Outsourcing is a game-changer for most corporate legal departments—especially when it comes to managed document review services. On any given day, an attorney in a corporate legal department can receive thousands of pages to review. It is impractical to think that a single attorney could efficiently review such an enormous quantity of complex text. Third-party service providers recognized this market opportunity and created a niche service to review contracts on behalf of those attorneys.

Initially, managed review services helped to streamline contract processes and procedures by providing a large, off-shore legal team that operated at a lower price point. Recently, artificial intelligence (AI) and other data parsing innovations have enabled legal departments to automate the entire contract negotiation process and reduce the dependency on outsourced attorneys. As a result, managed document review services that utilize an AI Digital Playbook can help legal departments cut costs, save time, and better allocate resources.  

Managed Document Review Services: Uses and Benefits 

Managed document review services represents a popular segment of legal outsourcing because it allows corporate attorneys to focus on more strategically important or complex agreements. When applied to the administration of agreements, managed document review naturally attends to bulk contract management.  

While managed document review can apply to various legal services, bulk contract management focuses on corporate legal departments and the contract negotiation process. Technologies leveraged for this kind of managed review have been specifically optimized for the contract negotiation process.   

Technology and Methodologies Used in Bulk Contract Management 

Bulk contract management would not be possible without innovations in managed review that harness the power of machine learning and other advanced technologies. Outlined below are some of the powerful technological features shared among the best AI tools for legal operations:

• Modeling: This process organizes data into a database to help the program understand its purpose and priority. The method is employed to interpret large swaths of organizational data that can guide decision making. 
• Machine learning: The ability to teach a computer to differentiate between essential and inessential information is the core of managed review. As a single person cannot read every document, the program must learn what is important to the user and return it in a consolidated format.  
• Predictive analytics: Past behavior often indicates future outcomes. The computer can understand cause and effect scenarios using machine learning and leverage that information to guide decisions. The system prioritizes the most successful elements of past scenarios to optimize outcomes. 
• Natural language processing: This subfield closes the gap between how humans communicate and how machines understand those communications. It builds a context that enables the program to "think" like a human. 

By combining these discrete technologies, the right managed document review service—an AI-powered contract negotiation platform that thinks like a lawyer—is capable of reviewing thousands of pages in minutes to deliver mark-up and negotiation on par with the top attorneys in a legal department.