Legaltech landscape

Phase	Function	Description	Management appreciation factor	Lawyer acceptance factor	Glamour factor	Iatrogenic factor
Phase of contract process	What does the bit of kit do?	Explain?	How excited will management be about this?	What is lawyer acceptance factor: the realistic chance that legal eagles will wholeheartedly embrace this tool?	How clever, complicated or unique is this as a piece of technology?	How far might this tool inadvertently entrench current rent-seeking behaviour?
Initiation	Law firm bid management	An auction portal for seeking competitive bids on external legal advisory projects	High: delivers control, visibility, metrics and cost pressure on external counsel	Low: While no work to implement for lawyers, it removes autonomy, power to choose counsel, is unpopular with outside counsel as any bidding system guarantees more losers than winners.	Low: It’s eBay or Uber, isn’t it?	High: Asks wrong question, namely: “how to I get the cheapest legal advice” rather than “how to I get the best advice or, for that matter, “do I need legal advice at all”.
	Self-service portal	A place where Sales can go to get pre-appoved legal forms to send out without vetting	High: Speeds things up and pushes away low value work from Legal	Medium: anything that pushes NDAs off the desk has to be a good thing.	Low: Could be as easy as an intranet page or SharePoint	Low: disintermediates unnecessary legal touch.
	Initiation and prioritisation tool	A system for queueing prospects, getting necessary information and prioritising before starting negotiation	High: Good oversight of process, good MIS	Medium: Helps initiate drafting provided it is used properly and information accurately provided	Low: Doesn’t need much tech.	Low: Disintermediates. Provides simple information inputs and disciplines personnel to follow process.
Drafting	Template Management	Centralised templates database or clause library for approving and warehousing approved forms and boilerplate	Medium: Should drive efficiency
	Document Automation
	Freehand Document Assembly
Negotiation	Document mananagement system
	Automated contract review	AI contract review and markup tools
	Manual review assistance	Comparison, formatting tools,
	Negotiation platforms/portal
Execution	Execution Approval
	Digital execution
Contract Management	Contract management
	Metadata extraction
	Obligation management
Tracking	Onboarding process management
	Legal term benchmarking

With gratitude to Alex Hamilton for setting this out in his excellent book Sign Here, here is a functional breakdown of the contract tech landscape — as Alex points out, any of these functions are captured by more than one tool — itself a commercial problem for Vendors, becasue no-one likes to buy duplications: