Ontra If anyone knows the ins and outs of the data powering Ontra’s offerings, it’s Keyu Huang, data scientist/analyst at Ontra. She was one of the first data analysts at Ontra, and has since been part of multiple product teams using data insights to deliver innovative products and AI-driven features. Read on to understand how she contributes to Ontra’s success — and spends her spare time training for grueling competitions.
You recently celebrated your second anniversary at Ontra as an analytics lead. Please describe what you do in your role.
I was one of the first data scientists/analysts to join Ontra. Since then, I have been a key contributor on multiple product teams, working to promote data-driven product development. Currently, I am embedded in the team responsible for our core Contract Automation product, which offers our customers a superior way to negotiate and manage routine contracts.
As a product analytics lead, I play a critical role in using data to identify opportunities for product enhancements and organize projects. My responsibilities range from analytics engineering to tracking, experimenting, and analyzing the performance of Ontra’s products. I also keep up to date with industry trends to ensure we remain the most innovative company in legal tech.
I collaborate closely with my Product team to drive product improvements and new initiatives. Our team is customer-obsessed and is always on the lookout for ways to add value to the customer.
Lastly, I mentor junior team members into strong analysts and team leads, increasing the capacity of our team. I am fortunate enough to have received mentorship from my managers — who are both knowledgeable and supportive — as I grew into my current role as an analytics lead. Working alongside an exceptional team has helped me gain confidence, creativity, and critical skills. I strive to match their excellence in every way possible. I firmly believe that ongoing learning and development are key to success in any role, and am committed to continuous improvement to ensure growth and success.
Please share an interesting data project you’ve led at Ontra.
One of the most exciting projects I’ve worked on at Ontra is improving our contract summaries through the use of our artificial intelligence technology, Ontra Synapse. I led the product analytics effort for that project.
Contract summaries are, exactly as they sound, overviews of the key terms within a contract or document that is provided to our customers at the end of a negotiation. Our legal network members have told us they spend too much time creating these summaries. To help reduce their time spent and increase their efficiency, we developed an AI feature that predicts terms to include within a document summary. I implemented the evaluation tooling for machine learning development and provided data insights for each product iteration. We’ve also leveraged the valuable data collected during this project to inform ongoing improvements and future AI feature development.
Are there special considerations for handling legal data? What makes a data set high quality?
Handling legal data requires special considerations to ensure data privacy, confidentiality, and security. A high-quality legal dataset should be accurate, complete, relevant, and timely. Data should also be properly labeled and formatted with minimal errors.
While accuracy is the most important attribute, timeliness is also very important — if the data isn’t fresh enough, it’s not usable. That said, people have different needs around data timeliness in the context of their roles.
Ensuring high-quality datasets helps Ontra make better data-driven decisions and improve its products and services. Ensuring the right security and permission access for our teams frees us to figure out how to make best use of our data.
Within the analytics team, our job is to make sure raw data is high quality and that we build an organized analytics layer for our stakeholders. The analytics layer makes data consumable for dashboards, analysis, data science projects, and any other data products — and empowers our stakeholders to access and use the data without relying on support or guidance from our team.
What software, tools, and techniques does your team use regularly?
At Ontra, our product analytics team leverages powerful software, tools, and techniques to drive data-driven decision-making. We want valuable insights from data, so we use the best available tools, including:
- Snowflake: Data warehouse where we centralize data from multiple sources.
- DBT: Data pipeline tool for modeling analytics data.
- Airflow: Resource used to develop and automate data pipelines.
- Looker: Business intelligence visualization tool for insights and dashboards, which includes a data governance layer to ensure data quality and security.
- Kubeflow and Jupyter Notebook: Tools for modeling and developing data science projects.
- LaunchDarkly: Application to control the release of features in software applications.
- Segment: Tool to collect rich customer app usage data to inform product development.
We rely primarily on SQL and Python/R as our data analytics language to conduct deep analysis and gain valuable insights from our data.
Combined, these tools and techniques allow us to efficiently and effectively process and analyze large datasets. They enable us to make informed product decisions to drive business success.
We’re always rapidly trialing and adopting new technologies, such as an open-source data cataloging tool and elastic search this quarter. Finally, we are also building out self-serve data tools, so our embedded teams can arrive at insights on their own.
What gets you the most excited about the future of Ontra?
I am most excited about our potential to transform the legal industry through data-driven innovation. Our cutting-edge technology and deep expertise in legal document processing allow us to deliver high-quality, automated contract solutions that save our customers valuable time and resources.
I am enthusiastic about the opportunities to further optimize our products and services through advanced data analytics techniques. By harnessing the power of data, we can continue to drive enhancements in our contract automation product and deliver even greater value to our customers.
Additionally, the collaborative and forward-thinking culture at Ontra inspires me to push the boundaries of what is possible in legal tech. I am proud to be part of a team dedicated to revolutionizing the way legal professionals work by streamlining complex legal workflows, and am excited to see what we achieve in the years to come.
What’s something interesting about you that doesn’t appear on your LinkedIn profile?
My passion and experience with triathlons. I’ve always been passionate about sports, and triathlons are now my favorite. My first triathlon was in 2022. I’m pregnant now but will compete in another triathlon during my third trimester.
Training for a triathlon requires a lot of discipline, focus, and goal-setting — all qualities that I believe are essential for success. Participating in triathlons has taught me the importance of perseverance and overcoming obstacles. Whether pushing through a grueling workout or dealing with a setback at work, I know I can apply the same mindset to achieve my goals.
Through triathlon competitions, I’ve also met people from all walks of life who share the same passion for the sport. It’s a great way to build connections and broaden my perspective.
