In this installment of Contract Heroes, we had the good fortune to be able to sit down for a chat with renowned AI expert, Jim Chiang. Jim is the founder of My Legal Einstein, an AI-powered contract acceleration platform. He has been submerged in the contract management space for some time, catering mostly to the AI side of CLM. He was the head AI engineer for major names in the CLM industry such as Apttus and Icertis and brings a wealth of both experience and knowledge to improve the way AI interacts with contracts. His goal and the goal of My Legal Einstein is to investigate how AI can transform the way people work in the contract space.

Our conversation with Jim touched on several aspects of the interaction between AI and contract management, exploring how the two can work together most effectively, the importance of honesty in technology, and the future of AI-based solutions as a whole in the world of contracts.

In this installment of Contract Heroes, we had a chat with contracting superstar Nada Alnajafi. Nada has been practicing law in-house for about 12 years, working mainly in the tech industry. She enjoys handling contracts throughout all phases of the process, from drafting to negotiating, even stating that contracts are her favorite part of the job. During our conversation, we discuss her blog (Contract Nerds) success, tons of tips around red lining, and her book: Contract Redlining Etiquette.

Tips for Developing Soft Skills with Patrick Barry

In this episode of Contract Heroes, we had a chat with soft skills specialist, Patrick Barry. Patrick has been working in-house as Associate General Counsel with Emerson Electric (more specifically their Commercial Residential Solutions subdivision) for 12 years. He explained that his role involves supporting the Emerson businesses in order to help them negotiate efficient and well-understood contracts by acting as a business partner with them. The ultimate goal is to create contracts that make the business happy while ensuring that customers and vendors always understand exactly what is expected of them.

Slightly different from our usual conversations, our focus during our chat with Patrick was on his list of 6 soft skills that lawyers and sales associates can use to cut through the bureaucracy involved in the contracting process and make sure negotiations run as smoothly and efficiently as possible. Read on to dive deeper into Patrick’s tips and how you can start applying them for yourself and your organization.

1. Find Commonality With the Other Side

Finding commonality is at the top of Patrick’s list for a reason. It is the first skill he typically recommends to lawyers. Most people on the sales team likely have a natural instinct for finding commonalities in order to sell more efficiently, but lawyers may not be used to taking the time to form connections like these prior to getting into the legal talk. Common ground does not have to be something complex either. In fact, the simpler the better, as it will be easiest for both sides to relate. Patrick recommends checking out the other party’s LinkedIn profile before the first phone call in order to locate that commonality and use it to bond right away. Whether it be the weather or attending the same school, bringing up common ground early on in the conversation sets a positive tone for the rest of the negotiations and makes it easier to work through any complicated issues that may arise later.

2. Figure Out Your Quarterback

Patrick next emphasized the importance of knowing who is the quarterback on your side of negotiations. Many might automatically assume a lawyer is a quarterback, but in some cases, it could be the sales or procurement departments. It is essential to determine who is the number one priority, and who is the person who has this agreement as to the first thing on their desk. Without a clear indication of the quarterback, negotiations can quickly become jumbled, and not everyone understands the game plan that will allow you to get across the goal line.

In fact, it is often the case that lawyers should not be quarterbacks, as they typically do not need to be involved with every contract. Coaching up the sales and procurement employees to know exactly when consulting the legal team is a necessity can be extremely helpful for keeping lawyers sane and putting more power in the hands of the business people. For example, NDAs are very standard documents. Utilizing a CLM tool to assist with the drafting process and simplifying the language of clauses can allow sales and procurement employees to handle standardized NDAs without needing to consult the legal department about them.

3. Size Up Personalities

Understanding the personalities of everyone involved in the negotiation is another key soft skill to emphasize. You should strive to understand the personalities not only of people from other organizations but also of your own internal employees as well. If you anticipate early on or even before initiating a conversation that this person may be aggressive or stubborn with you, you can plan ahead with effective strategies to handle that behavior and still create a productive conversation.

4. Minimize Redlines

Redlines are viewed very differently by the sales team and the legal team. Lawyers likely see them as a typical part of the negotiation process while business employees are more likely to view them as an inconvenience. Patrick explained that minimizing the number of redlines often leads to much smoother agreements, as it often avoids weeks of extraneous negotiation. For example, suppose you can spend an extra 10 minutes with a document and only change a few words rather than deleting an entire paragraph. In that case, it will be extremely helpful for avoiding frustrations, hang-ups, and confusion on both sides.

One of our hosts, Pepe, shared an example from his experience working at a bigger law firm. He recounted that he received a document from a client to review and did not see any problems with it, so he sent it back to his partner saying just that. His partner, however, was shocked and could not believe that they would be billed for reviewing the document without providing any changes. Many lawyers have this same stigma in their heads and may believe that if they do not make changes, then it may seem that they have not properly reviewed the document. This is not the case. In fact, making fewer changes will help the deal move forward faster and keep the client happy.

5. Prioritize Upfront

Setting priorities with all involved parties is another important soft skill. Before lawyers spend weeks redlining a document, Patrick encourages the sales or procurement team to spend 10 minutes deciding the top 5 issues that are deal-breakers within the agreement. If those issues cannot be resolved, then it is not even worth looking at the rest of the document. Outlining these priorities in exact detail prevents lawyers from having to guess what the main issues are. Guesses typically lead to wasted time and an insurmountable roadblock in the end. The goal is to avoid spending time on less important negotiable terms and instead prioritize those which actually bring more value to the contract.

