Joining Forces: Pepper Collaborates With HighQ and Kira Systems to Bring Clients a Force Majeure Solution
As businesses pivot to accommodate new expectations and obligations in their relationships with clients and vendors due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the issue of force majeure is front and center. While force majeure provisions are regularly included in contracts, how those provisions are interpreted and what they mean for business relationships can vary widely.
To help our clients identify force majeure provisions in key contracts and determine the best way to proceed, Pepper has teamed up with two of its technology partners to offer a new solution. This collaboration allows our attorneys to quickly review existing contracts to identify force majeure provisions, and gives Pepper an opportunity to provide you with critical strategic legal and business advice.
How It Works
- Collect the relevant contracts that you’d like us to review, and upload them to your HighQ site. Don’t have a HighQ site? Ask your relationship partner or other Pepper contact to set one up.
- HighQ feeds each contract through Kira Systems for a quick and efficient review. Kira Systems identifies and highlights any force majeure, impossibility or similar provisions in the contract. The Pepper attorney reviews these results and tags important features of the provisions, such as notice periods or what constitutes force majeure.
- Once a contract has been reviewed, Kira pushes that information back into HighQ for the client’s review.
- Pepper attorneys then follow up with the client for a more in-depth discussion regarding how to handle specific contract terms and the situations that may arise from the contract’s force majeure provisions.
What Is HighQ?
HighQ is a web-based platform that streamlines collaboration, legal service delivery and client engagement. With HighQ, Pepper is able to build client-specific portals that bring together content important to the client, while also providing easy ways for attorneys and clients to communicate and share documents and information. A HighQ client portal can show who is working on a client’s matters, real-time billing data, upcoming deadlines and key documents. The client portal has features for task management and shared calendars, as well as ways for clients and attorneys to communicate with each other on the platform and to collaborate on documents and other work product.
What Is Kira Systems?
Kira Systems is a machine-learning software tool that identifies extracts and analyzes contract text, giving users a quick picture of various contract terms – including force majeure provisions. Kira enhances visibility into your contracts, so you can respond fast to a change in law, anti-bribery review, or force majeure event. It allows you to easily jump between summary text and the original scanned page. Kira can also make sense of just about any document format, including scans of third-party forms.
To set up your HighQ site or to begin using this new process today to better manage your force majeure matters, contact Andrew Medeiros, Director of Practice Solutions, at 215.981.4666.