FTI Consulting has partnered with legal AI pioneer, Kira Systems, to help its clients with legal document analysis.
The agreement with the global consulting giant comes just two weeks after it sold its Ringtail ediscovery platform to Nuix for $50m. Although, it now appears that the company will licence back the software post-sale for client work.
With regard to the Kira partnership, one of several such deals the Toronto-based legal AI company has made over the years, FTI Consulting said that its Technology division would be the main point of contact and would leverage Kira’s NLP/ML capabilities via its recently created Contract Intelligence practice, which launched in June 2017.
The consulting business said that they can ‘provide clients with contract process experts, forensic experts, corporate investigation specialists and technology professionals’ – plus now with Kira’s well-developed legal AI extraction and analysis tech on top.
The types of work they envisage using Kira for include: complex regulatory responses, information governance reviews, M&A deals, litigation, and investigative engagements.
Commenting on the deal, Ryan Drimalla, a Managing Director in FTI Technology’s Contract Intelligence practice, said: ‘Relying exclusively on manual processes for collecting and reviewing relevant data within contracts is cost-prohibitive and resource-intensive.’
‘Kira’s ease of use and scalability will help our team automate the extraction of business-critical information found within these documents and, through integration with our existing suite of technologies, provide our clients with even more powerful and comprehensive contract discovery and analysis solutions,’ he added.
Rich Hermann, Director of Corporate Markets at Kira Systems, concluded: ‘FTI Consulting’s….Contract Intelligence practice is a perfect fit for our software’s capabilities. The team has repeatedly demonstrated its ongoing commitment to providing clients with the best service through the adoption of technology-driven solutions.’
The move marks an increasingly expansive and busy period for Kira following a rush of hiring to grow the business, as well as a huge $50m investment from Insight Venture Partners earlier this month, making it the largest ever funding of an AI company in this sector, and one that will undoubtedly accelerate the company’s growth even further.
And for people wondering about FTI, which we hear a lot about but perhaps don’t always know the scale of as a business, it generates around $1.8 billion in revenues and has 4,600 staff across 28 countries. This is not in the Big Four league yet in terms of size, but nevertheless a huge partner to have if they’re using your legal AI tech for their clients’ review needs. In short, this means more revenue for Kira, which will fuel more growth.
On a more day to day level, it also means that more companies globally, i.e. from FTI’s broad client base, will get used to making use of the output of legal AI tech and that can only be a good thing.
I have a dream that leases will (one day) be transmogrified from anti-social, unstructured text, creating barriers to homeowners’ necessary knowledge into useful, ordered data. Recent demonstrations of AI encourage me.
Does Kira have proposals or aspirations to work with public land registries to carry out the process?
Hi John, Will from Kira Systems here! In general, we think all contracts (including leases) should be transformed into useful, ordered data. We’re working on it, but it’s a big project!