6. View All Terms as Commercial Terms

The final soft skills tip that Patrick gave us was to view all contract terms as commercial terms. In this way, you can make sure that the business employees are involved with the agreement and understand the terms from their own perspectives. You do not want sales and procurement teams to view the legal department simply as a roadblock that impedes their attempts at making deals. In fact, business employees can often be the best advocates for lawyers and important contract terms once they have an understanding of them, as they can take that knowledge back to their own department and explain why the terms need to be negotiated in the first place. Lawyers should be viewed as business enablers instead of as roadblocks. After all, the ultimate goal of the contracts being drafted is to create a new commercial relationship with an outside party, so viewing items in commercial terms instead of only in legal terms can be extremely helpful to everyone working on the agreement from all sides.

For more exclusive chats with expert guests in the contract lifecycle management sphere along with valuable legal-tech advice, check out past installments of Contract Heroes, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode! If you have any questions for our guest, Patrick Barry, he can be found on LinkedIn and is always excited to share stories or chat about experiences in the legal community.

Contract Heroes with Roland Vogl

In this installment of Contract Heroes, we had a chat with a long-term partner in the legal tech space, Roland Vogl. Roland is the executive director of CodeX, the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, which is a joint center between the law school and the computer science department at Stanford University in California. The mission of CodeX is to bring information technology to the legal system in order to make work more efficient for all kinds of stakeholders.

Born and raised in the Austrian mountains, Roland grew up with the intention of practicing law in Austria. However, once he was introduced to the international climate while studying abroad in the UK, he quickly decided to seek out global work, eventually partnering with European institutions in Brussels. There, he became interested in privacy law and data protection, a major point of contention in the late 90s, and ended up attending Stanford University for his Masters program. After working at a tech law firm, he found an opportunity to rejoin Stanford as a teaching fellow in a new program focused on law science and technology. During his time at Stanford in the past 20 years, he helped co-found CodeX and has been involved in the overall growth and development of legal technology and computational law.

Throughout our conversation with Roland, we learned all about the foundation of CodeX while also gaining some insight into how legal tech has changed over the years from his perspective working intimately in the space. Read on to hear more about some of Roland’s unique experiences as well as some tips he shared for lawyers and law students looking to involve themselves in a less traditional career path.

The History of CodeX

To kick things off, we wanted to know a little more about how CodeX came to be and how it has evolved over time. Roland began by explaining that about 15 years ago, they held a workshop at Stanford in which his former boss co-taught a course on computers and law. At the time, the internet was starting to take off which meant there were more data available as well as new legal modeling and knowledge representation techniques. They decided that it would be an excellent time to devote attention to these topics and came up with the idea to create CodeX. 

The name CodeX itself stems from the intersection of legal code and computer code (and the fact that several other centers at Stanford also used “X” in their titles). The second part of the name, “Stanford Center for Legal Informatics,” was a bit of a toss-up at first, as they had trouble choosing between the phrases “legal informatics” and “computational law.” While the center's main focus involves the automation of legal reasoning (which is essentially computational law), they wanted to be inclusive of other techniques as well, landing on the phrase “legal informatics” instead.

The center experienced a swell of interest in new approaches from around 2008 to 2010, and they began holding weekly group meetings for more and more people to pitch their ideas. Over time, CodeX became not just about research, but also about building a community in which people could discuss their ideas with like-minded individuals. It showcased the power of making a network. This eventually led to the establishment of the Future Law Conference about 10 years ago, which is a flagship program that seeks out important trends to pay attention to in the legal innovation community. It offers a platform for people to showcase their work and share their expertise while meeting others involved in similar spaces. April 2022 was the first time the conference was held in person since the start of the pandemic, and Roland encourages everyone to check out recently released videos documenting the conference.

The Evolution of Legal Tech

Since Roland has been involved in the legal tech realm for a while, we asked him to tell us about how the space has evolved over the years from his perspective. He explained that it is difficult to pinpoint one exact area that has changed because the space as a whole has exploded with growth. We have provided a list of the innovations that he described across a huge variety of divisions all located within the legal tech space:

- Law schools: Awareness has exploded for law schools, which have begun figuring out how to teach legal tech and computational law to their students and properly integrate it into the curriculum.

- Law firms: Looking to change the way they deliver services to their clients as a result of more pressure from clients to be efficient and deliver services in a tech-enabled way. Creating new services for clients like predicting legal outcomes and computational law systems that allow them to navigate through a workflow and receive legal answers via machine.

-  In-house departments: Using legal tech to improve how they serve their internal clients and keep costs at bay while not having to reinvent the wheel over and over with each newly drafted document.

- Courts: Looking for innovation in providing a better user experience for litigants.

- Government: Employing AI systems across various agencies.

Roland also mentioned a research project being conducted that focused on using computational law and computational contracts in the insurance space in order to generate a better experience for consumers. Clearly, legal tech can reach into any number of different places and will continue to extend into new communities. In fact, Roland stated that it is an exciting time to be a lawyer who knows how to integrate technology.

Tips for Legal Tech Startups & New Career Paths

To wrap up this amazing conversation, Roland shared his knowledge about founding a startup and a few unique career paths available to those looking for something a little different from the traditional legal paths. Here are a few of his valuable entrepreneurial tips:

- Startups bring out the best and worst in people, so find teammates who share your values.

- Listen closely to the customer. Do not operate in a bubble and come up with big theoretical ideas without checking back with customers first to make sure it caters to what they really want.

- Build both your dedication and your ability to overcome adversity.

- Fail fast and fail often because oftentimes the best way to learn is through trial and error.

- Match up a legal expert who knows the shortcomings of their area with a technologist who has the right skills to engineer a solution to those problems.

In terms of exciting and innovative career paths outside of the typical law firms, in-house counsel, and academia, Roland recommended looking at areas like contract lifecycle management (CLM) and e-Discovery. Even if you are not interested in going the competitive startup route, there are plenty of jobs available at existing companies as a legal technologist.

