Summary
Blakes regularly assists various mining clients on transactions
involving many mineral and land tenures. Our deal team, led by
Partner Charles Kazaz, was determined to find a more efficient way
to obtain the high volume of mining claim abstracts that must be
reviewed as part of each transaction and to streamline the due
diligence process for those documents.
Using a combination of Power Automate and Python for the document
downloads, Kira for AI-powered contract review, and HighQ for data
presentation, the Blakes Innovation team worked with our subject
matter experts to drastically reduce the time required to complete
the initial review process.
Challenge
Transactions for mining clients required significant
administrative work to search for and download all relevant mining
claim abstracts from online registries. It could take days or weeks
of repetitive, manual work to collect what often amounts to
thousands of documents.
Once the abstracts were collected, they needed to be reviewed for
key terms, which once again involved a significant amount of manual
and repetitive work. The deal team would then use the summaries to
create the due diligence report for the client.
Blakes saw an opportunity to introduce automation and other
technology at different points in the workflow to streamline the
document collection and review process.
Solution
The Innovation team worked with the Corporate & Commercial
group's subject matter experts to create a process map of all
the steps involved in these matters and redesign the
workflow.
Using Microsoft Power Automate and the programming language
Python, the Innovation team coded an automation that searches for,
downloads and saves mining claim abstracts from online registries.
The Innovation team then trained custom fields in Kira, the
contract review software used at Blakes, to automatically extract
key data points from the abstracts, subject to a quality control
process conducted by the Corporate & Commercial group.
Blakes uploads the summaries to a client portal created using the
cloud application HighQ, where the data is easily searchable with
dynamic filters.
Results
The new workflow reduces the time required to download and complete the first review of the mining claim abstracts by up to 65%. It allows the deal team to focus their time and effort on higher-level risk analysis instead of the repetitive administrative work that is better suited for automation. Using HighQ as the presentation tool also allows our clients to review the data in a more flexible, dynamic format.
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