Cvent uses Kira to review 360 contracts in minutes

Litera has published a case study on Cvent's use of Kira to review 360 contracts during an acquisition, focusing on one of Cvent's most significant deals.

Cvent's legal team used Kira, Litera's contract review software, to manage a large volume of agreements on a compressed timetable during merger and acquisition due diligence. The system enabled lawyers to review 360 contracts in minutes and provide information to decision-makers during the transaction.

The example shows how in-house legal departments are using software to manage workloads once handled manually. In M&A transactions, legal teams are often under pressure to identify obligations, risks and integration issues across large sets of contracts before deal deadlines pass.

Myah Bowermaster, Head of Legal Operations at Cvent, said the speed of review directly affected the company's ability to complete the work required for the transaction.

"I would describe Kira's value to our business in three words: time to value," said Myah Bowermaster, Head of Legal Operations at Cvent.

Bowermaster added detail on the software's role during the acquisition process.

"Making strategic decisions at the right time with the right insights can change a lot of things. We would not have been able to successfully navigate what was one of our most significant deals to date in the timeline required without it," Bowermaster said.

Deal pressure

Contract review is one of the most time-consuming stages of corporate acquisitions because legal teams must assess commercial terms, change-of-control clauses, renewal provisions and other commitments across many documents. In-house teams can face extra strain when deal timetables leave little room for manual checking or repeated rounds of analysis.

According to Litera, Cvent's legal team used the review process not only to assess contract terms but also to support broader discussions on deal considerations, integration planning and risk assessment. That suggests the team's role extended beyond document review to advising management during the transaction.

The case also highlights a broader shift in legal operations. Corporate legal departments are under growing pressure to deliver commercial insight as well as legal advice, particularly in transactions where large volumes of paperwork can slow decision-making.

Litera presented the Cvent example as evidence that contract intelligence systems can reduce delays in due diligence. In-house legal teams, it said, are being asked to handle greater complexity at higher speed, especially in active M&A programmes.

Ashley Miller, Vice President of Sales, North America, at Litera, said the Cvent project showed how legal teams could use software to change their role in a transaction.

"In-house legal teams are being asked to move faster and take on more complexity," said Ashley Miller, Vice President of Sales, North America, at Litera.

"What Cvent's team accomplished with Kira is what purpose-built contract intelligence should do: turn high contract volume from a bottleneck into a source of strategic insight and make legal a trusted partner at the deal table. That is what 30 years of legal expertise, built into every workflow, makes possible," Miller said.

Market context

Litera sells software to law firms and in-house legal teams and says Kira has been trained on 45,000 lawyer hours. The product is used by 70% of the Top 50 Global Law Firms, placing the Cvent deployment within a broader market for legal technology focused on document analysis and workflow management.

The wider legal software sector has drawn attention as companies look to apply artificial intelligence to routine but labour-intensive tasks such as contract review, drafting and document comparison. Buyers in regulated or high-risk areas have tended to focus on systems that can deliver consistent outputs and traceable reasoning, particularly where mistakes in diligence can affect valuations or post-deal integration.

For Cvent, the example points to a legal operations model in which software is used to shorten review time and give executives faster access to information from contract portfolios. In transactions involving hundreds of agreements, that can affect how quickly management identifies obligations, negotiates terms or assesses exposure before completion.

Litera says it serves more than 15,000 customers and 2.3 million daily users, including 99% of the Am Law 100.