For more exclusive chats with expert guests in the contract lifecycle management sphere along with valuable legal tech advice, check out past installments of Contract Heroes, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode! If you have any questions for our guest, Roland Vogl, you can check out the CodeX website or email him at rvogl@law.stanford.edu to set up a time to discuss any and all things legal tech-related.

Contract Heroes with Nick Rishwain

In this installment of Contract Heroes, we sat down to chat with fellow legal tech podcaster, Nick Rishwain. Nick started his show, LegalTechLIVE, in 2015, when the realm of legal technology was still in the process of ramping up. Though he is currently on hiatus from the show, they have a log of 130 episodes, all showcasing fascinating interviews with founders of legal tech companies and startups. 

Nick first became interested in exploring the expanding universe of legal tech as a result of his employment with Experts.com, a marketing platform for expert witnesses and business consultants. The site started out somewhat akin to a directory but has since evolved into much more, allowing expert witnesses to market themselves to attorneys, businesses, and industries, and even offering flat fee searches for attorneys who do not want to perform searches themselves. Nick has been working there in a legal tech role for about 12 years and has done his podcast for 7 years. The idea for LegalTechLIVE struck him because he wanted to get to know other people in the industry and become more involved in the legal tech space. By promoting founders and the new, exciting things they were working on, he was able to network and build a community.

Read on to hear some of the highlights from our chat with Nick, including his perspective on how legal tech has evolved over the years and some excellent tips for marketing with lawyers.

The Evolution of Legal Tech

Since Nick has been involved in legal tech for 12 years, we wanted to kick off our conversation by hearing about the changes that occurred in the industry from his perspective, as both a podcaster and a member of the workforce. He explained that when he started it felt like most products were primarily eDiscovery, law practice management, or case management, but the industry has broadened significantly since then. There were only a few AI-based legal research tools receiving attention back in 2015, with CLM not even being a phrase utilized until a few years later. The startup space for legal research and IT solutions for offices, in particular, was not very vibrant when he first began the podcast. 

Nick stated that there has been both a broadening and a narrowing when it comes to the evolution of legal technology. The variety of tools and the number of concepts that now fall under the blanket of legal tech have most certainly broadened. Tools now are created with any number of unique purposes in mind, whether they are geared more toward a specific area such as compliance or justice, or they are designed to perform a specific function like managing text communications between lawyers and clients or innovating court reporting and legal intelligence. Some tools are created to go directly to the consumer while others are meant to be more enterprise-driven. All-in-all, the market is saturated with a huge amount of software, with many more options than were available in 2015.

The narrowing aspect comes into play when you consider what companies are prioritizing. As more options for tools become available with each one having its own unique perks and quirks, organizations can be more specific about what they want their legal tech software to accomplish within the company. An organization no longer needs to select from one or two extremely broad tools but rather can hone in on software that prioritizes the current and future needs of the company. In this way, legal tech solutions have both blossomed and somewhat narrowed in their scope.

Building a Community

We asked Nick to tell us a little bit about how he built up the community around LegalTechLIVE and how he went about finding guests to interview at the start. He explained that he was always most interested in speaking with legal tech founders before they became a big deal, those who were working on startups or series A companies. He did plenty of reading about the legal tech realm in general, which led him to find a number of people he could reach out to for interviews. He also utilized Google Alerts and social media like Twitter and LinkedIn to build connections with his peers and start making friends in the industry. In fact, he found searching through the legal tech hashtag on Twitter to be helpful as well.

Nick also stated that he typically sought out people who had new, exciting ideas about legal tech. There may have been hundreds of startups that all had the same concept, but Nick chose to highlight those who stood out with something more unique that had not already been done a thousand times. For example, many of the tools and services existed outside the legal realm already, but creative innovations needed to be made when adapting that software to work specifically for legal practices. Adding legal to a solution is essential if you want to be able to sell it to attorneys, and incorporating those aspects seamlessly could be quite difficult.

Laughing, Nick added that his superpower, if he has one, is promoting people and making friends. Since the start of his career as a podcaster, he has been able to help promote a number of founders and has even kept in touch with some, creating long-lasting friendships. Thanks to his expertise and the way he has built his reputation, some guests have even started to come to him to be interviewed instead of him reaching out first.

Tips for Selling to Lawyers

To wrap up our chat with Nick, we asked him to give a few tips to our viewers who may frequently find themselves trying to sell to lawyers. Ironically, his first tip was not to sell to lawyers at all, if you can avoid it! Instead, look for other stakeholders in the company, even paralegals or legal assistants. After all, many solutions will be enterprise solutions that help departments outside of just legal, so getting your foot in the door with these other departments may make it easier to finalize the deal. He also advised not to call lawyers on the phone to try to sell to them, as this can eat into their already packed schedules and leave a bad taste in their mouths. Keeping them in your email campaign and waiting for them to make the move on their own time is usually a better option. The final tip Nick provided was to attempt to integrate your legal tech solution into the company’s existing workflow, such as Microsoft Word or Outlook. Software that fits rather seamlessly into the established practices may sometimes be received more openly than stand-alone software.

For more exclusive chats with expert guests in the contract lifecycle management sphere and valuable legal-tech advice, check out past installments of Contract Heroes and subscribe so you don’t miss an episode! If you have any questions for our guest, Nick Rishwain, he is available on Twitter @LegalTechLIVE. You can also find episodes of his podcast on Apple, Spotify, and his website, https://legaltechlive.com.

