Legal analytics

Contract analytics company Knowable may be becoming more of a technology developer, but it's not straying too far from its human roots.

Today, the company announced the release of its Contracts Data Management Platform, a SaaS-based product that hosts, organizes and analyzes users' contract data, and brings together Knowable's ad hoc contract management and analytics services under one roof. "It's all about where your contract data resides and from a user perspective having access to that and analytics on top of it. What it does for us as a company is it brings together … the offerings and things we have been doing in miscellaneous ways," said Nicholas Reed, Knowable's senior vice president of product and research and development.

However, while the platform offers a centralized place for data and services, Reed stressed that Knowable will still be providing users with data in other formats and through other channels. "It's worth noting we have a fundamental belief that how you [receive your] data is ultimately up to you," he said.

To be sure, the Contracts Data Management Platform isn't going to be working entirely on its own. Knowable operates on what Reed calls the "Lawyer in the Loop" model, essentially relying on human legal professionals to review and organize the unstructured data from more challenging and unique contracts. Reed described this model as a "real competitive differentiator" for the company, adding that without human review, "you can't get to that level of accuracy on anything difficult, the technology is not there."

The model, however, means that the Contracts Data Management Platform won't always be fully automated. "You can upload a contract directly into the platform, [but] you will not see results necessarily instantaneously," Reed said. Still, whether human review is needed "depends on the complexity of the contracts and deals we are extracting. … There are certain things we have automated extraction on, I would call it the easier stuff," he said.

For the more complex works, users can track what stage of human review their contract is in via the platform. The speed at which these manual reviews happen will depend on individual service agreements in place between Knowable and their client.

To be sure, the new offering by Knowable joins a host of tools on the market focused on contracts, including those from Seal Software, Wolters Kluwer, eBervia and Luminance, to list just a few.

Reed, however, noted that Knowable looks to stand out from the competition not only with its "Lawyer in the Loop" model, but also with its focus on helping clients use contract data beyond just risk management. "One of the advantages of Knowable is although we are going to help you do your traditional role of being a risk identifier and mitigator, we are also going to help you transform your role [into one that] also identifies new revenue opportunity."

The Contracts Data Management Platform is the latest evolution for Knowable, which has seen some large changes over the past year. The contract analytics company spun off  from alternative legal services provider Axiom in February 2019, and months later in July entered into a joint venture with LexisNexis, whereby it would continue to operate independently while having access to LexisNexis resources.