London-based legal tech startup Genie AI has created an intelligent contract editor, the “SuperDrafter”, which uses machine learning to extract, curate, share, and recommend relevant knowledge within a firm or legal team in order to create better contracts.
Founded in 2017, the startup has just raised a €1.3 million seed round led by Connect Ventures, along with an €890k grant from UK Research and Innovation.
SuperDrafter assists lawyers by reading thousands of past documents confidentially, then recommending clauses during contract drafting, negotiation, and review. The result is a projected increase in drafting efficiency by 52%, according to a vote of 61 lawyers at a UK financial services firm after a product demo. The startup is currently piloting its SuperDrafter with law firms including Clifford Chance, Pinsent Masons, and Withers.
SuperDrafter empowers lawyers with previously unavailable insights from past transactions and negotiations. For example, by analyzing thousands of variations of the same clause, it can provide a better understanding of market standards so that lawyers can negotiate the best deals for their clients. What’s more, SuperDrafter does not require a human to tag or train the data – the algorithm learns by itself.
“With my and Nitish’s MSc dissertations in deep generative algorithms and reinforcement learning, we realized we can not just extract, but actually recommend legal language specific to each matter,” said Rafie Faruq, CEO & co-founder of Genie AI. “Lawyers always tell us they spend hours trawling through emails and file systems for that clause they wrote on that one deal; SuperDrafter shows this automatically. But it’s not just about efficiency. It’s about utilizing the collective intelligence of the firm, and that means a superior client service for law firms, and better commercial outcomes for in-house teams.”
“Our patent-pending technology solves some of the greatest challenges to large enterprise: we help firms control the confidentiality of their data whilst extracting novel insights,” added Nitish Mutha, CTO & co-founder of Genie AI. “To present these insights, SuperDrafter might be the only contract editor to date that natively replicates Microsoft Word, enabling us to provide the familiarity of Word, powered with machine intelligence. SuperDrafter helps you draft your contracts with the collective intelligence of data, lawyers and algorithms.”
“We believe that Genie will complement our existing suite of legal tech tools by allowing us to add an element of assessment in understanding whether a particular contractual provision is drafted according to, short of or goes beyond market practice, and ultimately whether provisions meet, exceed or fall short of particular client standards based on their preferences and documentation standards,” said Lucy Shurwood, Partner at Pinsent Masons.
