Machines with Meaning: LinkSquares’ Path to Tackling Legal Pains with Artificial Intelligence

It’s an exciting time in the world of artificial intelligence (AI). As the news cycle has erupted with bylines such as "The AI Arms Race is Changing Everything," you may be a bit overwhelmed as you evaluate contract lifecycle management (CLM) providers that tout AI capabilities. It’s helpful to break this topic down by asking not what the state of AI is overall but what AI can do for you and your business needs. This unprecedented time of innovation brings us back to the root of why and how we built our CLM suite with AI at the core.

Our Start

When LinkSquares was founded, AI for legal didn’t exist. Prior to founding LinkSquares, Vishal and Chris experienced contract management pains firsthand as they prepared for their previous company’s acquisition. The process was disorganized, lacked automation, and was overall very time-intensive. They knew there had to be a better way. Since neither Vishal nor Chis had a background in legal, they spent over a year talking with over one hundred legal professionals to understand exactly what teams needed. 

They found that no one quite knew what they agreed to in the contracts they signed. The agreements were often redlined or on third-party paper, and retrieving the agreed-upon terms was incredibly difficult. Accessing contract metadata was historically very manual, forcing legal to read every contract, manually pulling and inputting the data points into a spreadsheet or database making reporting all but impossible. 

To them, there was a clear solution: automating the extraction of contract metadata with artificial intelligence so legal could find answers in seconds.  

Following this discovery, the budding LinkSquares team got to work on creating a contract repository that would not only store agreements but would also extract data with powerful machine learning algorithms, which we call Smart Values™, and automate search and reporting so legal had the data they needed to do their job efficiently.

AI-First

What differentiated LinkSquares then still differentiates us today. Our decision early on to put AI at the core of our CLM solution – instead of adding it in later – is what has propelled our business forward over the years. We knew we wanted to build a product that emphasized the human-to-machine connection, and to do that, we needed to build AI that would complement our users. 

“AI is not just a feature, it is a fundamental part of our product. We remain committed to bridging the gap between cutting-edge AI technology and real-world customer value. Amidst this exciting era of AI innovation, we are committed to continuing our legacy and delivering a best in class AI-powered software solution for legal.” - Andrew Leverone, SVP of Product & Engineering. 

Our models are exclusively trained on billions of legal words and phrases to ensure they are fine-tuned to the nuances of legal language. The processes we use to develop and maintain our models were created with legal users in mind, and we use a multi-team approach to ensure quality. These teams include:

• Data Science: Our in-house Data Science team is made up of both expert Machine Learning Engineers and Data Scientists who collaborate on building and fine-tuning our language models to find and extract contract metadata. 

• Legal Engineers: Lawyers trained in AI, Legal Engineers monitor new developments in legal language important to lawyers that we can extract from legal contracts.
• Audit Team: This dedicated team reviews Smart Value extractions throughout production to ensure we always capture the correct information. This helps us monitor language deviations, inform & prioritize updates to existing models, and capture new language patterns.
• Product: LinkSquares’ product team works throughout the entire development process to build a customer-driven product, bringing LinkSquares AI to life through intuitive features across the platform. Working closely with our Voice of the Customer team, we prioritize features that directly satisfy customer needs. LinkSquares’ roadmap always focuses on the most important thing: solving legal’s pain points. 

Built to Put Legal in Control 

This brings us to the question - what can AI do for you? Using AI, legal teams save countless hours of manually reviewing contracts searching for answers. With more efficient processes, you can more effectively tackle business pains that require a strategic approach. In fact, according to Forrester, legal experiences ROI benefits of 352% and recaptures 40% of prior contracting workload by eliminating manual work and streamlining processes with LinkSquares all-in-one CLM. Here’s how it can help:

• Mergers and Acquisitions - Conducting M&A due diligence can be difficult and costly for both parties. Smaller companies may find it difficult to pull together answers promptly while the larger acquiring company scrambles to ensure all the i’s are dotted, and the t’s are crossed. With an automated CLM tool, legal has digitized contracts in a central location with robust search and reporting capabilities, allowing them to get to the answers faster.
• Risk Reduction - AI across your CLM ensures you aren’t committing to anything that may expose you to risk and helps surface existing agreements with unfavorable language. LinkSquares AI automates the first pass of your contract review of third-party paper, cutting down excess communications while ensuring your terms are up to par. Forrester found that using LinkSquares reduced the probability of risk exposure by 75%.
• Business Enablement - Contracts are core to every aspect of your business, leaving you to field questions from sales, marketing, HR, and beyond. AI empowers you to assist in deal acceleration through streamlined negotiations while ensuring internal teams are complying with current contract commitments.

AI's Potential in Legal

The AI landscape is evolving rapidly. Not every breakthrough in the greater AI field may have implications for you and your work, but it’s an exciting time for legal tech overall with the increased adoption of new tools into traditional workflows. At LinkSquares, our Product team keeps an eye on breakthroughs in natural language processing and machine learning engineering, so you don’t have to. We continue to embrace customer discovery to inform our roadmap and ensure we are bringing the correct tools to market that we know will help you drive value without putting you at risk.  

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