diligence will help to plug a few gaps in Elevate's preexisting services. Such services, however, were recently granted an additional boost with Elevate's acquisition of the legal AI and consulting firm LexPredict.

The strategy behind Elevate's two acquisitions essentially boils down to creating a holistic, end-to-end experience where different aspects of contract services are bundled together with technology under one arm.

Pratik Patel, vice president of innovation at Elevate, thinks about it in terms of efficiency. Two minds are better than one, especially if one of those minds is a machine.

Blending Sumati's human experts with LexPredict's AI tech could help streamline time-consuming tasks like migrating thousands of contracts from one system to another or doing a large-scale search for any and all contracts related to the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

“That's where the LexPredict acquisition underneath those reviewers effectively adds 40 to 50 percent efficiency in those sort of search and find contract review/contract analysis type projects,” Patel said.

Chopra compared what's happening with contracts to the kinds of developments seen in litigation after e-discovery technology came to the scene.

Back then, throwing a bunch of extra bodies at the problem wasn't a viable or cost effective solution long term, and the same logic applies here. Companies run on contracts—all of the moving parts included—and Chopra said part of Elevate's strategy has been an attempt to make that process more effective from both a people and technology standpoint.

“You're going to need humans but how can we reduce the touch points, how do we improve quality, how do we reduce risk by bringing in automation and machine learning?” Chopra said.