Law 2.0 News: Mumboe Uses Semantics To Pull Key Data From Contracts

Sarah Perez — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 06:40:00 -0800

Mumboe isn't just another enterprise collaboration suite. Instead, they focus on doing one thing and doing it well: making business agreements searchable. That's a very unique need they fill, which is why is why they already have 3000 customers using their free Express solution after only having launched earlier this spring. To compete with the handful of other vendors in this narrow space, Mumboe has now added a new feature called On-Demand Contract Intelligence, which takes advantage of the service's semantic processing engine to deliver something the others don't: automatic extraction of data.

]]> In these uncertain times, there has been a lot of speculation about what sort of web apps will survive the U.S. financial crisis. Clones and other sites offering little to no value may disappear, but ones that offer something unique may have a shot. Those that deliver something of value to a business may be even more likely to weather the storm. Although Mumboe hasn't been the only business contract management solution around - others like EchoSign, DocuSign, and Entrust, for example are also available - their competitors tend to offer document management through the use of digital signatures. What Mumboe does is different - business agreement tracking and management. Through their dashboard you can keep tabs on upcoming and past-due tasks as well as deadlines. You can also create, view, or search for agreements in your online database. Now Mumboe is introducing another feature that lets them stand from the crowd out even more than before: On-Demand Contract Intelligence.

Auto-Extracting Data

To use this new feature, you begin by uploading documents into Mumboe as usual, a process that involves nothing more than browsing for the file on your PC and uploading it to Mumboe. The OCR software in the system will scan the document's text and make the text searchable. Once complete, you can then select the new "Auto Extract" button which lets you automatically extract the key details from the document such as the parties involved and the agreement term. Those details are displayed for your reference along with the exact place in the document where they were found. You'll also be able to see an excerpt of the text contains those key words and phrases. You can choose to save the data as is or edit it as you see fit. If the system extracts terms you don't need to track, you can simply discard those items and keep the rest. When you're finished, just click "Done."

Pulling out the details:

Why This Matters

For consumers and every one else outside the target audience, Mumboe and other similar types of applications seem dry and boring. But for those in need of better tools, mainly those working in the legal profession, they will see this auto-extract capability as one sexy new feature. Why? Because according to the International Association for Contract and Commercial Management (IACCM), poorly managed contracts result in over $153 billion in missed savings and revenue per year. Give our current economic conditions, those numbers cannot be ignored.

The only hurdle Mumboe has to overcome is the lawyers' (a typically conservative bunch) fear of moving to an online application. Their, in our opinion, misguided fear and mistrust of any sort of cloud app keeps them doing business the old-fashioned way - reading through pages and pages of documents themselves instead of enlisting the aid of some "new fangled" system to help them out. But for those who do take the leap, their efficiency will increase dramatically. If there's any occupation that understands the concept of "time is money," law would be it, and that's why Mumboe has a shot.

How To Join the Beta

The Mumboe auto-extract features are in private beta at the moment, but you can sign up to join here: https://app.mumboe.com/registration/beta_promotion_index. Mumboe will give out invites to RWW readers exclusively.

More About Mumboe:

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EFF, Creative Commons Offer Developers Free Access to 2m Pages of Legal Documents

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 18:03:27 -0800

Creative Commons announced tonight that in partnership with Public.Resource.Org and with legal representation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, it has purchased and has now made available at no charge the equivalent of nearly two million pages of legal documents. If printed and piled on top of each other, the documents would make a stack of books 348 feet tall. Included are all U.S. Supreme Court decisions and all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 on.

Though these texts have always technically been in the public domain, the organizations had to purchase the electronic version from a private company that had compiled it. Now available at this link, they have also been converted to XHMTL so that anyone can develop user interfaces and search engines against the information.

]]> Context Will the development community rise to the challenge of building on top of this historic data? It's a solid bet that it will. From basic incorporation of the newly available content into existing search engines to more sophisticated and unexpected application development, this large database of structured, historically important information is sure to prove valuable in ways beyond the immediate importance of public access on principle.

There's certainly an active developer community ready and willing these days to experiment either for public good and/or personal advancement. The Reuters semantic web API OpenCalais that we wrote about last week, for example, has had 500 developers sign up to use the API in a single week, we're told by project partner Mashery.

While the newly released legal documents are content more than they are technology, in this emerging era of data, that distinction is growing less important. Freely available, large quantities of content are just asking for machine processing, but all the cool tools that are being developed need content to stoke their hungry fires and give them meaning. What better content to do so than a key part of the formerly inaccessible legal fabric of recent US history?