In early March 2020, Addleshaw Goddard used BRYTER and Kira Systems as the core components in ‘AMBER,’ its entry for the Global Legal Hackathon 2020.
AMBER allows lawyers to seamlessly identify, review, and report on key provisions in M&A deal documentation. In turn, lawyers can also use the qualitative data produced to further train their custom Kira smart fields, thereby continuously improving their M&A due diligence process. Using BRYTER’s integration with Kira, the Addleshaw Goddard team were able to build a live due diligence review and house-style reporting solution in the space of a weekend.
Michael Kennedy, Innovation and Legal Technology Associate and leader of the Addleshaw Goddard hackathon team, said, “We identified the need for a solution that would take the extracted fields from Kira and then allow a lawyer to carry out an initial legal review through a streamlined, simple and cost-effective process before outputting the review information into HighQ for further analysis and reporting.”
He added, “We wanted to build something that would make a lawyer’s life easier when reviewing documents, as well as have the capability to capture data along the way, meaning we could use this data to start training more granular machine learning tools alongside feeding back into training Kira. Knowing how easy it is to build digital legal products with BRYTER’s no-code platform, we were keen to explore how we could use BRYTER as the additional layer in this review process. BRYTER’s integration with Kira was key in delivering this tool in the limited time we had, and we were hugely impressed with how well it performed and received some great feedback from the judges.”
“Before the GLH weekend, some of the team had not used BRYTER. But in no time, our team member assigned to this task was up-to-speed and ready to build the module for AMBER – our GLH submission. It’s really important for me that legal tech tools speak to one another, and this is a great example of the results you can deliver when this is done in such a seamless way. Building working solutions for our lawyers is what we do within the Innovation and Legal Technology team, and we are excited to be working alongside BRYTER and other tech products to continue to develop our offering.”
Michael Kennedy, Innovation and Legal Technology Associate at Addleshaw Goddard
Thom Barr, a Customer Success Manager at BRYTER, who worked closely with the Addleshaw Goddard team, noted: “I always enjoy sitting down and working collaboratively with our customers to understand and support the development of their use cases. It was inspiring to spend the weekend working with Michael and the Addleshaw Goddard team and to witness first-hand how they were able to use our integration with Kira so quickly to create an ambitious end-to-end solution.”
Following a planning session on Friday evening, the Addleshaw Goddard team built the BRYTER module in just one day before final testing ahead of Sunday’s presentation. Connecting Addleshaw Goddard’s BRYTER and Kira instances was straightforward through BRYTER’s API platform. This meant the integration was immediately ready to use and could be placed within the module and tested on live documents within minutes.
Patrick Skinner, Team Lead of Practice Consultancy at Kira Systems commented, “We’re always pleased to see how Kira can form part of end-to-end solutions and I’m really excited by the work we have been doing with BRYTER to enable these complementary technologies to create added value for clients. This particular integration applies to a number of due diligence review and reporting exercises and I’m looking forward to working with the BRYTER team in the future to help our mutual clients.”
Sam Spivack, UK Managing Director at BRYTER, added, “We’ve seen a lot of interest from our customers in relation to the ways in which our integration with Kira can be leveraged to create guided or entirely automated document review processes. For Addleshaw Goddard to create a working product for an ambitious use case over the course of a hackathon weekend is testament to the strength of their use case and their experience in building legal solutions. Customer Success is central to the work we do at BRYTER and I’m delighted to see the outcome of our customer mentoring approach reap the rewards that the Addleshaw Goddard team deserve in relation to AMBER.”
AMBER has been hailed as an innovative example of how technology can be used to streamline internal processes at law firms to optimize the delivery of client services. This is further proof that the future of legal tech is as much about ease of use and adoption as it is about interoperability with other best-in-class technologies. Well done to the Addleshaw Goddard team for realizing the potential in just a weekend!
To see how else Addleshaw Goddard has used legal tech to create end-to-end solutions, read about their 2022 LIBOR repapering solution for Virgin Money using BRYTER. You can also book a demo of BRYTER today to see it in action yourself.