{"id":6502,"date":"2016-04-28T06:00:59","date_gmt":"2016-04-28T13:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/editor.thinkapps.com\/blog\/?p=6502"},"modified":"2016-05-12T14:03:34","modified_gmt":"2016-05-12T21:03:34","slug":"machine-intelligence-beagle-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thinkapps.com\/blog\/development\/machine-intelligence-beagle-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"How Beagle Brings Machine Intelligence to Legal Tech [Interview]"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>This is\u00a0a new interview series on\u00a0<em><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a title=\"ThinkApps posts on machine intelligence\" href=\"http:\/\/thinkapps.com\/blog\/tag\/machine-intelligence\/\" target=\"_blank\">machine intelligence companies<\/a><\/span><\/em>. First up is <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a title=\"Beagle\" href=\"http:\/\/beagle.ai\/\" target=\"_blank\">Beagle<\/a><\/span>, which uses\u00a0machine learning to help non-lawyers navigate complex contracts.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Few things are more daunting than legal documents. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Who has the time to research and try to understand all the technical terms, linguistic complications, and mind-numbing legalese? Or the money to pay someone to deal with all those things every time they have to work with a contract? <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Many people don\u2019t have either, and so they end up agreeing to terms that they never even knew about.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27114318\/Contracts2.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6547\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1440\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-6547\" src=\"http:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27114318\/Contracts2.png\" alt=\"Machine Intelligence Beagle: Complex Contracts\" srcset=\"https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27114318\/Contracts2.png 2560w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27114318\/Contracts2.png 300w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27114318\/Contracts2.png 768w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27114318\/Contracts2.png 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a title=\"Beagle\" href=\"http:\/\/beagle.ai\/\" target=\"_blank\">Beagle<\/a> was founded to help those people. It automatically scans contracts, identifies some of the most important parts, and categorizes everything to make it easily searchable. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Since its founding, the company has been named <a title=\"Canadian Innovation Exchange Showcase\" href=\"http:\/\/www.canadianinnovationexchange.com\/top-20\/2015-top-20\/\" target=\"_blank\">one of the most innovative Canadian startups<\/a>, been <a title=\"2016 SXSW Accelerator Finalists\" href=\"http:\/\/www.sxsw.com\/interactive\/accelerator-2016-finalists\" target=\"_blank\">featured at SXSW<\/a>, and participated in the <a title=\"Microsoft Ventures Accelerator\" href=\"https:\/\/www.microsoftventures.com\/locations\/accelerators\" target=\"_blank\">Microsoft Ventures Accelerator<\/a>, making it the <a title=\"Fast Company coverage of Microsoft Ventures Accelerator\" href=\"http:\/\/www.fastcompany.com\/3043791\/revolutionizing-work\/ahead-of-the-pack\" target=\"_blank\">first Canadian-based startup to do so<\/a>. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>ThinkApps recently interviewed <a title=\"Cian O'Sullivan\" href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/cianos\" target=\"_blank\">Cian O&#8217;Sullivan<\/a>, the founder and \u201ctop dog\u201d at Beagle, to talk about how the company\u00a0uses machine learning to continually improve its users\u2019 experiences.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>[Editor&#8217;s note: The interview questions and responses below have been edited for clarity and length.]<\/em><\/p>\n<h2>What&#8217;s\u00a0your role at Beagle? What does that position entail?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I am the founder, the creator of the concept of Beagle. The title I gave myself is &#8220;Top Dog.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My day is eclectic. <strong>The way I would describe being the CEO of a startup is that you have 10,000 balls in the air at any given time, and six of them aren\u2019t allowed to drop, but you can only catch three.<\/strong> It\u2019s a constant juggling act. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I spend my day moving the needle on strategies and making sure we are investing our time in the right way. When you are a small startup, you move ahead in about 20 different ways all at the same time, but everything has to be moving in the same direction.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2>What did you do prior to Beagle?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did a lot of self-taught computer things, and I ended up being a network engineer. Then I went to law school, and I tried to bridge my IT skills with my legal training. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I took my New York state bar exam and realized pretty quickly that I didn\u2019t want to be a lawyer. But I ended up doing a lot of work with contracts \u2014 on everything from mergers and acquisitions to contract negotiations \u2014 and whenever people found out I did that, they\u2019d end up asking me for help with their own contracts. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One weekend, a friend asked me to look at a contract that his company had to evaluate by the following Monday. It ended up being a $15 million project. So while I was kind of cursing and swearing at him under my breath, I decided I should look at this problem in a different way, and the concept of a \u201cquick look\u201d really hit me. