Robert Ambrogi Blog
BlackBoiler, the Arlington, Va., company whose AI-based technology automatically marks up draft contract language, has been issued two additional patents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for its AI-assisted contract review software.
That brings to seven the number of U.S. patent allowances issued for BlackBoiler’s software. It has additional patent applications pending in Canada and Europe.
This news comes two months after BlackBoiler announced that it had secured $3.2 million in funding from a group of strategic investors that included agreement cloud company DocuSign and a lead investor whose identity was not disclosed.
As founder and CEO Daniel Broderick tells me in an exclusive LawNext interview today, BlackBoiler’s technology is designed to address a $35 billion global market in which companies spend $26 billion reviewing and negotiating semantically similar contracts, of which some $7 billion is verbatim work.
Listen to our interview here:
Broderick says Blackboiler’s technology can result in up to 70% reduction in review time compared to in-person review.
The company’s technology works directly in the Track Changes feature of a Microsoft Word document, automatically suggesting revisions specific to the preferences of the user’s company or firm.
These latest two patents, Blackboiler says, build upon the core components of its technology. One, Method and System for Suggesting Revisions to an Electronic Document, covers BlackBoiler’s capabilities to automate the building of playbooks for automated contract markup, allowing users to develop the standards for their contracting terms.
BlackBoiler creates client-specific editing models and provisions based on a company’s playbook, allowing it to make instantaneous company-specific revisions in track changes to previously unseen documents. The new patent is part of a family of three patents as well as additional patent applications claiming this method.
The other patent, Systems, Methods, and Computer Program Products for a Clause Library, refers to BlackBoiler’s proprietary technology for a smart clause library, which houses and manages an organization’s standard negotiation clauses and organizes them by contract domain. BlackBoiler automatically adjusts the language in the standard clauses to match language in a document under review.