Product Review: Kira— Contract Extraction Software for M&A Diligence, 0418 COBJ, Vol. 47, No. 4 Pg. 13

AuthorOTTO HANSON, J.
PositionVol. 47, 4 [Page 13]

47 Colo.Law. 13

Product Review: Kira— Contract Extraction Software for M&A Diligence

Vol. 47, No. 4 [Page 13]

The Colorado Lawyer

April, 2018

TECHNOLOGY IN THE LAW PRACTICE

OTTO HANSON, J.

In mergers and acquisitions, a tremendous amount of time and money are spent on due diligence. Before a buyer can close, it must find and quantify the risks associated with the target company post-closing. Does the target own its intellectual property? Is it in violation of employment laws? Will its key customer or vendor contracts be compromised as a result of the transaction? The list of concerns can be extensive.

How do we assess these risks? For many of them, lawyers analyze the relevant contracts in light of the circumstances of the transaction. This type of legal analysis varies in difficulty. At times, it can be deeply complex, requiring the exercise of both wisdom and judgment to successfully navigate. This is the domain of humans—lawyers, to be precise.

But before lawyers can analyze the relevant provisions, they must find them. Typically, this function is performed by gangs of associates who are handed gigabytes of documents and asked to mine data from them. Find the change of control provisions in these 100 documents. Make sure every employee has signed an intellectual property assignment agreement. Stacks of PDFs of varying quality, many of which are completely unsearchable, must be opened, sifted through, and the relevant provisions found. These data mining tasks, which can be very time-consuming, are better suited to the domain of machines.

Kira has one such machine, in the form of a software as a service (SaaS) platform backed by artificial intelligence, taking humans out of the data-mining function.

How It Works

Kira lets you upload large quantities of documents onto its platform. Once uploaded, you can ask Kira to extract any number of provisions from a preset menu. Kira has more than 430 provisions that it is already trained to look for, but it also employs artificial intelligence to let you train Kira to look for more unique provisions specific to your deal type.

Let's imagine we're performing one of the most common tasks in M&A due diligence—a change of control analysis. We need to find out which of the target's contracts require notice or consent upon a change of control of the target company. Without Kira, lawyers visually search PDFs for words like "assignment,"...

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