ThoughtRiver, the leader in AI-driven automated contract pre-screening, has announced today the opening of two offices in Singapore and New Zealand to support its rapidly expanding Asia-Pacific business.
The move marks an important landmark in the growth of the UK-based legal AI pioneer, and signals a growing client base in the Asia-Pacific region for what is now a global company.
The region will be headed by Singapore-based Commercial Director Angus Chudleigh with the Australia & New Zealand market led by experienced Sales Leader David Audley. The move is a response to fast client growth across the region in large professional services, media, telecoms, financial services and industrial sectors.
Tim Pullan, CEO ThoughtRiver commented “it is a particularly proud moment to be opening our first regional HQ in the country in which ThoughtRiver was founded – Singapore. Companies in the Singapore and ANZ region have been reaching out to us for over 2 years now, and these office openings are heeding that call.”
He continued, “As the AI hype clears, GCs and other business leaders are focused on the proven technologies that can really drive efficiencies in the organisation. Contract pre-screening technology – which we have been developing since 2012 - is now emerging as a powerful new category in legal office automation.”
Angus Chudleigh added “I’ve been tracking ThoughtRiver’s rise for the last few years and I’m thrilled to get on board at this exciting time in the company’s growth.”
About ThoughtRiver:
ThoughtRiver addresses a fundamental problem for in-house counsels and lawyers: you don’t know whether you need to read a contract without reading it. This pre-screening triage was historically provided manually, but these days most organisations don’t have the luxury of people to do this work. ThoughtRiver’s pre-screening technology is able to automate this human triaging process by reading the contract, identifying parties, answering questions, and then telling you what to read and why you need to read it, in just the same way a good paralegal would. However, our technology never gets tired, does not stop to eat or drink, and only gets smarter with time.
About pre-screening:
‘AI’ contract review technology has to-date focussed on providing intelligent document search and extraction capabilities for lawyers to help save time on large due diligence and other retrospective projects.
Pre-screening on the other hand is designed to automate day to day routing and prioritisation decisions in large and busy corporate legal functions and is emerging as a sophisticated and technically demanding advance – and new category - in legal process automation technology.
Pre-screening technology comprises a legal Q&A and risk analysis process undertaken at an unprecedented level of detail and precision. Whilst the typical due diligence exercise involves assembling clauses on a handful of issues which then need to be considered by a lawyer, each contract pre-screen undertaken by ThoughtRiver triggers 1000s of software-answered questions on each contract in order to replicate what actually happens when a junior lawyer conducts an initial scan on a contract. Pre-screening then rolls up the answers in order to deliver a single final context-sensitive recommendation about whether a contract needs further review and by who. Importantly, pre-screening also explains why it has made that decision in human terms business people and lawyers will understand.