Two City firms have backed a lawtech startup's initiative to create a new standard language of contracting by analysing millions of existing contracts with machine learning software. 'Lexible' is a continually updated dictionary of contract terms which is claimed to have the potential to save huge amounts of lawyers' time by standardising the interpretation and review of contracts. The announcement, by UK startup ThoughtRiver, is signficant because it marks one of the first attempts to exploit the knowledge accumulated by commercial artificial intelligence systems being installed by City firms and in-house legal departments to take on the grunt-work of contract review. ThoughtRiver says its standard language of reference terms is based on an analysis of 4 million documents. This analysis revealed wide variations in phrasing: for example in 1.4 million contracts, a simple governing-law clause was expressed in 330,000 different ways.

Taylor Vinters has invested an undisclosed amount in ThoughtRiver, which will be co-located at the firm's offices in Cambridge, London and Singapore, as well as providing testing and other support services. Tim Pullan, Chief Executive of ThoughtRiver, was formerly Taylor Vinters' Head of Technology & Outsourcing in Asia when he founded the company in 2011 and has subsequently been developing the technology business with support from Taylor Vinters. This marks the second such Legal Tech equity investment by Taylor Vinters, as part of its strategy to develop innovative solutions that streamline how legal businesses operate. Four months ago, Taylor Vinters announced its first equity investment into Legal Tech start-up, Pekama - thought to be the first of its kind in the industry – which is a cloud-based lawyer collaboration software. ThoughtRiver's Contract Intelligence software uses artificial intelligence (AI) to scan and interpret information from written contracts used in commercial risk assessments, and produces visualisations of the potential risks and other issues.