Team

Applying software engineering techniques to legal drafting

Yohei Fujii, an experienced engineer, met Hiroshi Watanabe, an attorney studying at Stanford, while studying at MIT. Yohei and Hiroshi, both interested in startups, began brainstorming twice a week for 2-3 hours about what they would do if they were to start a business.

Endless scrolling and search in contracts reviews

One day, Yohei happened to see Hiroshi drafting a legal document.

Yohei said, "Why are you scrolling and searching so much? You spend most of your time scrolling and searching."

Hiroshi "Legal documents have defined terms, and definitions can be found somewhere in this file . But I don't know where it is, so I'm searching for it. And then there are documents that have a lot of references, but there is often no table of contents, so you have to scroll through it.

When we measured the time it took to read just two lines of the article with a stopwatch, it actually took more than 10 minutes. The majority of the time was spent scrolling to other clauses or searching for keywords.

There was already a solution in software engineering

Yohei comes from a software engineering background. When programming, he uses a programming editor (IDE) such as Visual Studio, VS Code, Intelli J, etc. Knowing that programming editors solve the scrolling/searching problem well, Yohei showed Hiroshi the programming editor and explained it to him.

Yohei "In the software engineering world, the scrolling/searching problem is solved."

Hiroshi "That's great. If we could apply this to legal documents, wouldn't that dramatically improve efficiency?"

Realizing the sensitive nature of legal documents and the penetration rate of MS Word, Hiroshi and Yohei took the approach of upgrading MS Word rather than creating their own document editor software.

>100 interviews conducted, >100 issues listed

After a rough draft of the idea was completed, a list of issues for further legal document review was made. We wrote down inefficiencies that were pointed out to us by the awareness of issues that Hiroshi had accumulated while working as a lawyer and by Yohei, a software engineer who is a professional in efficiency improvement with no legal knowledge, from his viewpoint.

The number of inefficiencies reached more than 100. After more than 100 user interviews, we evaluated and extracted items from the list of issues that were particularly painful for those who handle legal documents.

After about a year, the quality of the product was sufficiently high to launch it as a commercial product. Now, two years after its launch, the product has been adopted by almost all large and medium-sized law firms in Japan, as well as the legal departments of many large and medium-sized companies, almost exclusively by word of mouth, without any extensive advertising.