ThoughtRiver, a London-based legaltech startup that's applying AI to speed up contract pre-screening, has announced a $10 million Series A round of funding led by Octopus Ventures. Existing seed investors Crane, Local Globe, Entrée Capital, Syndicate Room, and angel investor Duncan Painter also participated in the round. The UK startup is one of a number applying AI to automate work that would otherwise be done by legal professions with the aim of boosting operational efficiency. Other startups playing in the space include the likes of Kira Systems, LawGeex and Luminance to name a few. ThoughtRiver argues it has a different focus vs the majority of contract view companies because it's focusing on pre-signature contracts -- with the aim of making securing a deal faster. "Almost all others are just employed to pull data from existing contracts.

AI contract review business ThoughtRiver has secured a $10m (£7.5m) investment from venture capitalists to expand its presence around the world, with extra spending in the US and South-East Asia. Octopus Ventures, which has £1.3bn under management and invests in technology innovation start-ups, pledged the Series A funding, saying it liked the company because it was disrupting a legal market that had been "slow to adopt AI" compared to other industries. ThoughtRiver was originally incubated by Cambridge law firm Taylor Vinters, which remains a shareholder in the business, and it is run by former Taylor Vinters partner Tim Pullan. The company, which has offices in Cambridge, London, New York, Singapore and New Zealand, has developed its own natural language processing engine that Mr Pullan said helped to iron out differences in the language used by lawyers to draft contracts. The product, Lexible, is used by PwC and businesses in the telecoms, retailing and technology sectors to automate the reviewing and pre-screening of contracts.

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.

Delighted to be invited by Re-Bank to take part in their recent podcast on Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Enterprise Software. Tim Pullan from ThoughtRiver was joined by Scott Sage, Crane, Abhirukt Sapru from Tessian and Ed Challis, Re:infer. Topics covered range from funding and growing enterprise software businesses to the impact of AI in today's society. It was a pleasure to be involved, click here to listen to the full podcast.

Its traditional aversion to risk has meant the legal profession has not been in the vanguard of new technology. But it is seen as ripe for disruption -- a view that is based not least on pressure from tech-savvy corporate clients questioning the size of their legal bills and wanting to reduce risk. As more law firms become familiar with terms such as machine learning and data mining, they are creating tech-focused jobs like "head of research and development" or hiring coders or artificial intelligence (AI) experts. Change is being driven not only by demand from clients but also by competition from accounting firms, which have begun to offer legal services and to use technology to do routine work. "Lawtech" start-ups, often set up by ex-lawyers and so-called because they use technology to streamline or automate routine aspects of legal work, are a threat too.

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.