Eversheds Sutherland setup a sub-division, ES Ignite, in response to the disruptive IT possibilities that are becoming more and more apparent within the legal sector. Eversheds Sutherland setup a sub-division, ES Ignite, in response to the disruptive IT possibilities that are becoming more and more apparent within the legal sector.
ES Ignite’s focus is to streamline the time constraints and economic demands of in-house legal work, based on best practice developed in over 20 years’ experience of delivering high-volume commoditized legal work.
ES Ignite were looking for a technology based contract review solution to absorb workload in the rest of the business and improve:
- Throughput
- Workflow
- Quality
A number of Artificial Intelligence based products in the marketplace were tested but they all had a common flaw – they didn’t work in the same way as a normal in-house legal team would, instead catering for bulk contract processing and neglecting working on an individual transactional basis.
At the beginning of 2017, ES Ignite read a complimentary article about ThoughtRiver in an IT publication. On paper, Thought River appeared to be the ideal solution to meet their needs.
ES Ignite challenged ThoughtRiver and thoroughly tested its capabilities. Any functionality gaps were soon identified and, during ES Ignite’s proof of concept, ThoughtRiver further enhanced its technology to meet their needs.
Eversheds Sutherland believe ThoughtRiver now provides exactly what they are looking for in terms of contract analysis software, some of its key advantages being:
- The fact that it can quickly and efficiently review both single and bulk contracts
- It effectively provides another ‘legal team’ to increase capacity
- The triage that ThoughtRiver makes possible enables highly efficient resource allocation for those contracts that do need attention
- The speed and efficiency of ThoughtRiver aligns to the need for fixed fee working and cost efficiencies in the managed service space
Currently the system reads and processes ‘Business as Usual’ work but ES Ignite have plans for ThoughtRiver to work further up the complexity tree. There is no doubt that ThoughtRiver will become an integral function of the business.
Barry Rodick, Product Owner, Eversheds Sutherland Ignite says:
“We are delighted to have found ThoughtRiver; the system is well aligned to how our teams work… only ThoughtRiver does it faster. It was a no-brainer to choose.”
“ThoughtRiver not only provides us a way of triaging contracts and prioritizing our resources, it effectively provides us with another legal team”
