Researchers: Professor Nigel Crook, Dr Mattias Rolf, Dr Jintao Long
Collaborators: Andrew Katz, Chris McCormick – Moorcrofts Corporate Law
Moorcrofts are an innovative law firm looking to use AI and other advanced IT tools to create systems that can enhance their clients’ business. They have engaged Oxford Brookes to develop an AI based tool to help review legal contracts and in particular rapidly identify dangerous clauses. The project is using cutting edge natural language processing techniques to analyse language and its context to identify the specific clauses which need to be reviewed by lawyers. This technique reduces the amount of work that a lawyer has to do to review a contract, making it cheaper, faster and providing a better service for their clients.
The resulting online tool will be licensed to other SME law firms – many of which are known to be suffering from a serious decline in business as the cost of legal services has reached levels which companies cannot afford. There are approximately 7,000 SME law firms in the UK who could benefit from this new technology, as could the 5.7 million SME businesses in the UK.
The use of AI will specifically be introduced to improve the efficiencies of three elements of contract law:
- The process of analysing agreements by using AI to highlight areas that need attention and make suggestions for changes.
- Back office processes such as formatting and version control which can equate to 40% of a legal firm’s chargeable time spent managing a client’s contract.
- Post-signing contract management as many companies which are unable to afford legal support do not have the expertise or resources to identify obligations and due dates.
Funder: Innovate UK, Moorcrofts Corporate Law
