Now more than ever, the private markets need legal AI solutions to address the expanding amount of legal and compliance work and growing legal expenses. Macroeconomic uncertainty, private markets growth, regulatory scrutiny (and uncertainty in 2025), and efficiency mandates have all contributed to increased business complexity. In turn, complexity has led to more questions and heavier workloads for GCs, CCOs, CFOs, and other private market professionals.
Legacy technology and manual workloads — in other words, the status quo — aren’t good enough to answer the relentless questions while driving growth and efficiency.
AI provides a viable alternative to increasing complexity and workloads.
AI legal tech provides a cost-effective way to streamline processes and improve efficiency. Unfortunately, conventional AI platforms don’t meet private equity’s high standards. Managers need reliable, purpose-built solutions to address their unique needs.
That’s why Ontra spent over 9 years building AI designed to address the legal use cases core to fundraising, portfolio investment, and fund operations. With Synapse, private markets firms get a scalable way to stay ahead of mounting legal demands without having to worry about the limitations of conventional AI.
Why conventional AI fails private fund managers
In the first few years of AI, there were several challenges to implementing AI in the legal and private funds industries. Legal language is difficult to understand and construct due to complex document structure, passive language, jargon, and non-standard syntax. The legal profession performs specialized tasks, such as marking up documents based on established precedent and client expectations, which generic AI models can’t address out of the box. Additionally, legal work often requires a high degree of precision, and when legal, financial, and reputational risk is at stake, there’s no margin for error.
AI has overcome some of these challenges through large language models (LLMs). Now, given the size of their data sets, LLMs can tackle legal language and a variety of legal and compliance tasks. That said, conventional AI still isn’t as reliable and effective as managers need for two primary reasons.
- Lacks specialized training data. Machine learning models depend on large volumes of high-quality data to learn how to perform specific tasks. Most companies don’t have access to the volume of private funds contract data required to generate acceptable outputs.
- Isn’t fine-tuned to deliver the case-specific answers. Given the shortcomings of conventional AI, legal professionals can spend too much time reviewing and revising outputs, negating any benefits derived from the technology.
What is Synapse?
Synapse is Ontra’s AI engine powering the solutions we’ve launched to manage the legal and compliance workflows associated with fundraising, portfolio investing, and fund operations. Think of our AI-enabled solutions as a private markets technology platform.
Ontra’s legal AI:
- Is safe, secure, and accurate
- Is designed for private markets
- Provides customer-specific results
- Keeps humans in the loop
What makes Synapse different from conventional AI solutions?
Industry-specific data: AI depends on high-quality training data to deliver high-quality answers. There’s not a lot of information about private markets contracts in the public domain, which is why conventional AI can’t meet the industry’s needs in terms of relevance and precision. Ontra’s previous AI training data set contained unparalleled industry data, representing hundreds of millions of individual data points. Ontra is not training AI models at this time.
In-depth contract frameworks: Private markets contracts contain nuances not found in contracts from other industries. For AI to be effective in contract automation, it needs a thorough understanding of all the clauses in a given document as well as the associated details. Ontra has processed over 1.2 million industry contracts, which have become the basis for our extensive, industry-specific contract frameworks. These “contract anatomies” can contain hundreds of fields.
Predictive and generative AI systems: Based on industry-specific use cases, Ontra has defined the types of answers private markets customers need to accelerate their legal work. For example, users may need to access precedent while negotiating a contract or quickly summarize an executed document. Based on our deep understanding of these requirements, we’ve built predictive and generative AI models to produce the high-quality, context-specific outputs users need.
LLM integrations: Ontra has integrated OpenAI’s GPT-4 into Synapse so we can do more, faster, with less data. Ontra’s platform is LLM-agnostic, which means in the future, we are able to leverage whichever leading LLMs will provide us with the most secure, reliable power to serve our customers.
Native integration: Ontra offers a seamless user experience by embedding AI outputs throughout Contract Automation, Insight, and Atlas. Synapse surfaces the right information at the right time to maximize productivity. For example, when a lawyer is reviewing a contract term, Synapse can retrieve previously negotiated contracts that contain similar provisions and highlight relevant clauses.
Human supervision & expertise: The private markets require a high degree of precision and can’t rely on AI models that produce answers with low relevance and accuracy. Conventional generative AI models are prone to present fabricated facts as true (known as hallucinations) and deliver inconsistent responses to questions. Synapse avoids these pitfalls by tapping a global network of over 600 independent lawyers and other trained specialists to review the accuracy of our AI outputs. We use a continuous feedback loop to improve our AI outcomes and ensure our AI legal tech is reliable for our customers.
How Ontra’s legal AI helps private fund managers
Synapse is simple to deploy and delivers immediate value. Since it was trained on vast amounts of contract data and integrated into Ontra’s suite of legal tech solutions, it can accurately analyze and digitize new contracts from day one.
Synapse supports several use cases:
Contract digitization transforms documents into structured data. Synapse identifies legal clauses and highlights corresponding document language in seconds. It matches and groups clauses together automatically and generates obligation names, descriptions, and categories.
Document analysis assesses a document’s complexity to optimize negotiation for speed, cost, and outcomes. Synapse will identify and prioritize time-sensitive contracts, determine a contract’s type so that it can be matched to the correct playbook and legal resources, and flag sensitive contract provisions that should be reviewed immediately. All these features help to accelerate routine contract negotiations.
Precedent retrieval surfaces relevant precedent to expedite negotiations and ensure consistency across contracts. Synapse retrieves similar contracts that have been negotiated previously and highlights relevant terms and associated redlines in the documents.
Contract analytics features aggregate and synthesize contract data and generate data-driven insights and reports, all of which are stored in a central contract repository.
Search with enhanced speed and accuracy with AI Search. With Synapse, users can ask questions of their documents and receive actionable answers in seconds.
The bottom line
- Private markets firms need technology-based solutions to address expanding legal and compliance workloads.
- Synapse is the AI technology powering Ontra’s private markets technology platform.
- Synapse’s outputs rely on industry-specific ML models, exhaustive contract frameworks, and commercial LLMs.
- Native AI integrations throughout Ontra’s applications surface the right information at the right time to maximize productivity.
- Ontra has pioneered a human-in-the-loop system in which a global network of over 600 independent legal professionals helps improve the accuracy of our legal AI outputs.
Continue to explore legal AI for private markets
Ready to learn more about Ontra’s legal AI? Reach out for a personalized demo today.
