Using AI to Analyze Contracts (an Interview With the Guy that Wrote the Book – Noah Waisberg, CEO Zuva)

Noah Waisberg literally wrote the book on Lawyers and Artificial Intelligence. Now he is building his second company that offers AI to analyze contracts.

As many do, Noah went to a top notch law school and then to BigLaw. He ended up doing deal work at the firm and had to review of ton of contracts.

What Noah learned is that even moderately sized companies have a ton of contracts, but because lawyers are expensive, to get a deal done, they would review only the most important contracts. This often left an incomplete picture of the liabilities and risks a company might be taking on by buying another.

This got Noah thinking. After taking some off from the legal grind, he and a co-founder launched Kira Systems to build an artificial intelligence tool that would help lawyers analyze contracts. If it worked, Noah figured, the AI would give the lawyers a head start permitting them to review more contracts with the same amount of work they were putting in without AI. Because more contracts could be reviewed, companies involved in M&A deals could have a better picture of the risks and liabilities in a deal.

Kira’s AI did work, and in fact, was a smashing success. Last year, another legal tech company, Litera, bought it.

Before the Litera acquisition, Kira started working on a tool that would help in-house legal teams use AI to analyze contracts to help out with contract management. After the Litera deal, this project became a new company that Noah now runs, Zuva. Zuva’s technology permits users to embed AI into into their own applications via APIs to extract information from their contracts.

In this episode, Noah explains how he and his team grew Kira systems and why he is excited to do the same with Zuva.