Beyond eDiscovery: Applying AI over a Platform Model to Streamline Legal Operations

Both law firms and corporate legal departments are facing increased pressure to keep their clients or companies one step ahead of their competition. Daily, they face the constant and often tumultuous twists and turns of government regulation, consumer privacy considerations, and the endless push to accomplish more (and do it well) with less time, money and resources.

From our experience working closely with a wide array of clients, we’ve identified some key themes regarding the challenges that many corporations and legal departments are operating against right now. This blog takes a look at some of those key themes — and also shares some of the platform enhancements we’ve recently made in order to support our clients’ business needs.

Contract analytics

Depending on the type of business, companies can be responsible for maintaining enormous amounts of contract data – and be required to frequently query that data for a host of different reasons. By using an integrated, AI-driven platform approach to contract analytics, businesses can quickly and easily derive insights and identify key business elements across a massive portfolio of contracts without having to review each one individually.

For example, suppose an organization is going through due diligence around an M&A deal and they need to rapidly identify a specific contract clause or element. Using an AI-driven platform allows a legal team to scan an entire database of contracts and identify red flags or “hits” right away. Then, the legal team can spend more time focused on a finite set of documents over a shortened time horizon.

Our Viewpoint Integrated Analytics platform recently did this for one of our major clients, a rental and leasing company that needed to quickly audit a vast network of vendors and contracts to ensure GDPR compliance. By using the platform, we were able to reduce the workload on our client’s internal resources and outside counsel, and the company’s costs by over 50%.

Legal operations management

As many facets as there are of legal operations management, there are also ways to streamline those operations through an AI-based platform solution. This can save both legal firms and corporate legal departments a lot of time and resources over both the short and long term. At Conduent, we recently worked with one of one of our financial services clients to identify $2M in cost savings through the strategic application of AI.

In many cases, firms and corporations house data in discrete silos, requiring new research to be conducted each time insights are required. Our platform provides clients with the capability to run an analytics solution across all available data — including multiple, disparate data sets. With integrated security, we’re able to conduct research and derive key data in a dramatically shortened timeframe while preserving the fidelity of every piece of information we touch. Our AI solution is trained through 30 billion business decisions that inform a detailed set of algorithms that in the end, save attorneys an enormous amount of time while achieving the same or better quality results.

Data privacy

As government policies evolve globally to better protect individual privacy rights, new regulations such as Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), are placing tremendous demands on businesses today. Organizations and firms must have the ability to quickly access and scan an organization’s data stores to identify personal info that may be subject to a data breach or may need to be locked down.

By using one integrated analytics platform, legal teams can quickly and easily conduct a robust data privacy scan and then rapidly respond to data privacy access requests. Conduent’s Viewpoint Integrated Analytics platform not only provides access to such data —it also allows for the proactive identification of personally identifiable information (PII) and risky practices that require corrective action before they become a problem.

Having this type of platform in place allows legal teams to respond to data privacy and access requests with the push of a button. It also allows for the continuous monitoring of available data and risk metrics to ensure ongoing adherence to PII handling policies by the company and third party suppliers/data processors. The result for firms and organizations is greater client trust and an enhanced brand reputation – not to mention significantly reduced costs and time spent on due diligence.

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We’re excited about the exciting applications of AI and machine learning in the legal and compliance space – and our team is growing along with our platform. We’re currently hiring for many different roles across our data science, client services, operations and solutions architecture. Search our openings here, and for more information check out our Legal and Compliance Solutions.