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If you give 10 lawyers the same contract for 10 minutes and ask them to highlight the most important parts, they\u2019ll all come up with the same thing. So I decided to automate the task, to give people an idea of what a contract says without them having to worry too much about it or to ruin their friend\u2019s weekend by asking them to take a look at it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27143717\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-27-at-2.13.12-PM.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6560\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1355\" height=\"588\" class=\"extended alignnone wp-image-6560 size-full\" src=\"http:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27143717\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-27-at-2.13.12-PM.png\" alt=\"Machine Intelligence Beagle: What Is Beagle?\" srcset=\"https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27143717\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-27-at-2.13.12-PM.png 1355w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27143717\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-27-at-2.13.12-PM.png 300w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27143717\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-27-at-2.13.12-PM.png 768w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27143717\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-27-at-2.13.12-PM.png 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1355px) 100vw, 1355px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<h2>How did you teach Beagle to understand legalese?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Depending on the way you look at it, this looks like it could be unachievable. Like, there\u2019s no possible way this could be handled. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The way we do it is, we say, let\u2019s take the concept of a contract and break it into categories of interest. When you think about it, the most important things you want to know about a contract are: who\u2019s it between, who\u2019s responsible for what, how can you get out of it, and who\u2019s on the hook if things go wrong? <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Now depending on the agreement type, you are going to need to know certain types of other information. So we pull out the things that are applicable to a particular category. That\u2019s first. And if we do that, we give people 80 percent of the information they want. But where do they get the other 20 percent? <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We have a tool in our system that is able to categorize things and allow you to search for things within those categories. Once you have that, the system now starts to learn. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It says, okay, I have enough information to be able to start to learn what you\u2019re looking for individually, and as I start to see a pattern in that, I will know to search for that stuff for you. This is where the machine learning comes in, and it\u2019s so transparent that the user doesn\u2019t even realize that it\u2019s happening.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27143713\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-27-at-2.15.22-PM.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6558\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1222\" height=\"445\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-6558\" src=\"http:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27143713\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-27-at-2.15.22-PM.png\" alt=\"Machine Intelligence Beagle: How Beagle Works\" srcset=\"https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27143713\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-27-at-2.15.22-PM.png 1222w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27143713\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-27-at-2.15.22-PM.png 300w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27143713\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-27-at-2.15.22-PM.png 768w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27143713\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-27-at-2.15.22-PM.png 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1222px) 100vw, 1222px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<h2>How and what does Beagle learn? At what rate does it continue to improve?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Most people are gonna get the benefit of the prime system that we provide. The 80 percent. It\u2019s up to the user to get the other 20 percent in whatever creative way they want. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A lot of users just worry about the 80 percent; they don\u2019t try to train it themselves. But we can get results with just eight samples of data. So if they had eight clauses in one particular contract that actually met certain criteria, our system would look at that and see if it can compute with a reasonable probability the chance of detecting that going forward. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>What\u2019s interesting about machine learning is that as the system gets smarter, it doesn\u2019t always look like it\u2019s getting smarter to the average user.<\/strong> <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Say a user finds 10 items. When they upload a new contract, Beagle identifies clauses it thinks falls into one of those categories. The user can then say yes, that\u2019s right, or no, it\u2019s not. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If they say no, that actually might be enough important information for Beagle to realize that the way it had done its original calculations needs to be completely restructured. So now the accuracy rate might go down a little bit while it tries to learn where these new boundaries are. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You\u2019re always saying yes it\u2019s right, or no it\u2019s not \u2026 it\u2019s not a huge battle, but we treat it like one. And people don\u2019t even realize they\u2019re training Beagle in real-time.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27122410\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-26-at-7.57.22-PM.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6550\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1377\" height=\"837\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-6550\" src=\"http:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27122410\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-26-at-7.57.22-PM.png\" alt=\"Machine Intelligence Beagle: Beagle Product in Action\" srcset=\"https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27122410\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-26-at-7.57.22-PM.png 1377w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27122410\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-26-at-7.57.22-PM.png 300w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27122410\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-26-at-7.57.22-PM.png 768w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27122410\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-26-at-7.57.22-PM.png 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1377px) 100vw, 1377px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<h2>Have customers been wary of\u00a0trusting an AI to handle contracts that deeply affect their lives?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">They certainly have. There\u2019s a lot of pushback. And the number one reason why there\u2019s pushback is that they don\u2019t know something like this exists in the first place, and they don\u2019t want to change the way they\u2019re doing things because their old system works. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If we look at the way the vast majority of companies handle their contracts currently, they will agree, there have been times when they signed an agreement they shouldn\u2019t have, or they didn\u2019t have time to look at it as much as they should have. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Or they might think that the contract isn\u2019t really important because they have a good relationship with the other party. And to some extent that is true: the contract is set up for when you have a divorce, not how you handle the marriage. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Beagle is more important when it comes to getting work or selling something to someone with public funds. That\u2019s where it starts to get really interesting because organizations agree that is the biggest and riskiest area. Every single person I\u2019ve talked to said they have lost money on the job because they did not understand the requirements. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So we do get a bit of pushback, and what we say is, we\u2019re not replacing your due diligence. That\u2019s not what we\u2019re doing. What we\u2019re doing is providing you with a tool to make your due diligence process hugely more efficient. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I once showed a demo to a guy running structured steel companies who wasn\u2019t a computer user. He stood up, did a little bit of search, and then\u00a0looked up at me and said, \u201cYou just saved me a week\u2019s worth of time.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>We\u2019re certainly not a replacement for due diligence. What we\u2019re doing is empowering you as a business owner to figure things out within minutes instead of hours or even days of work.<\/strong><\/p>\n<h2>What\u00a0is\u00a0Beagle&#8217;s role within the legal tech community?<\/h2>\n<p>The technology in legal as it relates to other industries is very immature.\u00a0For instance, legal technology is probably 15 years behind financial technology. Ten years ago you would have never thought you could do your income taxes online, and now you can.<\/p>\n<p>So legal technology is still way behind, but the community is recognizing that and saying we can shave 5 or 6 or 10 years off development if we make sure that we&#8217;re collaborating.<\/p>\n<p>Stanford University has put together a program between their legal department and their computer science department to create a legal informatics initiative\u00a0called\u00a0<a title=\"CodeX at Stanford University\" href=\"https:\/\/law.stanford.edu\/codex-the-stanford-center-for-legal-informatics\/\" target=\"_blank\">CodeX<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27125537\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-27-at-12.53.14-PM.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6554\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1252\" height=\"370\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-6554\" src=\"http:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27125537\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-27-at-12.53.14-PM.png\" alt=\"Machine Intelligence Beagle: CodeX at Stanford University\" srcset=\"https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27125537\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-27-at-12.53.14-PM.png 1252w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27125537\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-27-at-12.53.14-PM.png 300w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27125537\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-27-at-12.53.14-PM.png 768w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27125537\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-27-at-12.53.14-PM.png 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1252px) 100vw, 1252px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>There is a very traditional high academic look at how you deal with legal information. So the purpose of CodeX is to try to bring that back down and make it industry relevant and be able to connect it to the legal students at Stanford but also the community as a whole \u2014 the general potential consumer of all types of legal services.