Building the Bridge Between Business and Legal with Dan Hendy

This episode of Contract Heroes featured Dan Hendy, the Executive Vice President of Corporate and Commercial Solutions at UnitedLex. Dan has been working in legal operations since 2015 when he was first introduced to a legal ops role while employed at GE. Throughout our conversation, Dan shared his experiences with how the world of legal operations has evolved since its early days as well as some of the biggest mistakes and most valuable outcomes he has noticed during CLM implementations.

Evolution of Legal Operations

Since Dan has been hard at work in the legal ops world for 7 years now, we decided to start the show by picking his brain to find out more about how legal ops has evolved in his eyes and what it was like at its genesis. He explained he was interested in taking on his role at GE because he noticed a lot of moving parts in the legal department just were not working. The desire to fix these issues is a huge part of how legal ops began. As legal departments expanded, it became clear that they too would need a way to manage budgets, filter projects from other parts of the organization, and leverage spending on outside counsel. Back then, they were unable to collect operational data on the throughput and performance of the law department, making it difficult to meet today’s expectations of the legal team being governed the same way a CFO might run a finance department. 

Currently, legal ops are headed in a direction that builds the legal team as a business enabler. The chief legal officer is expected to present more than just details about individual cases being handled by the legal department. Instead, they must quantitatively show the impact they are having on the business via the data collected from contracts. This elevates legal team leaders and senior lawyers to the status of business partners, making them more credible with their peers and garnering well-deserved respect from other departments.

In summary, legal ops have evolved from merely managing outside counsel and your stack of technology to now having the proper data to make strategic decisions about how to run and structure the legal department.

Building the Bridge Between Business and Legal

Dan then gave us an excellent analogy to illustrate how a CLM solution can help the legal team provide better and more satisfying interactions with other departments who may have previously been hesitant to approach in-house counsel with their contract issues. Bringing up a handful of different food apps, he mentioned the concept of real-time tracking and how much it does to improve customer experience. By simply viewing the app, you can see where your food is and how long it will be until it arrives. A CLM solution can provide similar information for requests submitted to the legal team.

For example, if another department needs an opinion on a contract from someone in the legal team, they can submit their request and then have the ability to check the status of that request as well as who is handling it. Providing that visibility in real-time of how the task is being managed from within the legal department goes a long way in building the bridge between departments. It indicates the standard for different types of requests, allows lawyers to prioritize certain tasks, and gives others an idea of how long they can expect to wait before they hear back. In this way, the legal team clearly sets up and manages the expectations being placed on them.

The Biggest Mistakes During CLM Implementation

As we often discuss here on Contract Heroes, one of the biggest mistakes a company can make is to purchase a CLM tool without first fixing their contract processes, thus automating broken processes and wasting valuable time and resources. Dan provided us with an extremely helpful list of ways to avoid mistakes like this while implementing your own CLM solution.

- Start with your desired outcomes and work backward. What does the system need to produce by the end of the implementation? Utilize the “5 Whys Rule.” Choose an outcome that you think is a necessity, such as “I need to track approvals.” Ask yourself why you need to track approvals. “I need to show an audit trail.” Why do you need to show an audit trail? Keep following the statement back until you illuminate the real purpose, eventually reaching a much simpler process.

- Engage stakeholders and encourage executive sponsorship. A senior stakeholder in the company must make the implementation a priority and push people to adopt it. Without that backup from important groups outside of just legal, it will be difficult to make people excited about the change.

- Understand your contract processes. Not every contract process is created equal, so they should not all be treated the same. One out of hundreds of business associate agreements will not require the same attention as an 80-page agreement that takes 6 months to negotiate and is the driving force of your revenue. Pay attention to the differences in the processes and build the discipline to manage them properly.

Finding the Value of CLM for Your Business

Dan explained that there are generally two goals when it comes to CLM implementation: improving the employee experience or creating value via the use of technology. Clients need to sit down and figure out their motivating force for utilizing a CLM solution and how their business values that force before they begin the implementation itself. He went on to provide 3 illustrations of how different types of organizations may find value in their tech solution.

- Growth organizations: The motivation for a company that is focused on growth is speed and efficiency. They need to be able to process contracts quickly in order to gain more revenue. The focus may be on quantifying the timeline of the contract process and finding ways to speed it up.

- Big organizations: Established companies are often overrun with legacy contracts and may have no idea what information is locked away inside them. Moving all these documents into a repository and focusing on tracking certain data points within those contracts may help to identify areas where value erosion is occurring. The focus here may be on counteracting the value erosion that comes when you lack transparency in your contract portfolio.

- Compliance organizations: Companies that work in a higher-risk environment may need to prioritize the avoidance of litigation and commercial issues. Though this is harder to quantify than the other examples, CFOs are particularly understanding of the fact that not having a direct line of sight into your contract data can create unnecessary risks in the organization.

For more exclusive chats with expert guests in the contract lifecycle management sphere along with valuable legal-tech advice, check out past installments of Contract Heroes, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode! If you have any questions for our guest, Dan Hendy, you can easily reach him on LinkedIn.

The Contract Management Quadrant

In this installment of Contract Heroes, we had the opportunity to chat with none other than Krzysztof Kwiatek, the associate director at Deloitte Legal located in Kraków, Poland. Kris works in legal management consulting and runs the technology center of excellence, mostly focusing his time on CLM tool implementations. His induction into the world of CLM occurred in 2014 when he began working to manage the tech aspect of the new contract management team at Capgemini. Kris has 20 years of experience in widely understood IT and has spent the last 8 years involved specifically in contract lifecycle management. 

With Kris’s experience in implementing CLM software in mind, we focused our conversation around gaining his advice about successful implementations with high user adoption rates while also learning a bit more about how to go about choosing from the wide variety of CLM solutions currently available on the market.

