How Blakes Transformed Document Review to Streamline Due Diligence in Mining Deals

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 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.