Kira, now from Litera (acquired August, 2021) is software that searches and analyzes contract text. Kira offers pre-built, machine learning models covering due diligence, general commercial, corporate organization, real estate and compliance. Using Kira Quick Study, anyone can train additional models that can identify any desired clause. Kira can be deployed on virtual data rooms and other large repositories of contracts, creating summary analyses.
If you have a highly bureaucratic organization that is heavily focused on procurement, Emptoris can provide some value. It seemed to be very good at linking the contract information to procurement for better spend control. If you are trying to implement a standalone contract management solution that allows you to easily create contracts and store them in a central location, this isn't the tool for you. There doesn't appear to be a simplified implementation. In general, when a SaaS solution has a complicated and expensive implementation, I am very skeptical. This does not show that the vendor is trying to move customers forward on a single code base. If that many things need to be done during implementation, you are starting to customize the solution for every customer. This hurts the vendor's ability to scale and make improvements in the future.
Kira is a great due diligence tool and can be well utilised on both large and small transactions. It also has good application if you are looking to compare multiple documents against a model form document or market standard templates. Kira is less useful if you are looking to review emails (e.g. as part of a disclosure exercise); or if your review involves non-Latin based script languages.
Document protection - the Check Out contract feature is a great way to allow external parties to make modifications to contract language without the ability to accept those changes. Those redlines can then be imported back into Emptoris and reviewed or further modified as needed.
Notifications & reminders - you can trigger an email manually from within the system, or you can configure automated notifications andreminders to alert users when a new task is received or has aged a given amount of days, etc.
Interview wizard - there is a lot of value in the interview wizard. Administrators can configure screens with selecting options via check boxes, radio buttons, or typed-in values. Variables and conditions can be used to selectively populate fields within the contract or apply other options, making for a quick and convenient method to generate contracts conforming to corporate standards.
Field customization - administrators can customize a list of options for various fields including contract substatus, address type, and user created business term variables.
Approvals - many different options are available to configure approvals to trigger automatically upon presenting and/or executing the contract including specific individuals, one or more approver groups, or based upon various criteria including terms within the contract, type of contract, or the contract's owning organization.
Reporting, Emptoris comes with standard reports which can not always can be fit into our business. This needs to be improved. I hope Emptoris is addressing this issue in their latest releases.
Though the feature of editing language in MS word is excellent, loading MS word takes time.
Inability to relabel smart fields to suit the review process means it is hard to align it to particular projects (e.g. it would be useful to relabel the "Assignment" smart field as "Is the contract assignable?")
Not enough non-English smart fields.
Needs the ability to resell user-trained smart fields in a marketplace.
Output is not customizable enough.
Built-in analysis tools are useful but a little basic.
There are a lot of new, exciting products coming out in every field and I believe that there is always something better right over the horizon. If it was my choice, I would review my usage of Emptoris and other software periodically to make sure I'm using the most efficient software possible.
If our firm had more contracts in English, the usability of Kira would be rated higher. However, since we have to train clauses in Portuguese in order to use Kira, it makes its usability lower. We still are not able to fully use Kira for reading contracts in Portuguese. It takes a long time and many associate hours to make Kira usable in other languages.
The above rating for the overall support from Emptoris is for their product / product support, roll out training and refresher training / ongoing training, which is not only good but superior. There is no major or reconizable bad review that can be given to Emptoris at this point in time, from where is stands.
Customer Support is excellent. The online help portal is probably the best I have ever seen. Great videos with content easily found. The HelpLine is staffed by knowledgeable people. The videos have saved us providing a lot of in-house training, which we would struggle to resource. The account managers really know the product and their law firm clients and share best practices and trends.
I am a fan of Ariba to be used for the entire lifecycle of Sourcing. From RFX's to cutting PO's. I feel Emptoris misses the boat on the idea of a "One Stop Shop" for all of your Sourcing/Purchasing needs
Kira offers a lot more out of the box than other providers and is also more flexible around integrations. This, plus the clear pricing structure, is why we went for it instead of (or as well as) others. Diligen, RAVN, Leverton, Della, Seal not in list.
We won the 2005 Baseline Magazine Award for best ROI related to a technology implementation with an ROI 5544% (see 2005 Baseline ROI Awards, GlaxoSmithkline).
We always felt we could do "two times the work, with half the people and deliver double the savings".