<\/p>\n<p><a title=\"Cian O'Sullivan on CodeX\" href=\"https:\/\/law.stanford.edu\/directory\/cian-osullivan\/\" target=\"_blank\">For CodeX, I&#8217;m an evangelist<\/a> and also a networker in terms of trying to tie the companies together and making sure that we&#8217;re having all of those necessary discussions.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a second organization that I&#8217;m part of called <a title=\"LegalX\" href=\"https:\/\/www.marsdd.com\/our-sectors\/information-and-communications-technology\/legalx-cluster\/\" target=\"_blank\">LegalX<\/a>, which is focused purely on legal tech startups. It&#8217;s a global initiative that&#8217;s starting out of Toronto and is focused on understanding where those legal startups are coming from and being able to help facilitate getting them in front of big law firms or big companies.<\/p>\n<p>It\u00a0just so happens that there are a lot of legal tech companies in Ontario, CA, where we&#8217;re based. We definitely consider ourselves at the epicenter of that whole legal technology community that LegalX is\u00a0trying to put together.<\/p>\n<p>So these are the kind of initiatives \u2014 the more academic focus from Stanford CodeX and the more business, pragmatic focus from LegalX \u2014 that we are early members of. By\u00a0surrounding ourselves with the right community, we ensure that we&#8217;re looking at the market and the approaches and the strategy in the most effective way.<\/p>\n<h2>Do you plan to remain\u00a0focused on contracts, or\u00a0will you expand to other difficult\u00a0documents?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Long-term, yes, we\u2019ll use artificial intelligence to be able to analyze narratives that should be objective. Legal language should be objectively written because, if you and I have an agreement and both of us depart our relevant companies, our replacements will be able to come in and figure out what we both intended. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You also see that in the medical and engineering sectors. There has to be a uniform method of communication between professionals or across the industry. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But still, the average person might not know what\u2019s going on. That\u2019s exactly where methodology that is\u00a0able to process specialized objective narrative comes in. And in some cases, Beagle might even be able to translate documents so lay people can better understand them. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If you saw a radiology report saying there was a crack in your distal phalanx, for example, you\u2019d be able to translate that to say, yeah, you\u2019ve got a broken\u00a0toe. We\u2019d be able to do that because we have a corpus of data and understand how things are written and represented. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That\u2019s the kind of stuff we\u2019re working on in the background, but it\u2019s really a three-to-five year play. It all comes down to time, cost, and scope. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If we had a boatload of resources and the right people, you could see it a little bit sooner. But at its core, <strong>Beagle is about accessibility and about providing transparent access to the information in front of you that might be hard to navigate.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27151017\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-27-at-3.09.12-PM.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6565\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1331\" height=\"211\" class=\"extended alignnone wp-image-6565 size-full\" src=\"http:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27151017\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-27-at-3.09.12-PM.png\" alt=\"Screen Shot 2016-04-27 at 3.09.12 PM\" srcset=\"https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27151017\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-27-at-3.09.12-PM.png 1331w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27151017\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-27-at-3.09.12-PM.png 300w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27151017\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-27-at-3.09.12-PM.png 768w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27151017\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-27-at-3.09.12-PM.png 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1331px) 100vw, 1331px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<h2>What&#8217;s the most exciting trend in machine learning from Beagle&#8217;s perspective?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One of the things we\u2019re trying to be really aggressive about is the concept of being able to use small pieces of data. You\u2019ve got all this talk about big data. Big data, big data, big data. But what about small data? <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Small data is a bundle of information that an individual should be able to process and handle. Contracts fall into that definition. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>When we talk about machine learning, there\u2019s so much emphasis on having massive quantities of data and using it to train. We want to do that with small data. That\u2019s actually a lot harder. <\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Anyone can turn around and run a million equations on a bunch of data and say, this is what the outcome is going to be. It\u2019s actually really tricky when you have small amounts of data. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>We use machine learning to make sure that an individual will see a benefit. We\u2019re not talking about an organization or huge governments; the stuff we do benefits the individual end-user.