Imagine your physician practicing medicine identically to the doctors in Charles Dickens’ time. Ridiculous, right? However, we lawyers are still drafting contracts virtually identically to the solicitors who practiced in the days of Bleak House. I recently had the opportunity to interview Kingsley Martin, an attorney who is the CEO of Kiiac (pronounced kayak), a company that is harnessing the power of computing to create contract checklists for entire agreements and individual clauses.

Kiiac’s software can review a large sample set of agreements and identify the core, standard language and distinguish deal-specific terms. During our interview, Martin used a merger agreement as an example. Kiiac’s software has determined that there about 350 common clauses found in merger agreements. It is impossible for lawyers to keep all of these in their heads. Inevitably, lawyers will leave out key terms or put in duplicative or overlapping terms. Kiiac’s software application can review a draft agreement and compare its terms against the 350 standard merger provisions. It will indicate to the lawyer both possible additional terms and duplicative terms. The text of the reviewed agreement is color-coded. Black text means the text is commonly found in merger agreements, while red text delineates text that diverges from the standard agreement.

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