Business Integrity
Business Integrity Ltd is a privately held Software company headquartered in London, with offices in New York. Business Integrity develops, licenses and supports a range of Document Automation products for the Microsoft Windows platform. Business Integrity's flagship product is ContractExpress, a document automation system used by law firms and corporate legal departments. ContractExpress is an on-premises solution integrated into the popular Microsoft SharePoint platform. In February 2010, Business Integrity launched ContractExpress.com, a Cloud based version of the document automation software. The most recent EDition of the software, released in January 2011 is version 3.9.
History
The company was founded in 2000 as a joint venture between Tarlo Lyons, a London based law firm and Logic Programming Associates, a software company specializing in artificial intelligence software and Windows-based Prolog compilers. Founders Phil Vasey and John Mawhood devised a new approach to document assembly which enabled users to create document assembly templates in Microsoft Word using a text based mark-up language which would then be automatically compiled into a web-based questionnaire form.
In 2000, Standard Chartered Bank became the first corporate customer to license Business Integrity's products for the generation of procurement contracts. In 2001, Linklaters became the first law firm to license Business Integrity's document assembly products for use in their award winning Term Sheet Generator product.
Legal Influence
Business Integrity was incorporated to provide document assembly solutions primarily to the legal arena. An example of this is the use of "the natural and inherent editing, styling and annotation methods that lawyers and legal personnel use to mark up contracts and other legal documents". Another feature of this is the emphasis upon legal certainty. The software developed draws upon pre-approved template precedents and administrators have the ability to 'lock' documents so that changes are not possible. Alternatively where alterations are made, the document can be automatically dispatched to the legal department for approval. The intention of these features is to reduce the opportunities for errors to enter the process, while ensuring legal departments are only required to review work when it is necessary. Some have termed this disruptive technology as it alters the underlying processes of drafting.
One of the main formative influences for Business Integrity the has been the work of Richard Susskind, in which he argues that law firms in order to evolve and compete in the modern market need to embrace technological change. A similar theory is also expounded by Kenneth Adams who contends that the common features of legal drafting (e.g. reuse of precedent templates) and the inherent inefficiencies (e.g. ensuring compliance and certainty) lend themselves well to utilization of document automation.
Awards
- Best of Show for ABA Techshow 2010 by Technolawyer
- Microsoft Gold Certified Partner
- 'Best of Breed' at Legal Technology Awards 2007
See also
- ContractExpress
- Document Automation
- Cloud Computing
- Intelligent document
- Document Modelling
- Microsoft Word
- Microsoft Sharepoint