The ability to compare provisions while reviewing documents is one of the most highly requested and anticipated capabilities that eBrevia has ever added to its platform. Once you know how the capability works and the benefits to reviewers, you’ll understand why.
What is Provision Compare?
eBrevia’s Contract Analytics solution will automatically extract many legal concepts from documents -- such as Parties, Change of Control, Assignment, and even specific subjects such as Base Rent (for leases) or LIBOR Fallback (for loans where you’re measuring risk level for impending benchmark cancellations), along with many others. To supplement the power of eBrevia’s powerful AI extraction capability, the software includes many other robust workflow tools built-in, so you can:
- Verify the extractions the AI performed document-by-document;
- Mark issues for further action;
- Mark completed agreements OK so you know they’re done.
- Recommend action for discovered issues via further review, amending, redrafting, etc.
- Produce a report summarizing the findings.
Our newest feature, Provision Compare, turns traditional review on its head -- or rather, on its side, by letting you quickly identify and review those examples across all the documents in your review that are of most interest to you, perhaps by being nonstandard. This way, you can quickly “OK” the documents that have highly similar language, and then quickly zoom in on the exceptions that require further analysis.
Adding speed to the process, Provision Compare lets you mark all comparisons with rapid redlining so that differences from your accepted standard are immediately clear. All documents are ranked in order of their similarity to your chosen standard. This means that, with full AI assistance, and with the help of advanced mathematical tools such as similarity comparison, Provision Compare can deliver a big reduction in review cycle time, with even higher accuracy than ever before.
Provision Compare in Action
Imagine that you work for a private equity firm or company that acquired another company and you are on a team that needs to review 1,000 agreements from the newly acquired company. In a typical M&A due diligence, you’ll often have to search for provisions such as Change of Control and Assignment to determine the ramifications of the ownership change on existing contracts.
In eBrevia, you can easily set up a Form, which is a subset of provisions. With eBrevia’s powerful search and filtering capabilities, you can locate the relevant documents and apply your review Form to them.
With built-in similarity rankings and redlining, you can see the provisions that greatly deviate from your standard and you can mark these exceptions with a tag.
Everything above the line -- those provisions with high similarity -- can be safely marked OK.
The end result is a complex review completed much more quickly.
Creating Visionary Capabilities
At eBrevia we continuously listen to our client feedback and requests, and new features are often the result of a collaborative effort between our design team and our clients.
Provision Compare originated from a conversation with a client that had a template for standard language that provided an acceptable and low-risk review process. Their insight was that if they could sort documents by the difference from that standard, they’d be able to more quickly locate critical issues.
In addition to M&A diligence, Provision Compare would be helpful for many other use cases, including:
- Reviewing Fallback provisions in loan agreements for the LIBOR transition,
- Comparing provisions in commercial contracts against a company’s standards,
- Negotiating from a position of strength by seeing what language has previously been agreed to,
- And many more.
After recognizing that Provision Compare would be beneficial for many clients and different use cases, the eBrevia product team brainstormed the problem and produced a series of prototype drawings -- what some call “low-fi prototyping.” After several iterations of the design, during which we gathered feedback from a group of clients, we produced a “high-fidelity” walkthrough. Prior to the final release, we conducted further reviews with additional clients and subject matter experts, working together as business partners to ensure the final product would provide substantial efficiency gains to their document review processes.
What’s Next?
As with many capabilities we’ve rolled out over the past years, we’ll continue to “iterate” and improve Provision Compare. We’ve already got a list of things such as:
- Let a Form drive the “checklist” of Fields to be reviewed directly
- Dynamically filter on selected found Provisions with one click
- Automatically expand highlights with one click
- Add Word to the redline export formats (not just Excel)
Get in touch with us
Do you have comments about Provision Compare, or other powerful capabilities that are important to you? Get in touch -- we’re always here to listen and respond! Email us at: info@ebrevia.com.
