Announcements
Nagashima Ohno & Tsunematsu (“NO&T”) has agreed with PKSHA Technology Inc. (“PKSHA”) to collaborate in the field of LegalTech through a capital and business alliance with MNTSQ, Ltd (“MNTSQ”), which is a LegalTech start-up company and an affiliate of PKSHA.
PKSHA and NO&T have agreed to collaborate through MNTSQ with the goal of transforming corporate legal practices using natural language processing technologies. MNTSQ is a spin-out of BEDORE Inc. (“BEDORE”), a subsidiary of PKSHA focused on implementation of natural language processing technologies. In recent years PKSHA has invested in MNTSQ and promoted technical cooperation in the field of natural language processing through BEDORE. NO&T will now enter into a business alliance with MNTSQ, and invest a total of approximately 800 million yen in MNTSQ over the next several years through an affiliated corporation. Combining the high-quality legal capabilities of NO&T with the natural language processing and deep learning technologies of PKSHA/BEDORE has the potential to revolutionize the practices of law firms and corporate legal functions in Japan.
In recent years, natural language processing has been developing rapidly, and is now sometimes used overseas for contract analysis. After two years of confidential preparation, in February 2019 MNTSQ began a closed pilot project at NO&T focused on Japanese language and using natural language processing software. MNTSQ products are already used in NO&T’s legal due diligence activities. MNTSQ’s machine learning technology is already capable of analyzing the text of contracts in order to automatically produce summaries of basic terms and detect certain clauses that pose significant risks or are likely to require careful review by lawyers. This helps double-check and refine the work product of law firms and also reduces the time spent by lawyers and staff.
With this background, NO&T believes that MNTSQ’s technology could have a broad impact not only on the services provided by law firms, but also on corporate legal functions within companies, and therefore NO&T decided to fully support MNTSQ in providing services directly to businesses, including supporting MNTSQ by providing NO&T’s legal input on content to be provided by MNTSQ. PKSHA/BEDORE will also partner with NO&T to accelerate technical assistance to MNTSQ in order to apply machine-learning algorithms to the legal domain. With the help of NO&T and PKSHA/BEDORE, MNTSQ is committed to using natural language processing technology to develop the highest quality LegalTech products and services for law firms and corporate legal functions in Japan.
For more details, please refer to the joint press release (PDF: 355KB) by PKSHA and NO&T.
Nagashima Ohno & Tsunematsu
LegalTech_Contact@noandt.com