Litera unveils hybrid AI upgrade for Kira contract tool

Litera has expanded its Kira contract intelligence product and outlined plans for additional generative AI features in 2026.

The company positions the update as a response to increased contract review volumes and broader adoption of large language models in legal technology. Litera said Kira uses a hybrid approach that combines generative AI with proprietary models trained on more than 1 million legal contracts.

"While LLM technology has been a true game changer for contract review exercises, when LLM technology is paired with Kira's proprietary AI models, we are seeing incredible levels of accuracy and precision from simple natural language prompts," said Adam Ryan, Chief Product Officer, Litera.

Litera said generic generative AI tools can miss legal nuance in high-stakes contract review. It said some tools require extensive prompt engineering for consistent outputs.

Litera said Kira delivers 90%+ accuracy for contract analysis. The company said the tool can analyse contracts at scale and offers governance and collaboration features for legal teams.

Hybrid approach

Litera described the latest Kira release as the next iteration of its product. The company said the hybrid AI approach combines generative AI with proprietary models. It said those models draw on training across a large corpus of legal contracts.

Litera said Kira is used across M&A, real estate, banking, finance, tax, and IP matters. It said these areas place a premium on precision and consistency in clause and data extraction.

The company said Kira can reduce review time and improve risk management. It also said the product can identify and prevent contract value leakage. It said the system can scale review workflows across teams and projects.

Litera also highlighted governance as a differentiator. It stated that legal teams can enable or disable generative AI at the project level. It stated that teams can still use extraction features when generative AI is disabled.

Workflow focus

Litera said Kira includes end-to-end workflows for organising documents, tracking changes, managing reviews, and handling exports. It said this structure supports collaboration during contract review.

The company also highlighted Lito, a tool for drafting and comparing documents in Microsoft Word. Litera said Lito is included in the Kira subscription and operates as a standalone product alongside Kira.

Litera said Lito targets day-to-day reviews in Word, Outlook and web environments. It said Kira focuses on higher-precision analysis for more complex or higher-risk work.

Litera also outlined an approach that positions Kira within a broader suite of products across drafting, transactions, and knowledge management. It described this as a single platform model.

Planned features

Litera said it plans to expand Kira's generative AI functionality during 2026. It outlined three areas of development.

The first is Grid Chat, described as natural-language querying across review data. The second is Generative Smart Fields, which it said will use custom context grounded in verified extraction data. The third is a new set of intelligent workflows. Litera said these will cover rapid-turn analysis and large-scale collaborative reviews.

"The new iteration of Kira combines Litera's 30 years of legal expertise and a decade of AI refinement to bring GenAI to legal work with accuracy that teams can trust and governance they can control. By pairing GenAI with proven AI models and flexible oversight, Kira provides contract intelligence firms can rely on for their most critical matters," said Ryan.