If someone asked you to name a thing that affected everyone globally, what would you answer?

There is a high probability that your response would be the COVID-19 pandemic that still haunts the world. 

On a positive note, based on preliminary findings, a vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech showed 90% effectiveness in preventing the coronavirus. The pandemic may (hopefully) disappear soon, but the effects that the disorder related to it created for businesses will be hard to forget.

Today, we will look at the pandemic chaos from a different, less discussed but equally important perspective – keeping track of force majeure clauses – and will also discuss the ways in which Artificial Intelligence deals with the problem.

What is force majeure?

The force majeure clause is a part of the contract that frees the included parties from responsibilities and obligations in the case of certain events listed in the text, such as earthquake, war, hurricane, or pandemic.

Such clauses can be found in various documents such as association agreements, property and equipment lease, employment contract, etc. and it is important for companies as it serves as a temporary relief in unforeseen circumstances.

COVID-19 and force majeure

The coronavirus is arguably the single most damaging force majeure situation to hit the entire world, causing companies to tragically cancel projects, postpone events, and in some cases even close businesses.

As the pandemic affected all sectors and made it impossible for obligations to be fulfilled, lawyers and company representatives are being bombarded with tasks of reviewing all contracts to identify force majeure clauses.

Reviewing these documents, especially when it comes to a large company, is not only time-consuming, but sometimes even impossible, as some organizations have thousands of contracts with force majeure clauses in different places and different wording in each document.

Where can AI help? 

Some might speculate that Artificial Intelligence was created to conquer the world but the real motivation behind this is not that thrilling since the main reason for AI development is to make people’s lives more efficient and simple.

And AI is exactly what solves the challenging situation mentioned above with a smarter solution that searches and finds the force majeure clauses in just a matter of seconds, an operation that would take normal person hours or even days.

How exactly can AI do that? Well, with the help of deep learning, computer vision, and optical character recognition (OCR), AI can easily understand your digital documents and almost instantly identify relevant and necessary information within the file, in this case, force majeure clauses.

Companies can set search parameters and artificial intelligence models will analyze contracts to determine if they contain force majeure clauses and if there is a specific reference to an epidemic. 

The models are so intelligent that even in case of no texts directly related to an epidemic, it can also search for phrases inside the contract that discuss situations outside the control of the parties that may also apply to the pandemic. 

All of this text is highlighted so that human experts can review the information and decide what the next steps may be according to the contract. 

Thanks to the AI solution companies can: 

• Perform the search more quickly and accurately 
• Find relevant and useful information even if force majeure clauses are not included in a contract

Companies can now use AI technology not just for saving time and labor costs but also especially for matters that require human expertise such as identifying key information, locating missing clauses, highlighting the relevant passages, etc.

A real-life example

As one of our projects, we created a product, ExtractHD, that eliminates the tedious work of manual data extraction and instead automates it so that people can obtain the necessary information from digital documents in a matter of seconds, without problems.

At the core of this solution is computer vision and OCR, technologies that can also help companies quickly identify force majeure clauses, as we mentioned earlier.

No, AI is not taking over the world (yet). In fact, it can help people even in the most challenging situations, for example, COVID-19.

As much as we can hope that force majeure situations will not happen again, as the coronavirus situation demonstrated, we cannot ignore the importance of being prepared for them. Such disorder can cause many companies to go bankrupt or fail in fulfilling their contractual obligations. Luckily, AI offers a solution for this problem and it can help even with such complicated cases.

If your organization wants to save time and money by quickly finding force majeure clauses or automating text extraction and analysis, our experts would love to explore it further with a free consultation.

One of the main goals of Artificial Intelligence has always been to simplify human life by handling repetitive tasks and freeing up our time to focus on more meaningful projects.

Lawyers know more than anyone how important and crucial time management is in legal practice. This great importance has motivated legal professionals to seek innovative solutions that help them better manage their time.

That is why an increasing number of law firms began to pay attention to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) solutions. A recent study found that attorneys using artificial intelligence were able to complete their legal research 24.5% faster than those who stuck to traditional research.

Nowadays, technology is playing a crucial role in the day to day operations of law firms like administrative tasks such as communicating with clients and organizing firm files.

AI systems learn from the examples given to them. Names, dates, numbers and other kinds of legal information are fed to a computer that then learns how to process this data into useful insights that can help lawyers in their work.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the ways AI can simplify and improve legal operations at law firms.

Contract review 

AI is the best solution to eliminate routine tasks like reviewing contracts. With the ability of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Deep learning, legal firms can let the AI-powered system to pre-work the contract before the professionals do the final revision. 

This process cuts your expenses and also speeds up the process as your staff will have more time to focus on more important tasks. It is also important to note that speeding up this process through automation does not mean less quality work, on the contrary, AI-powered systems are highly precise. 

45% of lawyers using Artificial Intelligence tools noted that the system was able to find details that would have been lost in the case of a traditional research.

Contract management

Lawyers know the real struggle of managing and maintaining contracts. The AI-powered system not only stores contracts securely, it makes access to information smooth and fast. 

Attorneys won’t have to manually go through stacks of papers to find contract termination dates or other vital information. Instead, Artificial Intelligence software can review your documents in minutes, track all necessary data, and store it in a way that makes information retrieval as quick as possible.

Force majeure clauses

2020 showed us the real value behind the saying “Hope for the best and prepare for the worst”. Unfortunately, the case was that many companies and businesses were unprepared for the pandemic situation which, apart from the obvious problems, created additional legal headaches.

When the pandemic began, lawyers had to review mountains of contracts and documents that included force majeure clauses. 

The real problem was the fact that these clauses are located on different pages, which means that they had to manually go through the pages and identify the exact places by mentioning force majeure.

However, those who used AI solutions were able to quickly identify not only texts that directly refer to force majeure, but also those that indirectly discuss situations that would apply to the pandemic.

Predicting the outcome 

There are a large number of court records available to the public. Thus, data on trials, verdicts, and case details can be extracted and fed to Machine Learning algorithms. What does this give you?

Based on historical data, Artificial Intelligence can predict certain outcomes. Therefore, when analyzing similar cases and verdicts, AI can cross-reference your current case and give your probability of winning the case. Similar AI technology was used and was able to predict the decisions of the European court of human rights with 75% accuracy.

Conclusion 

As we mentioned earlier, machine learning and artificial intelligence are already tackling important tasks like predicting case outcomes, reviewing and managing contracts; However, as technology advances and the data available from previous legal cases increases, we will undoubtedly see more innovative ways to use artificial intelligence in the legal sector.

It is important to keep in mind that what we have today is just a glimpse of how AI systems will radically change the way lawyers handle their cases.

Why not schedule a free consultation call with our artificial intelligence experts and see how MaxinAI’s custom solutions can make your law firm better, faster and stronger?