Natural Home for Artificial Intelligence
Berkeley Law students help lawyers streamline contract review
Like all merger and acquisition lawyers, Wei Chen spent years on due diligence patrol — mining thousands of contract pages to find the few clauses needed for legal analysis.
“The process hasn’t evolved since I started practicing more than 20 years ago: It’s time-consuming, mind-numbing, and prone to errors,” she laments.
With the success of artificial intelligence (AI), she asked herself: “If my iPhone can find cat pictures from my photo albums, why can’t AI find the most favored nation or exclusivity clauses in my piles of contracts?”
Chen, a senior vice president and associate general counsel at Salesforce, wondered how to get lawyers to tag contracts and make them publicly available for free. She brainstormed with Adam Sterling ’13, executive director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Business, where she serves on the advisory board.
Sterling promptly connected her with a dozen eager Berkeley Law students in summer 2020, fueling an experimental pilot program that launched The Atticus Project — a nonprofit that harnesses AI’s power to accelerate accurate and efficient contract review.
Under attorney supervision, the students released a beta dataset of 200 commercial contracts last October. Sterling then introduced Chen to two UC Berkeley AI researchers, leading to a March dataset with over 13,000 clauses across 510 commercial contracts corresponding to 40 clause types.
“We hope this dataset will be a catalyst for legal AI innovations and move the industry forward for all,” Chen says.
Berkeley Law is helping The Atticus Project launch two programs. The first enables experienced lawyers to design a project to solve data-related legal challenges, create training programs, teach at participating law schools, and mentor law students. The second helps law students and non-legal professionals to learn vital legal clauses and find them in legal documents.
The Atticus Project has trained over 60 law students and 15 high school students on contract review skills and AI knowledge. With learning reinforced by self-graded quizzes, a 200-plus page handbook, and work product review, students identify key concepts in contracts and tag them using an online tool.
“I had previously only heard ‘artificial intelligence’ and ‘machine learning’ as buzzwordy terms used to describe a dystopian future of work,” says Chris Gronseth ’22. “I was excited to get hands-on experience in learning more about what AI really entails and how it might be a positive and useful tool in legal work.”
Chen sees a huge divide between AI’s performance in law and medicine, where skilled labor is scarce, versus areas where training datasets are abundant or cheap to obtain, like image recognition or Wikipedia.
She says, “Unless the legal industry catches up quickly, it will continue to live in the Stone Age while other areas take off.” —Andrew Cohen