Legaltech landscape
| Phase | Function | Description | Management appreciation factor | Implementation hassle | Lawyer acceptance factor | Glamour factor | Iatrogenic factor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Phase of contract process | What is the innovation? | What does the bit of kit do? | How excited will management be about this? | How much of a pain in the fundament is getting the kit in, setting it up and getting it to work? | Once implemented, how realistic is it 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 | Medium: This all falls on legal operations though, so you may confidently assume it will be done. | 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 | Low: Could be as easy as an intranet page or SharePoint. Legal operations as to do it. | Medium: anything that pushes NDAs off the desk has to be a good thing. | Low: Hardly rocket science | 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, but part of that ineffable world of legal eagles that management doesn’t understand | Low to Medium: Requires a bit of vision and there is quite a bit of faffing around configuring it, and them ownership and so on, but a useful tool once implemented. | |||
| 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: