Two legal companies that are leaders in document and contracts technology, Zuva and Litera, revealed today that they have developed a multi-level document classification taxonomy for use by legal professionals and companies, and that they have contributed the taxonomy to the SALI Alliance, a group working to standardize legal data, to make it available on an open-source basis.

In addition, the document classifier they developed, which includes 225 document classifications, is available immediately through Zuva’s API offering.

Zuva is the company that was spun out from the pioneering AI contract analysis company Kira when Litera, a global legal technology company, acquired Kira in 2021. It offers contract analysis AI through an embeddable API, enabling law firms, corporations and others to implement contracts AI within their own applications.

Noah Waisberg, CEO of Zuva and the original cofounder and CEO of Kira, told me that the development of this classification is the culmination of an effort that began at Kira in 2014. When Litera acquired Kira, Litera and Zuva agreed to continue developing the classification jointly.

The decision to open source the taxonomy, he said, was driven by the fact that law firms and corporations today are often using multiple systems for contract analysis and document management, but with divergent taxonomies, resulting in systems that have no standardization or interoperability.

Related: LawNext Podcast: Damien Riehl on the SALI Alliance and Setting Data Standards for the Legal Industry.

For that reason, they wanted to make their taxonomy available for anyone to use by contributing it to SALI. In a statement, the companies explained:

“In the new era of AI-driven legal technology, document classification and data standardization are more crucial than ever. Document management systems at law firms and corporations can contain millions of documents. This is where automatic classification comes in. By correctly and granularly identifying document type, users can more easily find documents they need. Not only that, but documents can be automatically routed to the right place for further review.”

Available Today within Zuva

Waisberg said Zuva is offering the classifier to its customers effective today. He said that Litera will add it to Kira at a later time.

“Our document type taxonomy is likely to be more comprehensive than that of many other vendors, and while keeping it to ourselves could create a competitive advantage for Zuva, we think our customers are a lot better off if others use our taxonomy too, or if competitor systems’ taxonomies can be translated to ours,” Waisberg said.

Waisberg said the classifications could be particularly useful to law firms and corporations in helping them bring order to their document management systems.

“If you’re a firm, especially a larger firm, and you’re trying to bring some order to your documents, or you’re a company, and you’re trying to bring a level of order to your document management system, understanding the document type is a useful thing that can make your search richer,” Waisberg said.

But even with a classification system, getting the documents classified can be a challenge. Some firms try to do it manually at the document-creation level, but find it difficult to get lawyers and others to do the tagging. Another option is to have review teams do the tagging, but that can be expensive for a large volume of documents.

The better option is to use technology to automate the tagging, he said. However, until now, few systems were able to classify documents beyond 25 or so document types. His former company, Kira, was able to identify 25 types out of the box.

Now, by using Zuva’s API and this new classification taxonomy, the classification can be done automatically within a DMS or other system, and at a more granular level than was previously possible.

Making It Open Source

Because the taxonomy took years of effort to build and refine, Waisberg said, he wanted to contribute it to SALI so that it would be available to the public.

“It took us a lot of work to do it, and we think it’s a very good taxonomy. But if we give it to SALI, then — even though that sort of advantages competitors who might also feel like building a document classification taxonomy — it also means that everybody’s using the same thing as ours, so ours is interoperable with other systems.”

Waisberg said he likes to think of the classifications as a cake recipe and his product, Zuva, as the cake. “If you want the recipe, we’re making it freely available. Then, if you’d like to buy the cake, we also sell the cake,” with the cake being the document classifications working within Zuva.

Another advantage of making the classification open source is that it gives customers choice, Waisberg said. If a customer decided to switch off Zuva and go to a competing product that also uses the taxonomy, then it would be easy to switch.

Toby Brown, president of the board of The SALI Alliance, said in a statement that legal data standards are critical for optimizing efficiency and nurturing global collaborations. “Zuva and Litera’s contribution is an exciting addition to the standards we’ve established, further paving the way for vast opportunities across the legal spectrum.”

Damien Riehl, a key member of the SALI leadership team, said that SALI’s classification scheme is particularly important in helping legal professionals safely use generative AI in legal contexts.

“For large language models (LLMs), an important method of increasing accuracy and reducing hallucinations is retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and SALI’s 13,000-plus tags can helpfully curate that document subset — for LLMs to summarize, analyze, and synthesize.”

It has been nearly a year and a half since Sheryl Hoskins joined Litera as its new CEO in April 2022. She came into that role following a period in which the company saw significant growth, fueled in part by a series of some 17 acquisitions, through which the company expanded from a primary focus on document technology into such areas as contract review, transaction management, firm intelligence, talent management, governance, and more.

Since then, she has continued to drive further growth, most recently laying out an ambitious strategy around generative AI that will bring a series of product releases and enhancements over the coming months. Today, Litera is a company with more than 2.3 million global users, nearly 1,000 global employees, and 15,000 global customers, including 99 of the Am Law 100 and 90% of the largest law firms worldwide.

