University of Cambridge uses Robin AI for up 50x faster summary reports on Limited Partnership Agreements

The University of Cambridge Investment Management (UCIM) team oversees a multi-billion dollar global investment portfolio spanning private equity, venture capital, real estate, infrastructure, and other alternative assets.

• As one of the top 10 university endowments globally, UCIM must vett investments to ensure strong returns that support the university’s research and educational missions.
• The UCIM team carefully reviews Limited Partnership Agreements (LPAs) as part of its due diligence. These complex legal documents can run to 150 pages and dictate profit sharing, governance, partner responsibilities, fund operations, and other terms of UCIM’s investments.
• Meticulously analyzing these LPAs is crucial for the UCIM team to understand risks, obligations, and alignment of interests before committing capital.
• UCIM’s greatest challenge is that it does not have in-house lawyers to undertake this work.

Sam Sturge, the Director of Private Investments at UCIM, explains the impacts Robin Reports has had on his legal review process and budget:

“We're an institutional investor with £4 billion (over $5 billion) in assets under management, and we’re a 20-person team with no in-house legal expertise. But we are investing across different types of asset classes, with lots of complex documents,” Sturge said.

• “Before Robin we had two choices: We either did it internally with no legal training, or we outsourced all of our legal responsibility to a law firm at their hourly rate,” he said.

Instant impacts — increased accuracy and speed

Using Robin Reports is “incredibly helpful” he said, because “it just saves our team a lot of time.”

• For a Limited Partnership Agreement of 150 pages, “it would take one of our team members 8, 10, 12 hours to review, but Robin Reports can do it in 5-10 minutes, and we get a really robust answer.”
• Not only is that a 98% time saving, “the accuracy of these reports is just so much better than what we’ve been able to do internally and enable us to really focus on the areas we want to spend time on.”
• “When we do decide to engage with an external lawyer we can say, instead of ‘please look at this 150 page document’ we can say ‘please look at these key areas’ and really maximize our efficiency,” he said.

Better use of lawyers‍

“We have a (limited) budget, and we have to selectively use it. Now Robin has enabled us to have a much more robust legal process,” Sturge said.

• “We haven’t reduced our spend with our third-party lawyers, but we’ve been able to target the resources and make them focus on the key areas we really want to spend time on, and to get much more robust legal reviews across everything we want to do.”
• “We now have early warning signs a lot earlier than we used to, and we can share the reports among the whole team. They are digestible and can be widely read by our CEO, our Chief Investment Officer” and others, he said.

How it works

‍The workflow is simple: UCIM uploads the LPA document, lists the issues they want checked, and clicks ‘generate report’.

• Robin AI instantly works to identify and extract key terms, governance rules, risk factors, and other need-to-know information.
• The product bundles references and citations from the document text for fact-checking by humans.
• Within 30 minutes, UCIM has a formatted, polished, multi-page LPA summary report complete with citations which has been reviewed and verified by a member of their team. This document can then be circulated for faster analysis and decision-making.

“Reports are easy to generate and review, meaning you do not have to be a lawyer, AI expert or RobinAI power users to harness the benefits,” Sturge said.

Be smart‍

Robin Reports is UCIM’s first legal AI software. “Showing how it works has been really valuable — the fact that it is auditable, with citations,” has helped win over those who were hesitant to embrace AI, Sturge said.

Context

‍The UCIM team first starting using Robin in September 2023, and were particularly interested in Robin’s capabilities for natural language search across their executed contracts, because they enable greater visibility and oversight of key provisions and obligations.

• That led to a collaboration developing Robin Reports — in a matter of weeks from April to June 2024.
• UCIM shared information their unique challenges creating summarization overviews of LPAs in the specific table format required for fast decision-making and collaboration with wider stakeholders in the team.
• Robin AI’s product & engineering teams then worked with UCIM’s team to determine what information would need to be surfaced and in what format, to make the product easy to use.

Takeaway: “Overall these reports, and the broader RobinAI platform have significantly improved our approach to investment legal reviews,” Sturge said.

What’s next? UCIM plans to expand usage of Robin AI across a wider range of tasks and contract types to achieve more time and cost savings.

About Robin AI

Founded in 2019 by Richard Robinson, a lawyer at Clifford Chance, and James Clough, a machine learning research scientist at Imperial College.

• Robin AI now has 160 full-time employees and over 100 customers.
• Robin AI raised $26M in Series B funding in January and recently appointed Scott Casey as CFO, cementing its leadership in the fast-growing legal AI sector.