With Indian lawyers increasingly appreciating the benefits that artificial intelligence can bring to their day-to-day work, the use of this technology is set to grow. Dipankar Bandyopadhyay, founder of legaltech company Riverus, shares with ALB about how AI can take the legal industry to the next level.
ALB: What kind of gap in the legal market did you see that Riverus’ products are aiming to fill?
Riverus: Although digitisation in the legal market has started a bit late, we can now sense a rapid acceleration towards digitising manual and repetitive tasks. These tasks can be summarised under three broad headings, namely contract processing, legal research, and project management.
The key gap that we are trying to address through Riverus Umbrella, our flagship product, is that there are no easy tools in the market which can help the business side in a company quickly understand their day-to-day contracts without having to block the legal department’s time. Umbrella has built-in legal intelligence that can provide an X-ray report of any contract within a couple of minutes. General counsel rely on Riverus Umbrella to make sure that contracts do not fall through the cracks, and that certain minimum standards are embedded in every contract signed by their companies. In addition to summarising and red-flagging new contracts, Riverus Umbrella also provides deep visibility into the entire inflight and legacy contract portfolio of an enterprise. GCs use this visibility to proactively help business verticals in realising better outcomes from their contracts, and CFOs use the same capability to reduce revenue leakage across the organisations.
As we expand our market, we see Riverus Umbrella helping to bring lawyers and commercial people together to ensure that the goals of each contract of an organisation are fully realised.
ALB: How important of a role is technology playing in developing India’s legal system today, and what are some of the trends you see for the future?
Riverus: We definitely see an increasing appetite within enterprises to buy more legaltech solutions, and legaltech companies are also being able to raise capital from VC funds. But beyond the so-called “commercial scene,” the government’s main initiative in technology in the legal space has been to digitise courts and government departments like RoC and sub-registrar for land records. Building on these early initiatives, the government is now bringing in more innovative and bold measures like faceless appeals in income tax matters. The Supreme Court of India too has started an initiative to digitise the entire litigation records available with it, which could be a treasure trove for building AI/ML applications meant for betterment of the justice system.
Three key trends that I believe will emerge in the next five years are: First, availability of full dockets of past and current cases from Indian courts (similar to PACER in the U.S.); second, emergence of contract intelligence software as an essential tool for companies much like today’s ERP softwares; and third, emergence of a gig economy in the legal space thereby expanding access to justice.
ALB: How much of a role is AI playing in law firms today and what kind of competitive advantage does it give them?
Riverus: Despite access to significantly meaningful data, large Indian law firms are yet to adopt a culture to process data and build useful tools for their lawyers and clients. However, law firm leaders are certainly evaluating these matters, and some of them are backing entrepreneurs in the legaltech space through investments and access to know-how. AI/ML in the legal space can be a gamechanger as much of the “grunt work” performed by paralegals and junior associates can be fully or partly automated. This will increase profitability for the partners and increase client satisfaction levels.
ALB: What are some of the other products that Riverus is currently planning?
Riverus: Riverus’ mission is to automate legal tasks that involve understanding the meaning and context of legal documents. Apart from an AI/ML driven contract-intelligence solution (Riverus Umbrella), Riverus also provides a AI/ML powered caselaw-research solution. In the course of the next two years, we want to offer a fully managed experience to our customers to reduce contract review cycle time to half of what is spent today. Simultaneously, we will provide 100 percent assurance on ready availability of any contract data from signed contracts that may be needed for regulatory reporting or, simply for making better business decisions.
