Linklaters unveils the future of legal contracting with CreateiQ platform

Linklaters has today unveiled its new contract automation platform, CreateiQ. The platform makes the process of drafting, negotiating and executing contracts faster, smarter and more accurate.

CreateiQ was designed by Linklaters > Nakhoda, the Linklaters-backed technology start-up. Working closely with Linklaters lawyers and using their knowledge of what in-house lawyers and companies need during the contracting process, the result is a unique legaltech proposition for use across a range of legal contexts – from derivatives to M&A.

Shilpa Bhandarkar, CEO of Nakhoda, commented:

“As a leading global law firm, we are uniquely placed to understand the challenges our clients face in each stage of the contracting process.

With CreateiQ, we have built a single workflow that brings contracting into the digital age, saving our clients significant time in the drafting, negotiation and execution of contracts and allowing lawyers to spend much more time on high value work.”

Unlocking legal data

CreateiQ revolutionises the contracting process by creating structured data at the point of contract creation. This allows users to easily extract and use their contract data to identify legal risk, increase data-driven decision making in their negotiations and use contractual data in their business operations more widely.

Expertise at scale

CreateiQ has been spearheaded by the Nakhoda team alongside a cross-practice group of market-leading lawyers, drawing on their global expertise of contracting for some of the world’s largest corporate and financial institutions.

CreateiQ dashboard

Doug Donahue, finance partner (New York) and Nakhoda board member, said:

“The launch of CreateiQ is a shining example of our continuing commitment to collaborate with our clients to deliver solutions to their most pressing needs. Over the course of my entire career, it has been painfully obvious that the way in which we create and negotiate legal agreements and then capture and track the data within them is archaic compared to the technological advances we see in other industries and in our everyday lives.

CreateiQ is a great leap forward to solving these problems and delivering the best in class service that our clients expect in a scalable way.”

The underlying technology for CreateiQ has already been deployed in the derivatives space through ISDA Create, and now has nearly 30 companies in the Fortune 500, and 8 of the 10 world’s largest banks by assets using the platform.

Linklaters sees uses for CreateiQ far beyond derivatives documentation and will offer the platform as a solution across a broad range of industry sectors and document types. Over the coming months, the platform will continue to expand its offering in financial services, with credit facility agreements, loan agreements and subscription letters being some of the first documents automated on the platform.

Stuart Bedford, corporate partner (London) and Nakhoda board member, concluded:

“We built the platform to be both sector and document agnostic and we have already had discussions with clients in a range of industries about automating their documentation. Examples to date include procurement contracts, customer agreements, leases and intra-group finance and supply agreements to name but a few.

We believe that CreateiQ has a significant role to play in the digitisation and automation of the negotiation of legal documentation at scale.”

For more information, visit linklaters.com/CreateiQ