eBrevia Replaces Your Army of Doc Review Minions

I never did doc review, but it doesn’t sound like I missed out on much. As I understand it, some firms keep armies of junior associates around so that when a partner wants to see all the choice-of-law provisions related to a merger, the associates can stay up all night to give her the answer the next day.

Or you could just check a few boxes, click a few buttons, and get the answer immediately for a fraction of the cost. That’s what eBrevia does.

When you see it in action, it seems like a simple thing. After all, with OCR and a scanner, how hard is it to search a document? Well, a bit harder than you think, because of OCR errors and the likely possibility that you will miss something if you don’t read the whole thing. eBrevia accounts for OCR errors and uses pretty sophisticated machine learning to understand what sorts of provisions are relevant to, say, jurisdiction (they may not use the word jurisdiction, for example).

eBrevia founder Ned Gannon was hesitant to discuss the cost with me. That’s because they are still figuring it out. But, he said, the ballpark cost is around $12–30 per document. It depends on what you need (i.e., do you need eBrevia to add a new type of provision to its capabilities). But even at the top of that range, it’s almost certainly less than paying a junior associate to spend a half hour reading and summarizing the document for you.