Ivo has launched a super-affordable ‘open-source model for contract work’. Branded as Sage, it was built in partnership with River AI by post-training DeepSeek V4 Flash on long-horizon contract work. It used both public and synthetic data generated by lawyers, with River providing technical and training infrastructure help.
AL asked ChatGPT to compare costs to major models and it said: ‘DeepSeek V4.1 Flash API pricing is $0.15 per million uncached input tokens. A comparable frontier model can be $2 to $5 per million input tokens, and $12 to $30 per million output tokens. In other words, this is around 20X to 50X cheaper.’
And that matters, especially as lawyers apply AI to more and more documents during their work. (See tables below.)
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Ivo, which started in New Zealand, and now also operates from San Francisco, explained that ‘by open-sourcing its [contract AI] model, Ivo is enabling lawyers to fine-tune it on their own datasets, adjust its rules and safeguards for specific use cases, and iterate quickly on new ideas or approaches.’
They added that their approach greatly increased accuracy compared to a general model: ‘After reinforcement learning, the model went from scoring seventy percent of the pass criteria of the Legal Agent Benchmark (LAB) Contracts to ninety-one percent. It reached comparable quality of much larger frontier models and higher token efficiency at a fraction of the cost.’
And as noted, cost is a key point. DeepSeek’s models are way less expensive than the latest models from OpenAI and Anthropic. And they’ve post-trained this one to make it more accurate than just general LLMs.
Min-Kyu Jung, co-founder and CEO of Ivo, commented: ‘The next leap for AI in contract and legal work won’t come from bigger models. It will come from giving models the context of the work: the documents, the playbooks and the way a legal team operates.
‘That’s the hard, unsolved part of legal AI, and it’s where we’re focused on next. We’re opening up our model so others can test it, adapt it and build on it. That’s how we move closer to contract intelligence the whole industry can rely on.’
Is this a big deal?
You can already choose to use a range of models with most legal AI platforms. What sets this apart is that Ivo are focusing on making this contract model open-source, so that lawyers can do what they want with it.
But, perhaps the even greater factor here is cost. A contract tool that is very much cheaper than most others, even when those platforms use routing to pick more economical model mixes, undercuts the economics of many of its competitors.
More about Ivo here.
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Legal Innovators UK – Nov 4 and 5 / Legal Innovators New York – Nov 17 and 18
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For London – Nov 4 and 5, at the Minster Building, see here:
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