Diligen Review: Tackling Due Diligence and Contract Review Pain Points with Machine Learning
As featured on LexTech Review. Written by Chelsey Lambert.
As a business law attorney, the length of documents, number of contracts and countless rounds of review are a taxing process. One that has become so tiring, that it distracts from the quality of work you provide once the task of filtering information is complete.
Diligen is a beautiful platform that streamlines the contract review workflow process. It applies machine learning technology to bring key provisions or particular pieces of information to the top of the digital pile for review, cutting contract review time by 50 percent.
Jumpstart Projects
To begin, log in and arrive on your projects page. Create the name of your project or related matter. Add teammates and reviewers. Now, add your documents. Scanned documents are OCR’d and Diligen’s algorithms gets to work. The Diligen system is smart enough to automatically recognize the contracts name, date, parties as well as dozens of key provisions like change of control, assignment, termination, survival, indemnity and more.
Begin Your Search
No number of documents is too much to tackle in Diligen. Diligen rapidly provides a high level overview of what’s in your documents and then allows you to sort those documents intelligently to find what you are looking for. Filter by document type, name, date of contract, governing law, or clause types. For example, sort by contract name to focus only on your consulting agreements, sort by date to see only contracts within a certain date range or sort by change of control to see only contracts that contain that provision.
The Diligen Review Process
Keep team members focused on only documents they need to see. You can do this by assigning one or several reviewers to review specific contracts or even easily assign batches of similar contracts to particular reviewers. The system keeps track of the team’s progress, tracking who has reviewed each document and what still remains to review.
The review screen itself it absolutely gorgeous. Roomy and easy to navigate, a user can jump right in and know exactly what they are expected to do. The original document itself it on the right-hand side, with the AI generated summary conveniently located alongside it on the the left side of the screen. Diligen colour codes different clauses so that the reviewer can easily see information that pertains to different clauses at a glance. It also allows the user to ‘jump’ to particular provisions within the original document with just one click. This makes finding any information you are looking for within the contract instant, convenient and highly efficient. Using Diligen the team can also keep track of any notes, comments, questions or red flags right alongside the document.
The standard Diligen system recognizes a wide variety of key clauses in the context of corporate document review. Impressively, the system comes with a built-in tool that allows the user to train the system to recognize any new clause type, making it enormously adaptable to any contract review task. The training module itself is probably one of the easiest systems I have ever seen to train an AI tool.
Most programs learn over time, based on the user’s behavior. This is an imperfect system, relying heavily on repetitive user actions — a process that can take months. With Diligen, the training process is simple. Look for ‘clause examples’ by opening a document and highlighting the text you want the system to identify in future contracts. They recommend saving around thirty examples to properly train the software and ensure accuracy. Once the system is trained to identify a new clause, you can still continue to improve the algorithm by giving it feedback with the built-in tools over time.
Summary Reports
As soon as your documents are processed on the Diligen system (which can be as little as seconds per document), you can generate a Due Diligence Summary Report for those contracts. These reports can instantly be completed by the AI or edited by human reviewers. Reports are available as Word documents or Excel spreadsheets. The reports are entirely customizable and can include any combination of contract information, clauses and reviewer notes and comments. The reports present a professional image with very little effort, saving even more time on every contract review.
Overall
Diligen has done an exceptional job streamlining the contract review process. The combination of machine learning technology and a great user experience make sharing the workload between team members easier than ever.
Request a Diligen demo here and use the discount code LexTech30 for a free one month trial of Diligen.
Originally published on LexTech Review. Reviewed by Chelsey Lambert.
Chelsey Lambert is a Legal Technology Specialist, published Author and CLE Speaker. As a former Practice Management Advisor for the Chicago Bar Association, and Vice President of Marketing for a leading case management provider she has seen our industry from many angles. Today, she works with vendors to bring their products or emerging technologies into the marketplace. And, teaches legal technology courses to lawyers all over the country sharing different ways technology can benefit their law firm. As Founder of Lex Tech Review and Lex Tech Media Group she welcomes the opportunity to chat!