The patents cover contract pre-execution invention, which edits high-volume contracts.
BlackBoiler, an AI-based pre-execution contract company, announced it has been issued four patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for its AI-assisted review product. BlackBoiler’s patented technology dramatically reduces the amount of time that lawyers and other professionals spend reviewing and marking up documents such as NDAs, service agreements, and other high-volume contracts.
One of the approved patents, a “Method and System for Suggesting Revisions to an Electronic Document,” is a core component of BlackBoiler’s pre-execution technology for contract analysis. The technology suggests revisions to a document-under-analysis (DUA) and is part of a family of three patents as well as additional patent applications claiming this method. The approved patent covers BlackBoiler’s unique technology for automated revision of electronic documents, and specifically “for suggesting edits to an electronic document” in instances “where the suggested revisions are similar to past revisions of similar documents.” The patent application notes that embodiments of the invention “are suitable for a wide scope of applications.”
The USPTO also issued BlackBoiler a patent for “Systems, Methods, and Computer Program Products for a Clause Library.” BlackBoiler’s smart clause library houses and manages an organization’s standard negotiation clauses and organizes them by contract domain. The proprietary technology automatically adjusts the language in the standard clauses to match language in a document under review, saving time attorneys spend manually updating variable elements in standard clauses. The patented technology ensures consistency in contract language no matter who in the organization is conducting negotiations, and it enables insertion of clauses into an electronic document with a single click.
“These patents underscore the significance of BlackBoiler’s intellectual property around our proprietary technology, which creates client-specific editing models and leverages them to markup inbound contracts instantaneously in the Track Changes feature of Microsoft Word,” said Dan Broderick, co-founder and CEO of BlackBoiler. “We believe our technology has the potential to drastically reduce inefficiency in the contract review process within law departments and law firms, and to actually improve the way attorneys handle this type of work.”
Amongst Global 2000 and Fortune 1000 companies, BlackBoiler estimates that $35 billion is spent annually on high-volume contract review—$26 billion of which is spent on reviewing and marking up contract language that is semantically similar enough that most edits can be automated. In addition, an estimated $7 billion is spent on redundant work on pre-execution contract negotiation—work that has already been done on similar contracts.
“Challenges unique to contract negotiation have forced us to move beyond popular directions in natural language processing research and push the boundaries of what’s possible,” said Daniel Simonson, senior computational linguist and NLP research lead of BlackBoiler. “The approval of these patents vindicates our efforts, and would have been impossible without such a strong, multi-disciplinary team.”
About BlackBoiler
With offices in Washington D.C. and New York City, BlackBoiler is a National Science Foundation-backed software company focused on the automation of contract review. The company’s patented AI-assisted contract review tool is designed to work seamlessly with programs users already know how to use: Word and email. Through proprietary techniques, BlackBoiler creates client-specific editing models and leverages these models to markup inbound contracts instantaneously in the Track Changes feature of Microsoft Word. BlackBoiler grows smarter and increases efficiency of contract review with each additional use. For more information, go to https://www.blackboiler.com/.
Join the conversation!