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27122510\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-26-at-7.57.55-PM.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6551\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1374\" height=\"839\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-6551\" src=\"http:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27122510\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-26-at-7.57.55-PM.png\" alt=\"Machine Intelligence Beagle: Beagle Product in Action 2\" srcset=\"https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27122510\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-26-at-7.57.55-PM.png 1374w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27122510\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-26-at-7.57.55-PM.png 300w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27122510\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-26-at-7.57.55-PM.png 768w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/27122510\/Screen-Shot-2016-04-26-at-7.57.55-PM.png 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1374px) 100vw, 1374px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<h2>What advances in machine learning have most benefitted Beagle?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The only way that we\u2019re able to do this right now is twofold. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Number one is that there\u2019s an incredibly transparent academic community about standards techniques and libraries available. This means we\u2019re not in a position where we\u2019d have to write our own algorithms. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Even 10 years ago, some of this stuff would have been very difficult. So we\u2019re keeping our ear to that, and we\u2019re able to experiment with a lot of things in a very, very short period of time.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The second positive is the ease of infrastructure. We can run off Google, Azure, and Amazon Web Services \u2014 and we actually use all three of them. We don\u2019t have to focus on our own data centers, which makes us lean and allows us to really focus on the data science.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2>Are there any limitations on machine learning Beagle would like to see removed?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">While the scientific community is very transparent, there\u2019s been a lot of discovery from a proprietary perspective that hasn\u2019t been shared, and some of the licensing models that some of the creators want make it extraordinarily difficult to be able to leverage. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Another thing that\u2019s disappointing for us in one way is that t<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">he legal work with respect to\u00a0applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to contracts or legal narrative is limited. Very little work has been done by others on that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> That forces us have to come up with a lot of the solutions. But, on the positive side, that shows we are trailblazers hitting the market at the right time.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2>How serious a threat do you consider machine learning initiatives from large companies?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Most of those large companies have<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">built massive engines to deal with massive amounts of data that you as an individual company can leverage, but have to put in resources. And when you\u2019re using their engine, they\u2019re able to compute and take the data you\u2019re providing and use it for their own purposes. But they are not focused on the individual contributor or end-user. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We\u2019re doing a pilot with one of the world\u2019s largest auto manufacturers in Germany, and they asked that exact question. My answer was that we are specialists at understanding how small pieces of data can affect people, and that we are focused on empowering individual end-users. So that helps.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>But, on the positive side, these big companies help consumers understand that machine learning and artificial intelligence can improve their lives. It\u2019s almost like they\u2019re saying it\u2019s OK for people to give us their permission to help solve their problems. <\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So we\u2019re able to benefit from the fact that we aren\u2019t creating something people haven\u2019t heard of; we\u2019re just applying it in a different way.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong><em>Stay tuned for more interviews with\u00a0<em><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a title=\"ThinkApps posts on machine intelligence\" href=\"http:\/\/thinkapps.com\/blog\/tag\/machine-intelligence\/\" target=\"_blank\">machine intelligence companies<\/a><\/span><\/em>\u00a0that\u00a0are harnessing the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence in innovative ways.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;re kicking off a new interview series with machine intelligence companies. First up is Beagle, which uses machine learning to help non-lawyers navigate complicated contracts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":69,"featured_media":6546,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[510,511,524,540,526,513,545,76,512,525,509,508,527],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>How Beagle Brings Machine Intelligence to Legal Tech [Interview]<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Check out our interview of machine intelligence company Beagle, which is using machine learning to help non-lawyers navigate complicated contracts.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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