Gowling WLG Uses Kira Quick Study to Analyze Hundreds of Pages of Outside Counsel Guidelines in Minutes
Managing hundreds of complex outside counsel guidelines (OCGs) demands considerable time and attention to detail from law firms. Gowling WLG, an international law firm, sought to expedite its reviews of OCGs, boost accuracy, and strengthen its OCG risk assessment and compliance processes.
Simon Chester, then Counsel at the firm, spearheaded the initiative to utilize Kira's Quick Study.html feature to create a world class solution. Gowlings had been leveraging Kira and its built-in AI smart fields for years to complete legal due diligence on corporate transactions involving large bodies of contracts and leases, among others.
Simon built upon his 50 years of expertise from advising Ontario’s Attorney General and as a lawyer and partner at McMillan, Heenan Blaikie, and finally Gowlings, to find AI models that he trained to find important terms and nuances in OCG. The project started in the depths of Covid-19 isolation, using Kira Quick Study. Gowlings has significantly improved its efficiency, compliance management, and client relationships by using Kira and the Quick Study fields Simon built to analyze OCGs quickly and accurately.
“Don’t think about Kira purely as a contract analysis tool. It is so much richer than that.”
Challenges
Gowling WLG faced the formidable task of managing a vast number of OCGs, ranging from short, one-page letters to extensive 210-page guidelines with multiple appendices. The manual review process was time-consuming, labor-intensive, and susceptible to human error.
Ensuring compliance across its thousands of client requirements relating to cybersecurity, billing, staffing, privacy, and regulatory standards, was particularly challenging. High document volume combined with complex and often inconsistent compliance obligations strained productivity, making it difficult to quickly and efficiently assess the risks and responsibilities associated with each client and their OCGs.
Solution
Simon built an extensive database of OCGs and trained 90 custom AI models using Kira. Kira’s Quick Study feature empowers legal teams and subject matter experts to collaborate with Kira’s AI to create and train their own Kira AI models, known as smart fields, for exclusive use by their business.
With prior experience using Kira for due diligence in corporate transactions, Simon saw an opportunity to apply the tool to OCGs. He used Quick Study to train custom smart fields tailored to the firm’s specific needs, capturing essential clauses and client requirements unique to each OCG.
“Kira Quick Study has enabled us to get a much better handle on the obligations that we’re assuming for our clients,” Simon explains. “The value of this is that we can quickly assess whether a particular set of OCGs poses risks to the enterprise and how we should respond to clients.”
“What does this do for us? Well, it means that instead of spending hours reading a complex 97-page document, we have pretty well instantly an analysis from Kira which cuts the time of slogging through those pages quite dramatically.”
Implementation
Gowling WLG initially tested Kira with 50 sample documents to assess its potential for analyzing OCGs. Simon trained Kira’s AI to recognize and extract relevant text from new documents added to Kira it hadn’t encountered before. He leveraged a continuous feedback loop to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of the Quick Study smart fields, ensuring that they could handle increasingly complex documents.
Over time, the firm’s Kira OCG database expanded to include over 1,100 OCGs, totaling around 40,000 pages. Kira and Quick Study easily scaled with that expansion, accommodating the team’s continuous improvements in recall and precision.
Now, anyone at Gowlings who needs to review an OCG can utilize Simon’s thoroughness and expertise as he hands on his work to his team. With 176 smart fields—comprising 86 built-in and 90 custom smart fields—the team extracts and analyzes clauses related to diverse client requirements, including finance, staffing, conflicts, cybersecurity, and privacy, among others. Additionally, the team uses Kira’s Generative AI-powered Smart Summaries to obtain quick insights from OCGs, enabling faster decision-making and more efficient compliance checks.
“I was given a contract that was essentially incomprehensible, because it had been cobbled together from multiple sources—it contained contradictions and inconsistent definitions. I broke it into pieces, loaded it into Kira, asked it to use the auto summarization feature [Kira’s Smart Summaries], which we then used to rebuild the contract following our standard contract templates and sent it back to the client saying, ‘Does this meet your needs? Was this what you were trying to say?’ That process took less than 5 minutes. If I had asked an associate to rewrite the contract, it would have taken them an hour to understand it, and probably another hour to redraft it.”
Results
Managing large volumes of OCGs is a challenge that law firms regularly face. Doing so effectively fosters trust, improves client relationships, and reduces risk to the law firm’s business. Gowlings has realized significant efficiency gains as Kira can analyze hundreds of pages of OCGs in just minutes, greatly reducing the time spent on manual reviews and increasing their accuracy.
The firm’s compliance management and capacity to assess compliance risk also improved. By training and using Quick Study smart fields, Gowlings could conduct faster and more thorough risk assessments for each OCG and client-specific requirements, such as cybersecurity measures. Being able to quickly review and analyze documents also helped Gowlings strengthen client relationships by enabling faster compliance assessments of the firm’s ability to comply with client OCGs.
Simon’s creativity and success with curating and building nearly 100 custom smart fields for OCG reviews demonstrates Kira’s adaptability beyond the core due diligence use case. OCGs are, however, just one example of an alternative use case where Kira can add significant value to a firm’s business. Like Gowlings, firms can benefit greatly from creating Kira Quick Study fields and leveraging Kira’s flexible workflows.
In 2025, firms’ ability to create custom AI fields in Kira will become even easier and faster. By proactively identifying workflows where Kira Quick Study fields could improve both accuracy and productivity, firms can free up resources to focus on the highest priority work and differentiate the services they can offer.
For more information on how your legal team can leverage custom AI through Kira Quick Study to amplify your lawyers’ expertise, schedule a demo today.