Deploying a Pilot

To kick off the discussion, we first asked Kris to tell us about his view of contracts and why CLM is important to every organization. He explained that since contracts and services are everywhere, permeating nearly every inch of an organization, and they need to be signed more and more often, the process surrounding them must be efficient. Contracts are touched by everyone in the company, but they are not owned by one specific department. Even though practically every other process within a company may already be automated, from ERPs to HR, the contracting process, not home to anyone department, was often overlooked. However, there are two main reasons that automation is so beneficial for contracting processes: signing contracts faster and quickly extracting information that you need at the moment you need it. Even if you are only able to implement a contract repository at the start, you are still going to start seeing the benefits of faster searches, tracking approvals, and learning how to make your contract process more efficient.

Kris then took us through the implementation process, beginning with a pilot or minimum viable product (MVP). The goal of an MVP is to narrow the scope of the system, usually to just one template or one department, in order to gauge how well it will fit a company’s needs. In fact, these needs are what must be detailed before the pilot can even commence. The organization and the implementation team must first come to an agreement internally about the success criteria for the tool and what it will be expected to fix. Without these criteria in place, it will be impossible to measure the software’s actual success throughout the pilot and determine whether or not it will be properly deployed.

Kris explained that deploying the pilot quickly is a must and that it needs to be deployed to real users who can provide real feedback. Outside of a contract repository, the MVP will typically include two integrations (single sign-on and E-signatures), one or two templates (NDA and another which must be used for the duration of the pilot), and a limited group of about 100 users who have been properly trained to work with the system. Once the pilot concludes, you are then faced with two options: go deeper into the functionality by extending everything in the same department and testing again, or launching the MVP throughout the whole organization. The latter is the usual choice as long as the pilot was deemed successful.

The CLM Quadrant

As we then asked Kris about his experience recommending certain vendors, he constructed a very handy visual when it comes to the different purposes that a CLM tool may be designed to fulfill, which we later deemed the CLM Quadrant. Essentially, CLM solutions are created with one or more of these vantage points on the contract process in mind: buy-side, sell-side, pre-signature, and post-signature. Depending on the needs of your organization, especially placing focus on the must-haves instead of the nice-to-haves, you may look for a solution that adheres to one quadrant more than another. As the tools grow and develop, and your contract processes do as well, you may also find that a tool expands with you down the road, accommodating more aspects of the quadrants than it previously did.

Deloitte is tool agnostic, meaning that they do not have their own solution and can provide the client with the best option for them without any bias. Despite being tool agnostic, however, they do remain tool opinionated, with years of experience providing them with enough information to develop preferences between vendors. That being said, Kris does try to have at least two or three solutions available for each shelf of the market, from the biggest organizations to the middle players to the smallest companies too. 

User Adoption

With tools, surveys, and questionnaires in hand, Kris and his team have managed to scale down the implementation process to anywhere from three to six weeks, depending on the size of the company. However, even the quickest and most seamless implementations do not always guarantee user adoption of the software. This is where building up hype for the implementation becomes necessary. The closer you get to going live, the more buzz you should be creating around the CLM tool. But, the buzz that you generate cannot come from preaching about small technicalities within the tool because not many people will engage with that. Instead, try sending short videos or animated movies about how great life will be once the CLM solution has been implemented. Almost akin to movie trailers, you need to be making people excited for the final product.

The human aspect of implementation plays a huge role in generating buzz and facilitating user adoption. Your test group for the pilot will become the ambassadors to the software, as they are the experts who know exactly how to work it and how much it will increase the quality of life for employees. It falls to them to spread rumors about how great the CLM tool is among their colleagues. The implementation team will be responsible for making sure all questions about the system are addressed in a timely fashion. After the system goes live, it is important to host daily training sessions with an open invitation that allows anyone to join the call and ask questions about how to use the tool. Following up on questions quickly and providing hands-on solutions is the best way to ensure that no one feels left behind or frustrated while working with the new system.

For more exclusive chats with expert guests in the contract lifecycle management sphere along with valuable legal-tech advice, check out past installments of Contract Heroes, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode! If you have any questions for our guest, Kris Kwiatek, he is available to message on LinkedIn.

This week’s installment of Contract Heroes brings you invaluable insight from renowned legal operations consultant and founder of InnoLaw, Lucy Bassli. Lucy got her start as a commercial contracts lawyer, eventually moving from a big law firm to working in-house at Microsoft for about 13 years. It was through her work at Microsoft that she discovered her passion for the “how” aspect of her job rather than the “what.” She defines the “how” of working with contracts as finding ways to do them faster, better, and more efficiently. Lucy left Microsoft 4 years ago to start her own consultancy, InnoLaw, where she now works with her team to help corporate law firms better understand how to manage their contracts. Read on to discover just a fraction of the wisdom she shared with us throughout our conversation.

AI Expectations

With the explosion of contract lifecycle management (CLM) software, many legal-tech conversations have become centered around one common buzzword: AI. However, despite how much the word is thrown around and advertised on the websites of software providers, consumers may still not be aware of what AI currently can and cannot do. We asked Lucy to give us some insight into her experience implementing systems that feature AI and what customers who utilize such software should expect from their program.

Lucy began her explanation by stating that contract management boils down to an intricate series of processes and interactions. AI can certainly play a part in these processes and interactions, but you shouldn’t aim to have it replace them entirely. Some CLM providers haven’t been entirely clear about the value of using AI, and this disconnect leads to a lack of understanding about how to successfully implement an AI-driven program. 

What many first-time AI or CLM solution users may not realize is that AI requires a great deal of human interaction in order to be successful at its tasks. Just as you would train a new employee, you need to teach the AI by feeding it plenty of samples, sometimes hundreds or even thousands of documents. The more samples it has, the better it understands and is able to provide the service that the software company advertised. Essentially, it’s important to be merciful on your AI and not expect too much from it, especially early on in the implementation process.

