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Say you have a big contract review project to do, in connection with an M&A deal you’re working on. Should you just use an AI-enabled CLM to do this work? This is pretty tempting if you already have AI capabilities through your contract management solution. Is that technology enough to meet your M&A due diligence contract review needs? TL;DR: Your CLM is not designed for M&A due diligence contract review. Contract Analysis AI is better suited for this.

We’ve been busy at Zuva! As part of a bunch of changes around publicly launching Zuva Analyze, we renamed a few of our products. This piece explains what we did, and why. DocAI is now Zuva API Followers of Zuva will know our first product, DocAI, an API-only solution designed to easily embed contracts AI into your applications. We built DocAI because of a problem we saw time and time again in our Kira Systems days (followers of Zuva will also recall that Zuva is a spinoff of Kira Systems – we started with the same underlying technology): there was demand for contracts AI tech embedded in other systems (e.g., CLMs and homegrown repositories), but it takes a lot of effort to build high quality contracts AI. We have seen this trend towards contracts-AI-built-in-all-over play out lots in recent months. We also saw a need for tighter integrations across legaltech, and thought an API-first product could help enable that. However, on this second point, our forecast was very off (at least so far)! If anything, legaltech looks less likely to integrate than it did three years ago when we sold Kira, which surprises us.

On July 29th, the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility issued Formal Opinion 512, covering Generative Artificial Intelligence Tools. The Opinion says a lot, and we could do a long post discussing our feelings about it. Instead, this post tries to help clarify the most problematic and impactful section: Self-learning GAI tools into which lawyers input information relating to the representation, by their very nature, raise the risk that information relating to one client’s representation may be disclosed improperly, even if the tool is used exclusively by lawyers at the same firm. … Accordingly, because many of today’s self-learning GAI tools are designed so that their output could lead directly or indirectly to the disclosure of information relating to the representation of a client, a client’s informed consent is required prior to inputting information relating to the representation into such a GAI tool.

At Zuva, we’ve spent the last three years focused on refining our contracts AI to be the best available. Since spinning out of Kira Systems, we’ve taken our same underlying technology and focused on improving everything about it. Users of Zuva’s contracts AI can expect: Enhancements ✅ Today, Zuva’s contracts AI has enhanced out-of-the-box knowledge, more document classifications, and improved trainability. Innovation ✅ We’ve incorporated new and innovative ways of combining our proprietary contracts AI with the power of generative AI so that you can learn more from your documents. Our newest feature – Zuva Answers – gives you direct responses to specific questions (either out-of-the-box or self-trained), in addition to the relevant extraction.

The Importance of Risk Scoring in Contracts A first stop at the hospital ER is the triage desk. There, a nurse will evaluate how urgent and important a given patient’s situation is, often using pre-set rules to make this determination. Post-triage, high risk patients (e.g., someone at imminent risk of death, or perhaps a pregnant mom with worrying symptoms) get immediate attention, while lower risk patients (e.g., someone with a hurt ankle) get taken care of when the ER can get to them. Triage is especially important when the ER has more patient flow than it can easily handle. It enables an ER team to direct their efforts to the places it needs to be.

This isn’t a real Shit User Story, but one we made up, inspired by the stories we see on their social media pages. In our first “Talk to Sales” article, we outlined some data on what the current reality of the buyer journey for contracts tech looks like.

TL;DR: Based on reviewing 130 contracts tech company websites, 75% require a sales conversation for a trial, 72% do not share any pricing information on their website, and 0 (apart from Zuva) offer pay-as-you-go pricing. You’re in the early stages of trying to buy some software. You go to a vendor’s site, trying to learn some key details - what it does, how it looks, what it costs. You see a “Try it out” button in the top right corner. Great! You can find out what the software does, see how it looks, and try it out, all in one step.

In-House Legal Teams Favor Familiar Tools over CLM Systems for Contract Management The legal industry is fascinated with contract lifecycle management (CLM) technology, and for good reason. Adding the right CLM tool to a legal team’s contracting processes can save significant time and money. With all the talk around CLM technology – social media content, whitepapers, podcasts, features at industry events — fear of missing out can leave some legal teams with a perceived urgency around implementing a CLM tool, or a feeling of inadequacy if their team is not ready to do so.

There are many reasons why one might need to analyze the content of a contract – contracts are what make a business operate, after all!. However, contract analysis and review can be a time-consuming, error-prone, and costly task, especially when performed across hundreds or thousands of documents. To address this challenge, Zuva specializes in extracting valuable information from contracts, with 1,400+ built-in AI fields and 29 Answer fields to make it easier for you to extract the data you need from your contracts. By normalizing the extracted data or obtaining structured answers, you can easily automate your business workflows and enable a wide variety of use cases.