Litera announces today (15 August) new generative AI features in Kira, it’s AI-powered contract review and analysis software, led by smart summaries that will help legal professionals to speed up the analysis of the information extracted by Kira.
Kira was one of the earliest providers of AI contract review for corporate transactions and the market has been wondering how Litera, which acquired Kira in 2021, will respond to the raft of new capabilities and opportunities that generative AI presents.
With the smart summaries announced today, which leverage GPT 3.5 in Azure, legal teams can take the data extracted from contracts and produce automated reports, enabling them to deliver advice faster. Litera says that in the upcoming year, legal teams will also be able to use Kira to find information from their contracts using natural language questions and requests, as well as set up projects.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Litera’s VP of generative AI, Greg Coates, said: “What we’ve got with Kira is a great engine that takes loads of unstructured data and turns it into something semi-structured. That might be extracting change of control clauses for you to review, but what we aren’t telling you is what those clauses say. We’ve culled them down but we’re not telling you what you’re going to read.
“With this new release we are trying to take it one step further so that you can say ‘this is what the clauses say, and these are the implications for your client.’ This ambition is that you put the documents in and get a due diligence report out. This is the first step on that path.”
Litera’s customers have wondered when it will make an announcement around gen AI and Coates said: “We have had to bite our tongue while other vendors announce things that you can’t yet buy. As of August 26, customers can begin using this and there is a lot more planned; every four weeks we’ll be announcing a new feature. There are five or other things in development or a working proof of concept.”
There are also those that have wondered if gen AI will make contract review technology obsolete, here Coates says that Kira remains better than generative AI in the vast majority of use cases, but that where generative AI turns out to be better, Litera will incorporate it.
“We have tested gen AI and in a couple of cases it might be better and in others it is not. If you ask gen AI to find a material adverse effects clause, it will find it, because the clauses always have those words in the text, and it is good at finding that. If you ask it ‘does it include a carve out for the pandemic?’ it’s really good at that, because it can find the word ‘pandemic.’ What it’s not good at is something like change of control or exclusivity clauses, because they don’t contain those words and it’s about the meaning of the text.
“Kira is trained to understand what constitutes exclusivity. We have 1400 different smart fields divided up among six techniques and we’re going to add a seventh, which is gen AI. We are going through testing of us versus gen AI and so far we think that Kira is better in 80% of use cases. We will give customers the option of whether to turn on gen AI. If not Kira will continue as it does today, but we think the best solution is to have both.”
In terms of any fears around the accuracy of the first solution out today, Coates says that Kira has taken prompts out of the equation, which will increase the reliability of the answers returned. Summaries are generated by ‘clicking a button’. Kira has also confined answers to the extracted data in Kira – it can’t go out and ask training data. Coates says: “We have legal knowledge engineers from Kira who have been trying to break this for weeks. At first they could, so we found out why it misbehaved and how to engineer that out. This delivers a very high quality summary every time.”
caroline@legaltechnology.com