CLM Vendor Standards

Being the head of her own consultancy, Lucy was able to shed some light on an aspect of CLM solutions that we haven’t had the chance to discuss as often on our show: the screening process for selecting which software to recommend to clients. Since her consultancy is agnostic, they do not have any partnerships with specific companies, meaning that they always do their best to recommend a solution that will be the best fit for the customer without any sort of bias. 

The first piece of the puzzle when evaluating CLM solutions is, of course, the features and functions, aka the actual technology. Most will be stronger in some phases or areas than others, so it’s important to know which phases are the strong suit for each software in order to choose one that best fits the needs of the customer. The next step is then to evaluate the people behind the product. Getting to know the sales team, as well as the company’s implementation policies, can be a good indicator as to whether or not they’ll be thorough and communicative throughout the process. Typically, she will ask them to prepare a demo for the client to use in order to gain a better feel for how it will work with their practices.

For Lucy, evaluating the people behind the product even reaches all the way to the CEO. One way to wade through a sea of potential vendors is to check the backgrounds of the CEOs. Those who have experience in the legal world, have shown some level of passion for the work they’re doing, and put energy or excitement into the advancement of legal-tech are going to be the standout candidates. These are the providers who are more likely to be in it for the long haul instead of merely capitalizing on a current business boom. Providers who showcase stories of consistent customers year after year will generally have higher implementation success rates.

For more exclusive chats with expert guests in the contract lifecycle management sphere along with valuable legal-tech advice, check out past installments of 

Contract Heroes

 and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode! If you have any questions for our guest, Lucy Bassli, you can easily reach her on 

LinkedIn

In this installment of Contract Heroes, we had the opportunity to chat with Mat Jakubowski. Mat has over 10 years of legal experience at companies like Thomson Reuters and Dentons. This experience has given him a unique blend of skills that he now uses to both run a legal ops department and also provide world-class Legal Tech training and mentoring to aspiring lawyers and legal professionals at Silvertown Legal. 

Part of why he made the transition was that he wanted to be involved in the ever-evolving world of legal-tech, branching out beyond the reach of just one company to affect change in a bigger way as the legal industry rapidly advances from manual to digital. 

At the time that Mat graduated from law school, there was very few off his peers going into the legal-tech space, with the “standard legal path” being road most followed. Now, with so many alternative paths, he is excited to share his experiences working with legal-tech, and we hope that his advice can help both those looking for technology solutions to suit their contract processes as well as those seeking jobs in the vastly expanding legal technology realm.

Utilizing Free Tech at Your Disposal

To start things off, we first wanted to see if there were any free technology platforms that Mat could recommend for those who might be just starting to look into adopting legal-tech and are still in the process of evaluating their contract lifecycles. He began by stressing the importance of understanding your processes before looking into integrating a high tech contract lifecycle management (CLM) software, as technology cannot be used properly unless it is applied to good processes. But, that doesn’t mean that you can’t utilize smaller technology solutions during your evaluations as well.

One of the platforms Mat recommended checking out was the Microsoft Suite, particularly Microsoft Teams. Teams can be of great help when it comes to creating better communication between departments as well as planning out processes and assigning tasks to different team members. Excel, though usually overlooked, can also be used for planning or keeping track of data. It may not always be the most user-friendly experience, but it can still get the job done while you prepare to make the transition to a more detailed software.

Mat also suggested utilizing software like Miro in order to visualize your processes as you learn about them. It is much easier to pick apart the details of your contract processes when you have a map or graph of that process that highlights the dependencies, clauses, clients, and even points out who is approving what. This may also help you pick out processes that are currently being handled by senior employees which could be delegated to mid-level or junior employees instead, freeing up more time for senior personnel to devote to more pressing matters. All in all, free tools like these may be of immense usefulness in creating a big picture of your organization, your processes, and what you’re looking to change.

Hiring the Right People

But of course, no matter what tools you choose, they cannot be properly utilized without the right people. The next question we posed to Mat asked him to explore how he goes about finding individuals who fit an organization’s unique culture and who are excited to work in an expanding sphere like legal-tech. Conveniently, Mat broke down his answer into 4 key parts, outlining the different traits that he would look for when deciding who to hire:

• Legal experience: Understanding the legal aspects of the contracting process is extremely important. Even if this legal experience boils down to just a few internships, it helps to have a handle on how legal processes work, such as redlining, the importance of clauses, limitations, liabilities, etc. Certain parts of the contract will be contentious and others will be simple, so you need to know where to spend your time in order to create the best quality contract without dragging out the process.
• Project management: Innovation is almost always exciting at the beginning, but it is usually a long process, sometimes longer than anticipated. Individuals working to incorporate legal-tech solutions need to be able to keep up the momentum of the innovation project for the entire duration of the plan. Highlight the value that the innovation will bring to the company and make sure people know what they are meant to be doing at each step of the journey.
• Business acumen: Business knowledge is not always necessary when incorporating CLM solutions, but it is helpful when focusing on a value-driven mindset. By knowing what a business does and how it operates, you can better understand which values to prioritize throughout the integration process.
• Tech knowledge: Surprisingly, Mat considers tech knowledge to be the least essential of the 4 traits he mentioned. While it is helpful to know how the technology works in order to figure out the best ways to gain value from it, you can easily learn a lot about technology on the job or even by simply attending webinars. After all, Mat himself didn’t have much tech knowledge when he started either. 

