Latest news with #Min-KyuJung
Techday NZ
3 days ago
- Business
- Techday NZ
Ivo launches AI tools to transform contract analysis & insight
Ivo has announced the launch of two AI-native products designed to automate contract analysis and streamline the extraction of insights from legal agreements. Legal teams have traditionally depended on contract lifecycle management (CLM) tools to store and manage agreements. However, extracting meaningful data from these systems often involved the manual review of large volumes of documents, with significant time and resource investment required. The latest offering from Ivo consists of Repository and Assistant, both powered by the company's proprietary AI Repository Engine (AiRE). The tools are positioned to provide visibility into organisation-wide contract portfolios and allow users to submit plain language queries to gain immediate access to relevant contract information. Product features Repository enables the creation of dashboards with custom AI-populated columns, presenting key business and legal insights rapidly. According to Ivo, the platform's AI is capable of clustering related documents, such as amendments linked to master agreements, and can assess the extent to which specific agreements diverge from established standard templates. The Assistant product offers the capability for both legal and business teams to query tens of thousands of contracts using natural language, retrieving comprehensive answers regardless of the contract file's storage location. The underlying AI can respond to detailed questions, for example, identifying all customer contracts with specific data security requirements, by understanding how each contract aligns or deviates from pre-determined standard positions. Min-Kyu Jung, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Ivo, commented on the current challenges experienced by legal teams using traditional CLMs. "CLMs were supposed to solve the problem of extracting true intelligence from contracts, but have overpromised and underdelivered. We're solving the knowledge problem. Legal teams don't need another static system of record. They need intelligence at their fingertips — contextual, instant, and deeply reliable." The new Ivo solutions are designed to integrate directly with widely used document management systems, including Google Drive and SharePoint, as well as on-premise solutions. The Assistant will also operate with Ivo's Microsoft Word add-in to provide negotiation recommendations based on insights from previous contracts. Market adoption and scope Following its Series A funding round earlier this year, Ivo has been utilised by over 200 legal teams, including those at Canva, Quora, and Eventbrite. The company reports these organisations have been able to reduce contract review time by up to 75% while maintaining accuracy. With the introduction of Repository and Assistant, Ivo identifies a move from contract review to a broader application it terms 'AI contract intelligence', stating its intention to make CLMs unnecessary without directly replacing them. The company emphasises that its platform is suitable for enterprise-scale deployments, handling extensive portfolios without manual metadata tagging or requiring bulk uploads. "What used to take hours of combing through contracts can now happen in a single sentence. This isn't just faster. It's foundationally smarter," Jung stated, detailing the impact of this approach on business operations. Ivo says the products have been deployed by early access customers in legal, procurement, sales, and operations sectors. The company claims that the technology enables contracts to be transformed from passive records into strategic assets capable of informing business decision-making across departmental boundaries. Industry shift The announcement positions Ivo within a broader industry transition, moving from software systems designed solely for record-keeping to those which support understanding and immediate action. The company cites increased contract complexity and volume as key drivers for the need for improved visibility, precision, and speed. According to Ivo, Repository and Assistant allow for every agreement to become instantly searchable, every risk to be visible, and every contract to serve as a strategic asset for the business. The company states it is working towards building the infrastructure required for this paradigm shift in contract management and analysis.
Forbes
3 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
How GenAI Is Driving The Future of Legaltech Start-Ups
Lawyers need new ways to interrogate thousands of contracts Technology start-ups targeting the legal profession continue to grow at speed. The global 'legaltech' market was worth $31.6 billion last year, according to analysis from Fortune Business Insights, and could be worth $63.6 billion by 2032. However, in one area of the legaltech market where technology might be expected to have a huge impact, there is a growing sense of disillusionment. Contract lifecycle management (CLM) software enables enterprise legal teams to automate and standardise at every stage of the contract process, from creating and reviewing new contracts to storing every single agreement the business enters into in a form that can be analysed for risk and enhanced performance. That sounds highly attractive – but research has warned that almost half of CLM implementations are falling short of expectations. Those disappointments have seen other companies steer clear of CLM software. A recent survey from legaltech start-up Zuva found the majority of businesses are instead sticking with traditional document management systems, storing and managing contracts with tools such as SharePoint and Google Drive, or simply leaving them on local drives around the enterprise. Min-Kyu Jung, co-founder and CEO of legaltech start-up Ivo, thinks this is a huge missed opportunity. Legal teams need tools that enable them to put the data in their contracts to work, he argues. If lawyers are able to easily search and compare all their contracts, they can, for example, identify standout risk exposures, easily create new contracts that align with the business's policies and priorities, and negotiate from a better-informed position. 'Legal teams need intelligence at their fingertips that is contextual, instant and deeply reliable,' says Jung. 'Every contract should be a strategic asset.' Companies such as Ivo and Zuva think legaltech solutions built with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) can resolve many of the problems that have dogged CLM software to data. Zuva's research points out that existing CLM products struggle to extract information and insight from contracts, and to understand the relationships between documents and the obligations they contain. Ivo's Jung makes a similar point. It is this week launching two new GenAI-based tools – Repository and Assistant – which aim to address these issues. He describes the launches as part of 'a growing shift in enterprise software from systems of record to systems of understanding'. Using GenAI, Ivo's tools enable legal teams to set up dashboards of their contracts, recording key insights, and to conduct natural language searches of contracts to find particular terms or features in potentially hundreds of thousands of documents. I first interviewed Ivo earlier this year, when the company unveiled a $16 million Series A funding round. Since then it has doubled its customer base, signing up around 100 legal teams – including the legal functions at prominent businesses including Lindt & Sprungli, Fonterra and Hootsuite – to its first product, a contract review tool. Jung hopes the launch of its new AI tools will accelerate its growth. 'We know many companies, right from the top of the business, are looking to all their functions to explore artificial intelligence tools that deliver value,' he says. 'We're also seeing a lot more sophistication from legal teams that have a much better understanding of the limitations of existing CLM software and a clear view of what they want from new solutions.' It is the advent of GenAI that is enabling legaltech providers to respond to this demand, Jung adds. 'I don't think the kind of products we're now launching would have been possible a year ago.' Indeed, research published last year by Innolaw found that while around 50% of CLM products used some form of AI to extract data, 'the use of GenAI in CLM software is still mostly hype-driven'. That is starting to change, with a new report from Gartner suggesting more than 70% of legal function leaders now intend to implement GenAI solutions within the next couple of years. It points to a growing number of legaltech firms offering these solutions – including ContractpodAI, GEP, Icertis, Ivalua, Luminance and Zycus in the natural language space.
