The Soothsayer

Samir Bhatia, CEO of Brightleaf Solutions has culminated to be one of those rare leaders who also naturally serves as an inspirational mentor. Owing to his strong experience in Business Development, Bhatia exhibits special qualities including sturdy interpersonal skills and a unique capacity for empathy. These qualities most notably translate in his ability to motivate a team to care about its project and be invested in project’s success. For the steadfast CEO being successful is a combination of a good idea, sound execution, ability to put oneself into the weeds and rise out of them changing as the market dictates. “You will run into ups and downs. It is how you handle it. It is how you let your team know how to handle it. Take the downs as opportunities. Easier said than done, but this is a strong trait of a CEO. Take the ups as stepping stones to a higher ground!” says Bhatia.

The proactive, result oriented, responsible and technically sound leader makes it a point to put all his energy and time to get a job done. By thinking outside the box, he has taken his company, Brightleaf— offering technology powered service to extract information from users contracts using a proprietary semantic intelligence/natural language processing technology—into a very well recognized name in the Contracts Management space. “The industry knows us now as being the company that can do the data extraction cheaper, faster and exceedingly (decidedly?) better than anyone! We have positioned Brightleaf to add value to these companies,” adds Bhatia.

" You will run into ups and downs. It is how you handle it. It is how you let your team know how to handle it. Take the downs as opportunities. Easier said than done, but this is a strong trait of a CEO. Take the ups as stepping stones to a higher ground! "

By developing technology using the latest Natural Language Processing (NLP), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) capabilities, Brightleaf’s software has aced much of the extraction work. Utilizing a highly trained team of lawyers in India, Brightleaf checks the data extracted by the proprietary software, and uses a stringent /proven. Six-Sigma process to provide perfect data extracted from the client's contracts, a must when dealing with critical information upon which the client’s company relies heavily. “The CLM software vendors come to us as we are highly focused, best in class and add tremendous value not only to the end client, but also to the CLM vendors, who, at one time, used to shy away from answering the client’s question of ‘What do I do with my legacy contracts?’,” he explains. In an instance, for a Class 1 Railway client, Brightleaf extracted information from their Track Maintenance agreements. Being a firm, which is at least a century old, they had millions of miles of railway track and Brightleaf found out that they were maintaining certain tracks when the obligation had shifted and the other party should have been doing so. This amounted to 8+million dollars of yearly revenues were not being billed for decades. Brightleaf’s perfect extraction helped the client “find” this revenue and they are now starting to enforce these contracts.

Bhatia has a unique talent in bringing the cost down on any regular expenses for the company. In addition to being loyal and innovative he is also an inspiring person who motivates his team to work hard and achieve more. He mentors and develops his team, guiding them on how to optimize their jobs and gives them opportunities in different areas to keep them motivated. Bhatia adds, “People stick with you if they are constantly learning, not only in their area of expertise, but in other areas as well. This helps the employees, as well as the company to exceed all goals. The company for the future is adding multiple language capabilities to the software and constantly enhancing the software for better extraction results, for better quality control process enhancements. “Strive to be the best you can be. Give it a 110%. Live, eat breath the company—these are the qualities of a true CEO and leader,” adds Bhatia, who has been motivating numerous entrepreneurs around the globe through his strong belief in values and dreams.

Bhatia’s team members call him the “Soothsayer”. As he always looks to the future goals as the strategy, and works backwards to align the tasks to the strategic goals. In his thinking process, he envisions obstacles, often predicting them before they happen, and putting in processes to mitigate that risk up front. They ask him, “How did you know this was going to happen?”. It comes over years of experiencing all the ups and downs, he adds.

He looks forward to the enhancement of the technology and his service offerings outside of contracts. Bhatia adds, “The vision to extract data-points from multiple documents can be extrapolated to many verticals. For example, in the Financial sector, we have done pilot projects to extract the salient information from Microsoft Word and PDF documents; items such as trading party, settlement date, NAV value, number of shares traded etc. These then get uploaded into the client's financial systems that track these trades, much like the information that we extract from contracts gets uploaded into CLM systems. Even beyond the Financial vertical, there is much need in Healthcare, Bio-tech/Pharma, manufacturing, and many other verticals. The sky is the limit”, he adds with a gleam in his eye.