Searching for Solutions

So after you’ve evaluated your processes and hired the right people, how do you go about wading through the immense pool of CLM solutions available on the market right now? We asked Mat to walk us through the early steps of locating the perfect CLM tool for your organization. Laughing, he first explained how not to start your search: selecting a tool simply because one of the partners in the firm heard good things about it or knows someone who works for the software company. This could result in choosing a software that is completely unsuited to the needs of your organization, which would be a waste of money, time, and resources.

You first need to understand what you want your CLM tool to be able to do for you. Begin by making a clear list of your must-haves and what you want the software to help you accomplish. There are tons of CLM tools out there, and each one has to differentiate itself from others by offering various features, all of which can be helpful in their own ways. But, this also makes it easy to be drawn in simply by the features that would be nice to have while losing sight of the ones that are your organization’s priority. Mat recommends being realistic about your list and starting small. You cannot expect the software to fix every single problem in the legal department right away, so focusing on smaller goals at first allows you to choose a software that suits your immediate needs and that may adapt with you down the line.

Encouraging High User Adoption

And, once you have all your moving parts in place, the final question that many are left asking is how you get your employees to actually use the new software. Mat explained that support from various locations within the company throughout the implementation process is key. Leaders of the organization, whether they be partners or stakeholders, need to be the ambassadors of change, while a leader of the innovation group itself remains available to answer questions and make sure no one feels left behind. Having a handful of employees who catch onto the software quickly and can act as living proof that the new technology works may encourage others as well. Not to mention, it also helps to showcase success stories early on in the process in order to keep people feeling positive and motivated for the change.

For more exclusive chats with expert guests in the contract lifecycle management sphere along with valuable legal-tech advice, check out past installments of Contract Heroes and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode! If you have any questions for our guest, Mat Jakubowski, he is available on LinkedIn to discuss all things legal-tech.

In this week’s installment of Contract Heroes, we sat down with the mastermind behind the creation of Counselwell, Avi Weiss. Avi ​​is currently an in-house lawyer at Coinsquare, a cryptocurrency company based in Canada, but he also manages Counselwell simultaneously. His passion for in-house counsel and the drive to provide resources for his peers in this versatile and demanding profession have led him to take on both jobs, often working nights and weekends to achieve his goals.

Throughout the episode, we had the opportunity to learn more about Counselwell and its early days while also gathering some of Avi’s essential tips for anyone looking to find a job working as in-house counsel. Though a bit different from our typical subject matter, Avi’s perspective provides a great look at the world of in-house counsel, what it’s like, and how to get your foot in the door. 

Creating Counselwell

So, what is Counselwell all about? Avi explained that he created Counselwell with the intention for it to become a resource and a home for in-house lawyers, which it most certainly has. Counselwell offers resources like online courses, a Job Board, a vendor directory, and a Slack community to lawyers all around the country, helping them to grow professionally in their careers and reach new heights.

The idea for Counselwell originally came to Avi when he made the switch to in-house counsel himself for the first time. He started out his legal career working at a large law firm in Toronto. Bigger law firms like this one, he explained, have lots of resources available for nearly any subject, as there are people working there from practically every area of law who can give you advice. When you make the jump to in-house counsel, however, you become the only resource for that company when it comes to all sorts of legal subject matter. Whether the questions are in your area of expertise or not, you are still expected to know or be able to figure out an answer. Despite searching around, Avi was unable to find any resources to help him when he first started working in-house. So, he decided to make his own resource: Counselwell.

One of the features of Counselwell that we wanted to highlight in particular are the online courses being offered, such as legal project management and contract management. Avi explained that working as an in-house lawyer himself, he was able to think about the types of tasks that lawyers have to do most often outside of the usual substantive law tasks. Dealing with contracts and managing legal projects were two of the most frequent tasks he noticed, hence why they were made into online courses at Counselwell. The legal project management course teaches things like staffing, balancing costs, and time management in order to help lawyers create a structure for handling various legal projects. The contract management course is designed to help lawyers assess their contracts and processes before adopting any form of legal-tech, like contract lifecycle management (CLM) software.

Tips for Prospective In-House Lawyers

Counselwell also features a unique Job Board that is specifically designed to help those seeking in-house positions find the perfect job for them. Avi noticed that in-house counsel positions can have an infinite number of titles, which makes searching for and finding job listings difficult. The Job Board eliminates all the clutter of different titles by listing only jobs for in-house counsel. Starting back in mid-2021, the Job Board has grown to include about 60 listings, with more and more being added each month.

One of the main points we asked Avi to touch on was providing some tips or suggestions for anyone interested in an in-house position, whether they’re at the start of their career or simply looking to switch paths for something new. He explained that the first step in the process should be to narrow down your search by thinking about key aspects of your dream job: what type of industry or company you want to work for (a government agency, a startup, a non-profit, a big company, etc.), what type of legal department you want to be a part of (small agile teams or larger ones), and what type of work you want to do. The type of work that you want to do is especially important, and Avi warned against picking a job based on what others might think of your title. Instead, focus on what tasks you’ll be doing at that job and what the actual experience of working there will be like in order to determine whether or not it will be a good fit for you.

We’ve condensed Avi’s checklist for finding your perfect job down below:

1. Create a spreadsheet of all the key aspects of your dream job mentioned above.
2. Create a list of companies that match all your criteria.
3. Reach out to people on LinkedIn who work in those companies and track the conversations on your spreadsheet.
4. Use the conversations to narrow down your choices more and more until you find a job that centers around your ideals.

For more exclusive chats with expert guests in the contract lifecycle management sphere along with valuable legal-tech advice, check out past installments of Contract Heroes, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode!

Throughout our conversations on Contract Heroes, we have often focused mainly on contract processes, how to go about bettering them before implementing tech solutions like contract lifecycle management (CLM) tools, but one key aspect of the contracting realm that we have yet to fully cover is people. After all, the employees working throughout the different departments of a company are the ones who make the contracting process possible, so we decided to center our attention on understanding the importance of people and building cohesion across the entirety of the business.

