Uhura Solutions
Contract: analytics/drafting/review
uhurasolutions.com
Contents
- What does it claim to do?
- Substantiation of claims & potential issues
- How might the end-user assess effectiveness?
- The creators
- Jurisdiction
What does it claim to do?
Uhura Solutions is a contract review platform with an emphasis on identifying particular kinds of clause in contractual documents.
Claimed essential features
- Extracts key clauses from contracts, including force majeure, jurisdiction, and notice termination.
- Provides metrics for reporting and risk assessment.
- Identifies missing clauses for use in developing litigation strategy.
Pattern detection in documents: e.g. “seek out force majeure clauses in contracts.” (Uhura solutions – Force Majeure; archived)
“Without AI, attorneys will have to spend valuable time simply finding the force majeure language, governing law, notice termination, and any other applicable clauses.” (Uhura solutions – Force Majeure; archived)
“Built-in metrics […] which provide real-time risk assessment reporting”. (Uhura solutions – Force Majeure; archived)
“The AI will scan documents to find out if a clause is lacking. It can filter out certain phrases or words within each clause. This allows companies to concentrate on simple-to-win scenarios, specifically where a clause acknowledges a pandemic or epidemic. If desired, companies can initiate an alternative or concurrent contract search to seek out force majeure clauses with vague phrasing (such as a suggestion of an act of God).” (Uhura Solutions; archived)
Claimed rationale and benefits
- Automate contract review to save time and cost.
- Provide insight into existing contracts.
“… offers automation capabilities to help reduce costs and shorten document processing time from hours to seconds. Lower your costs, save time, and eliminate manual processing of contracts and agreements.” (Uhura Solutions; archived)
“With AI, you can streamline the analysis and remove the burden of manual assessments.” (Uhura Solutions; archived)
“The AI algorithms turn contracts into data, providing unparalleled insights into existing contracts.” (Uhura Facebook page with video; archived)
Claimed design choices
- Uses “vision processing” and :natural language processing to analyse contracts.
- Training dataset is large enough to enable recognition and analysis of “virtually any contract type”.
“We use cutting-edge AI technologies such as vision processing to read contracts and :natural language processing to understand the meaning.” (Uhura Facebook page with video; archived).
“Our machine learning models have been trained on a large dataset so that virtually any contract type is automatically recognized and processed for analysis” (Demo video on Uhura solutions - Force Majeure; archived)
Substantiation of claims & potential issues
- Overreliance on the system might mean that relevant clauses are missed, with potential implications, for example, for assessment of contractual risk and thus legal effect.
Uhura Solutions does not provide blogs or articles with technical information about the contract analysis solution and its components. It does provide a short video with a demo on its website that showcases the solution.
Data
- Uhura Solutions is suitable for contract review and aims at “seek out force majeure clauses in contracts.”
- It does not specify whether it can do so in multiple languages or only in English.
System
- The uploaded documents are classified into three different “risk assessment categories”.
- The metric or training set for these assessments are not known.
Figure 1: Screen grab of video on How Force Majeure Contract Review works (Uhura solutions - Force Majeure; archived)
- The solution uses section titles and formatting to identify and extract relevant section and tags force majeure clauses and entities such as place names.
- The techniques used are not explicitly mentioned on the website, so it is impossible to evaluate how well the system does so.
Figure 2: Screen grab of video on How Force Majeure Contract Review works (Uhura solutions - Force Majeure; archived)
- The recognised clauses are given additional context by predefined answers from a knowledge base.
Figure 3: Screen grab of video on How Force Majeure Contract Review works (Uhura solutions - Force Majeure; archived)
- The solution offers a dashboard to give a structured overview of the document analyses.
Figure 4: Screen grab of video on How Force Majeure Contract Review works (Uhura solutions - Force Majeure; archived)
Rationale and benefits
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Uhura claims to “Lower your costs and save time: 95% faster processing time; 92% accuracy score; 85% costs reduction *KPIs measured in the user acceptance tests.” (Uhura Solutions webpage; archived). The evaluation dataset for these user acceptance tests is not available.
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“Uhura’s success is powered by in its dynamic AI platform. Its document-processing tech relies on two cutting-edge AI technologies to power its platform; image processing and :natural language processing.” (‘Real intelligence – the brainy tech that reads like a human’; archived)
Resources
- Blog post: ‘Real intelligence – the brainy tech that reads like a human’ (archived)
- Uhura Facebook page with video
How might the end-user assess effectiveness?
Homepage (archived): Free trial is available for the ‘community version’.
Top The creators
Created by
Legal tech company
Details
Uhura Solutions was founded in 2017 in Montenegro by CEO Djuro Stojanovic, alongside fellow founders Blazo Crvenica, Bojan Tesic, and Mladen Markovic. All the founders graduated with first class degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. They started in Montenegro, moved business to Tel Aviv and are now located in London (blogpost; archived).
Uhura has received support from Barclays through their accelerator program. For an account of Uhura’s cooperation with Barclays and their Accelerator programme see ‘Real intelligence – the brainy tech that reads like a human’ (30 June 2020) (blogpost; archived).
Uhura has also received funding from the UK government: (Uhura news item on 12 November 2020; archived). Also see Uhura webpage (archived): “Uhura Solutions has been awarded funding by Innovate UK’s Sustainable Innovation Fund: Uhura Solutions has been awarded funding by Innovate UK’s Sustainable Innovation Fund to develop its contract intelligence platform, which will help businesses to reduce their legal costs and risk exposure. The company is developing advanced AI-based technologies to automate, clarify, and drastically enhance business productivity in relation to legal matters.”
Top Jurisdiction
Background of developers
All the founders are from Montenegro.
Target jurisdiction
Not specified. As of yet only available for contracts rendered in English language.
Target legal domains
At the time of writing Uhura Solutions is focused on (Consumer) contracts across domains (specifically geared towards force majeure clauses).
Top