Before coming to Litera, Hoskins had more than 20 years of experience in the global technology industry and an established track record managing global teams. She spent the first decade of her career at General Electric and McKesson Corp, where she held domestic and international leadership roles. Most recently, she was CEO of restaurant management platform Upserve. She also spent six years as an active-duty officer in the U.S. Army.

In her first-ever appearance on a podcast, Hoskins joins me to discuss her career, her decision to join Litera, the state of the company today, and her vision for its future.

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When it was founded in 2011, Kira pioneered the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning for contract review and analysis. Now Kira, which was acquired in 2021 by Litera, is employing the newest wave of generative AI to help legal professionals accelerate the process of due diligence and other forms of contract reviews.

Litera today is announcing the imminent launch of Smart Summaries, a new feature within Kira that uses generative AI to help legal teams synthesize the content that Kira uncovers in contracts and other documents, producing summaries they can then use in delivering recommendations and strategic advice to their clients.

“What’s really exciting about it is that it’s building on the power that already exists in Kira,” Meredith Johnson, Litera’s chief product officer, told me during a briefing on Friday.

Click the Generate button to create the summary.

Kira’s machine learning model already has over 1,400 so-called smart fields addressing more than 40 substantive areas. Based on these smart fields, Kira’s technology identifies and extracts common clauses and data points from contracts and other documents.

This new Smart Summaries capability uses generative AI to synthesize and create summaries of Kira’s smart fields, to help lawyers more quickly complete their analysis of a due diligence review.

The summary appears in the worksheet tab.

“We’re leaning into that smart fields functionality that already exists in Kira and then layering on top of it a generative AI workflow that allows for users to click that generate button and make those automatic summaries,” Johnson said.

The Smart Summaries capability has been developed using the Microsoft Azure OpenAI service.

Litera is targeting the last week of August for the release of Smart Summaries and will be demonstrating the feature next week at ILTACON.

First Of Several AI Products

Johnson said this is just the first of a series of new generative AI capabilities Litera will bring to market over the coming months, as part of the company’s amplified focus on and investment in generative AI technology.

Each month for the rest of this year and into next year, she said, Litera will be releasing more capabilities and enhancements, in Kira and in other Litera products, including its drafting suite and its Foundation law firm intelligence product.

Litera has formed an internal generative AI incubator with the mission of helping the company bring quality, tested, sustainable generative AI features and products to market over the coming months. The incubator is led by Greg Coates, vice president, generative AI, at Litera; Brett Balmer, cofounder of Foundation, which Litera acquired in 2021; and Haley Altman, former global head of corporate development at Litera and, before that, founder of Doxly, which Litera acquired in 2019.

“We’ve focused on two critical areas,” Johnson said of the incubator. “One, making sure that we have the best talent to shape the tools and the product roadmaps that we want to bring to our customers. And then, of course, working really closely with leading firms all over the globe to make sure that we’re designing purposeful and meaningful solutions that avoid the hype that might be out there in the market.”

For those attending ILTACON next week, Litera CEO Sheryl Hoskins will present a session on Aug. 22 at 3:30 p.m. where she will discuss Litera’s AI strategy in more detail.

Read more about Kira in the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.

Legal technology company Litera today officially announced its acquisition of Upper Sigma, a London-based CRM and marketing platform for law firms that is built on the Salesforce CRM platform.

Litera says that by integrating Upper Sigma with the firm intelligence platform Foundation, which it acquired in 2021, it will be able to offer the only business development technology in the legal market that combines best-in-class experience management with robust CRM capabilities.

“This powerful pairing will provide seamless insight at the intersection of relationship intelligence and experience, allowing firms to respond to RFP’s and track client data, internal experience data, firm performance, and management all under one umbrella,” Litera says.

Although Litera is formally announcing the acquisition today, the acquisition took place in January and was previously reported by Legal IT Insider in February.

Already since January, several global 50 law firms have switched to using Upper Sigma, Litera says.

According to Litera, key features of Upper Sigma include:

• Ability to provide full insights into clients’ and lawyers’ relationships and activities.
• A proven track record of successful implementations for large firms.
• Enterprise-level security and scalability and pre-built integrations on Salesforce, the world’s leading CRM platform

Litera says its acquisition of Upper Sigma is a “decisive move” to quickly expand its marketing and business development tech stack.

“In today’s shifting economy, top-performing firms must prioritize business development and client engagement strategies,” said Litera CEO Sheryl D. Hoskins. “Law firms that embrace technology and data analytics are more likely to succeed in a competitive legal landscape.

“We believe Upper Sigma’s CRM will be a key tool in helping Litera’s customers grow their business while providing superior client experiences.”

Upper Sigma was founded in 2020 by Emile Van Den Berg and Kyle Alexander, both of whom had previously worked for the South Africa-based Salesforce tech consultancy CloudSmiths.