Cohesion Across Departments

We kicked off our discussion by posing our usual opening question to Kim: “Why do you think the contracting processes of every organization need attention?” She explained that processes make up the foundation of the business. They provide an outline of how people should be doing their jobs and what roles they need to play both within their own business units and as a part of the larger company. The best way to facilitate a deep understanding of this foundation is to find a sense of commonality across all the different business units. By creating consistency among processes in each unit, you can make sure employees are always aware of their roles and are able to adapt even when switching to or collaborating with another unit.

For organizations that do not yet have that consistency between units, there are two ways to go about creating it: roll out the new strategy to each unit one at a time or try to incorporate the entire organization in one large move. Choosing between these two possibilities depends on your company’s risk level. It is often much riskier to try to implement strategies in one “big bang” motion. If the strategy is ineffective, then carrying it out across all the units was a waste of time and resources. Kim advised instead to focus on individual business units first. Test the strategy on a smaller scale and make sure it works, then roll it out in broader terms so you can minimize any disruption. Depending on the size and scale of the company, you can either incorporate the new strategy unit by unit or move from location to location.

Finding Your Strategy

Building from Kim’s discussion of incorporating a company-wide strategy, we next asked her to explain how to begin developing that unique strategy. Understanding your contract processes and the way you interact with customers and suppliers is key. Essentially, finding your strategy will act somewhat as a maturity model as well. Mature contracting organizations have their supplier strategies in place, have well-defined processes, and have talented people who understand how contracting truly works. Once a company reaches that point of maturity, then they can begin utilizing strategic contracting.

Strategic contracting is based on three main types of contracts: performance-based, relationship-based, and vested outsourcing. Each one will be used differently, so it is important to understand your relationship with each customer or supplier in order to choose the correct contract moving forward. Kim outlined these three types of contracts as follows:

• Performance-based contracts: Typically used for critical or strategic suppliers. Focused on how you are going to perform to meet the end state of that contract instead of just quality and delivery. How are we going to support the customer after we’ve delivered the product?
• Relationship-based contracts: Typically used for strategic suppliers. Focused on how you will work together to achieve a certain endstate. Establish terms based on the relationship and how you will ultimately satisfy the customer’s needs. Approach from a trade-off perspective. Keep in mind who will be doing what in the relationship and how you will act in order to achieve the end deliverable.
• Vested outsourcing: The most collaborative model for strategic suppliers. Focused on building out the relationship together. Understand and agree on the risk profile that both companies will engage in and develop the actual contract jointly. 

Since vested outsourcing sounds like the best solution for most cases, we asked Kim to give us an example of when that type of approach might not work. She explained that forming contracts using the vested outsourcing strategy requires a great deal of trust and for both sides to understand each other’s risks. If the relationship between the two companies is at all contentious, then this strategy most likely will not be a good choice.

Picking the Right People

As we mentioned, we wanted to hear more about contracting from the perspective of the people involved in it rather than just the processes themselves and the tech used to automate them. We asked Kim to help us understand the best way to go about finding and selecting the right people to fit into each aspect of the contracting process and help the company really function at its highest potential. She stated that not only is it important to create a culture within the organization that breeds the correct type of people who want to be involved with that culture, but it is also a necessity to try to incorporate employees early in their careers. 

Contracts are, of course, inherently based in the law to some extent, as they always have to account for risks and what to do when something goes wrong. However, it is extremely important to make sure contracts do not cater only to the legal side of the relationship, but also to the business side. After all, the goal of contracts is to enable business. Kim explained that people who are hired into contracting positions must be able to understand both sides of the contract as well as how to create and develop meaningful business relationships with customers and suppliers. Apprenticeship programs in college allow young employees to become exposed to different types of contracts in various industries and help prepare them to build these comprehensive contracts that are risk-balanced and use appropriate language to support the legal and sales perspectives equally.

To wrap up the show, we asked Kim to give us some tips that people who are just starting their search for a CLM tool can use while wading through the countless options available on the market. From her perspective, it is important to keep in mind that technology is the enabler people use to make their jobs easier and more efficient. You should aim to find a holistic solution that uniquely fits your business strategy and creates a flow across all departments while also allowing room for long-term growth.

For more exclusive chats with expert guests in the contract lifecycle management sphere along with valuable legal-tech advice, check out past installments of Contract Heroes and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode! If you have any questions for our guest, Kim Miller, she is available via email at kim.miller@L3Harris.com.

Tom is a contract management veteran and a legend in the industry with tons of knowledge to impart about the early steps of implementing contract lifecycle management (CLM) tools. Over the years Tom has helped his clients understand the people, process, and technology that makes up the framework of contracting, especially from the sell side of the equation.
 

During this episode we discussed:

• How to leverage contracts as a strategic tool that can empower your organization, maximize revenue, and control the way revenue leakage is managed
• Why the combination of people, process, and technology is a unique at each organization and how to solve this puzzle to meet your businesses needs
• What “phase zero” is and why it’s so important when starting your journey to find the perfect CLM tool

Want to learn more about Tom and the things we discussed in this episode? Connect with him here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tmfuchs/

Just as a typical doctor would do when diagnosing their patient, the Procurement Doctor evaluates his client’s contract process in order to locate the pain areas before suggesting recommendations on how to go about fixing those areas.

During our interview we discussed:

Karthik’s experiences in working with the procurement side of contracts vs. the sales side.

Why implementing a contract playbook can help your team cut costs, bring in more revenue, and reduce the overall contract processing time.

Why managing data vs filing and forgetting is so important when it comes to contract.