ThoughtRiver Unveils AI-powered Microsoft Word Remediation Tool for Lawyers

By STS News Desk On Sep 26, 2019

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Users Can Access Thoughtriver’s Technology Within Word Documents to Analyse and Edit Contracts at the Same Time

ThoughtRiver, the market leader in intelligent legal pre-screening, has announced that its core platform, which standardises the interpretation and review of legal contracts, will now be available on the Microsoft Office platform via a Microsoft World plug-in. The new plug-in will give lawyers and other legal professionals the ability to automatically review and remediate contracts directly within Microsoft Word.

ThoughtRiver’s new plug-in will allow lawyers to quickly insert preloaded comments into the document for business colleagues or counterparties to kick off negotiation or discussion of contracts, while also offering up standard clause suggestions for immediate insertion, helping firms to standardise and speed up the way departments are working on agreements. ThoughtRiver is further enabling seamless workflow via integration with Microsoft Flow and a pre-configured email connector so that lawyers and business users can leverage ThoughtRiver’s intelligence simply by sending an email and receiving the results back via email without ever leaving Outlook. ThoughtRiver’s clients can now also create their own connectors using Microsoft Flow between their own commonly used apps and services to further streamline their personal workflows.

This new plug-in will be demonstrated at the upcoming LegalGeek conference, October 16th, in London, at which ThoughtRiver will have two stands as a Silver Sponsor, and which sees CEO Tim Pullan speaking on the main stage. Pullan commented on his company’s latest product news:

“The power of the plug-in within Word gives lawyers the right tools where and when they need them. There are immense efficiency gains to be recognised. Having been a pre-screening company for several years, we took a step back to work out how we were going to extend ourselves to cover the complete lifecycle, that begins when a contract comes into a lawyer’s inbox, and ends when it goes out to the counterparty or client. We realised that if this was going to fit hand in glove, we had to leave our own environment and go to where the lawyer is in Microsoft Word, in order to have world-class usability for our clients. Understanding how our clients work and being sensitive to that when we design our products is a core part of our success and this plug-in is a clear example of our user focused design.

Pullan continued: “It’s not just about creating a new bit of interface in Word. This directly impacts our core system and we have made changes to make this work in a simple way for users. Now, the plug-in will allow lawyers to standardise comments when reporting markups to clients or feedback on contracts to their business team colleagues.”

According to Soren Lundsberg, General Counsel for G4S, the world’s leading global, integrated security company and a ThoughtRiver client. “For in-house lawyers, constant resourcing pressure means that the review of contracts is simultaneously mundane and mission-critical. Now, being able to access ThoughtRiver’s insight and edit contracts directly in something we use every day like Word means that lawyers will be able to work in a more informed, efficient way, increasing their value to the wider organisation. This new plug-in looks like a real game changer, a vital additive to lawyers’ working processes, and based on our review of early versions of the prototype and being allowed to input into the development, we expect that this will help us create a significant improvement in efficiency and quality.