Robert Ambrogi Blog
LegalOn, a company that was already one of Japan’s largest providers of AI contract review technology when it launched into the U.S. market last December, today is announcing its expansion into contract drafting with the release of LegalOn Templates, a collection of more than 100 market-standard templates created and kept current by attorneys experienced in the applicable area of law.
“It is designed to be responsive to what we’ve been hearing from our customers, which is that, in a world awash in content, it’s as hard, if not harder, than ever to find reliable and up-to-date attorney-drafted templates,” Daniel Lewis, LegalOn’s U.S. CEO, told me during an interview yesterday.
Even for companies that already have their own collections of contract templates, LegalOn’s templates address nuances that their own may not, Lewis said.
“For example, in our collection, we’ll flesh out templates that are appropriate for buy-side or sell-side, or California or New York, right, so you start to get into these nuances that matter and can accelerate the drafting process if you’re otherwise trying to modify a past precedent that’s not exactly the right fit, or if you’re wondering about what would be the better position if you’re on the buy side.”
Read more about LegalOn in the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.
Jeffrey Shimamoto, a former attorney and general counsel who is now head of content at LegalOn, said the collection includes many standard agreements such as NDAs and MOUs, but also many that are specific to industries, such as a manufacturing and supply agreement, a patent know-how licensing agreement, and a SaaS terms of service agreement.
“We keep these updated for any changes in the law,” Shimamoto said. “And if a company does have their own internal templates and they frequently send them to outside counsel to have them reviewed for any changes in the law, we provide that as well within our service.”
The collection currently includes agreements tailored to the governing law of either California or New York. LegalOn plans to continue to add additional templates.
Users can access the templates directly within LegalOn and then download them to edit in Microsoft Word. The templates are available to LegalOn customers at no extra cost.
After announcing its expansion into the U.S. in December, LegalOn formally made its platform commercially available to customers in April. At that point, it also introduced a new feature, AI Revise, which it said was the “first AI contract editing tool enhanced by expert legal knowledge.”
LegalOn already used AI to review contracts and highlight risks and suggested redlines. Its AI Revise feature took that a step further, enabling users to turn those suggestions into revisions. It allows someone who is reviewing a contract to adopt LegalOn’s expert-developed content and suggestions with just one click.
Lewis, who was previously cofounder and CEO of the legal research and analytics platform Ravel Law, which LexisNexis acquired in 2017, said that the same team of lawyers who developed that expert guidance and suggested clauses was the basis for expanding that expertise into the creation of contract templates.
“This continues our expansion in trying to be the very best solution to solve teams’ pre-signature contracting needs, whether that’s review and now whether it’s drafting,” said Lewis. “It continues our pathway of what we feel is a very unique approach to AI, which is to be at the leading edge of AI, but to complement that and combine it with trusted attorney written content.”