Natalie Munroe is a senior lawyer in a major Canadian law firm. She advises the domestic and international firms on mergers and acquisitions, security laws, and general corporate matters. Yet Munroe doesn’t devote much of her time with the General Counsels of large Canadian companies. Rather, she engages most of her time in heading a division at the company named Osler Works – Transactional, not typically a legal form but certainly an approach to transforming legal service distribution. Munroe is a product and procedure innovator.
Osler Works- Transactional has introduced a range of technical advances, including artificial intelligence technologies, to a new streamlined framework for corporate legal transactions. The concept behind Osler Works- Transactional is to leverage technological advances to speed up and utilize less human capital for high-volume legal transactions. The goal is to provide customers with high-quality and more effective resources. This also indicates that the firms can increase their business without the assistance of any further human capital.
Osler Works focuses on the usage of “e-discovery” technologies to locate key problems in court records. When that went well, the company set up another similar business unit for purchase in 2016. This unit focuses on mergers and acquisitions, corporate financing, real estate, lease, telecommunications, and others. The Transactional Department would operate with Osler’s specialists in Merger and acquisition laws for any M&A deal.
Although the implementation of disruptive technologies is a core feature of many of Osler’s “Works” companies, the organization often focuses on the improvement of technology. In the Transactional industry, before the technology is introduced, the Transactional department analyzes the method to get to the right procedure.
In certain instances, the process design is given by the technologies that the organization wants to use.
In other instances, the process is guided by intuition and market analysis.
The combination usually results in a 20 to 70-80 percent enhancement in due diligence function. The more complicated the scheme, the lesser is the progress achieved. The firm has developed and implemented a collection of resources for different purposes. The integrator of such resources is a prosecutor, accountant, or market consultant who works with the company.
One of the main resources is Kira Systems, a Canadian AI-based contract evaluation, and analysis software firm that uses machine learning to retrieve crucial details from contracts and other relevant documents. Osler Functions– Transactional mainly utilizes Kira for due diligence procedures, to extract information from contracts and other legal documents. It is not rare for a due diligence agreement to have more than a thousand papers, so Kira has the ability to initialize all of them.
Kira program may extract a broad variety of due diligence clauses, including adjustments of authority, classification, exclusivity, licensing grants, and indemnity. It will also define a range of specific contractual words — expiry periods, termination conditions, agreement criteria, and so on. The Osler Works-Tractional Group frequently utilizes many forms of equipment besides Kira. Closing Folders and DocuSign assist with automated closures and have a digital signature network. This utilizes document processing software to compile records and fill in database variables with the appropriate details. Often the team utilizes tools and applications like Outlook mail merge feature. It uses HighQ, a shared platform, to share details with customers. The usage of such technology for a business order is much more efficient and adds considerable benefit to customers, according to Munroe.
Munroe further mentions that the company is still looking for AI technologies, and expects further applications to be introduced over time. The team, she says, has been trying to work on bringing more benefits and efficiency from the technology they have. The job of Transactional is handled by a mixture of senior attorneys, junior lawyers, contract experts, and market analysts. The combination reduces labor costs much.
Previously, Osler employed a variety of law students and entry-level lawyers to perform the kind of work they did in the Transactional sector. Munroe notes, instead of the entry-level attorneys, they have experts and contract professionals who excel in due diligence with a lot of expertise. There are young attorneys on the Transactional Unit, but they are monitored and qualified to utilize the platform and to adapt it to various forms of transactions.
The research is more important now, too. Munroe operated at Osler and a major New York company in the mid-2000s, doing due diligence at the moment. Modern technologies, Munroe mentions, make jobs quicker and less time-consuming. Of starters, for Kira, human staff set up an application and only concentrate on production updates, which is more important than reading other papers.
Munroe says that while technology can substitute certain human activities, it cannot envision a completely automated operation in the near future. Software suppliers, she notes, are not actually selling something that can include full automation. For the time being the most important thing is that people should be employed with smart computers to use the technology available for them.
