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Legaltech landscape: Difference between revisions
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{| class="wikitable sortable" style="text-align: left;" | {| class="wikitable sortable" style="text-align: left;" | ||
!Phase | !<small>Phase</small> | ||
!Function | !<small>Function</small> | ||
!Description | !<small>Description</small> | ||
!Management appreciation factor | !<small>Management appreciation factor</small> | ||
!Implementation hassle | !<small>Implementation hassle</small> | ||
!Lawyer acceptance factor | !<small>Lawyer acceptance factor</small> | ||
! | !<small>Iatrogenic factor</small> | ||
|- style="vertical-align: top;" | |- style="vertical-align: top;" | ||
|''Phase of contract process'' | |''<small>Phase of contract process</small>'' | ||
|''What is the innovation?'' | |''<small>What is the innovation?</small>'' | ||
|''What does the bit of kit do?'' | |''<small>What does the bit of kit do?</small>'' | ||
|''How excited will management be about this?'' | |''<small>How excited will management be about this?</small>'' | ||
|''How much of a pain in the fundament is getting the kit in, setting it up and getting it to work?'' | |''<small>How much of a pain in the fundament is getting the kit in, setting it up and getting it to work?</small>'' | ||
|''Once implemented, how realistic is | |''<small>Once implemented, how realistic is wholehearted embrace?</small>'' | ||
|'' | |''<small>Risk of inadvertently entrenching rent-seeking behaviour?</small>'' | ||
|- style="vertical-align: top;" | |- style="vertical-align: top;" | ||
| rowspan="3" "3" style="vertical-align: middle;"|'''Initiation''' | | rowspan="3" "3" style="vertical-align: middle;"|'''<small>Initiation</small>''' | ||
| | |<small>Legal fees bid management system</small> | ||
|An auction portal for seeking competitive bids on external legal advisory projects | |<small>An auction portal for seeking competitive bids on external legal advisory projects</small> | ||
|'''High''': delivers control, visibility, metrics and cost pressure on external counsel | |<small>'''High''': delivers control, visibility, metrics and cost pressure on external counsel</small> | ||
|'''Medium''': This all falls on [[legal operations]] though, so you may confidently assume it will be done. | |<small>'''Medium''': This all falls on [[legal operations]] though, so you may confidently assume it will be done.</small> | ||
|'''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. | |<small>'''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.</small> | ||
| | |<small>'''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”.</small> | ||
|- style="vertical-align: top;" | |- style="vertical-align: top;" | ||
|Self-service portal | |<small>Self-service portal</small> | ||
|A place where Sales can go to get pre-appoved legal forms to send out without vetting | |<small>A place where Sales can go to get pre-appoved legal forms to send out without vetting</small> | ||
|'''High''': Speeds things up and pushes away low value work from Legal | |<small>'''High''': Speeds things up and pushes away low value work from Legal</small> | ||
|'''Low''': Could be as easy as an intranet page or SharePoint. [[Legal operations]] as to do it. | |<small>'''Low''': Could be as easy as an intranet page or SharePoint. [[Legal operations]] as to do it.</small> | ||
|'''Medium''': anything that pushes NDAs off the desk has to be a good thing. | |<small>'''Medium''': anything that pushes NDAs off the desk has to be a good thing.</small> | ||
| | |<small>'''Low''': disintermediates unnecessary legal touch.</small> | ||
|- style="vertical-align: top;" | |- style="vertical-align: top;" | ||
|Initiation and prioritisation tool | |<small>Initiation and prioritisation tool</small> | ||
|A system for queueing prospects, getting necessary information and prioritising before starting negotiation | |<small>A system for queueing prospects, getting necessary information and prioritising before starting negotiation</small> | ||
|'''High''': Good oversight of process, good MIS | |<small>'''High''': Good oversight of process, good MIS</small> | ||
| | |<small>'''High''': It’s largely a tech and operational job, but it will span several silos. Design of the tool, ownership of and responsibility for it will be an unholy fight.</small> | ||
|'''Medium''': Helps initiate drafting provided it is used properly and information accurately provided | |<small>'''Medium''': Helps initiate drafting provided it is used properly and information accurately provided</small> | ||
| | |<small>'''Low''': Disintermediates. Provides simple information inputs and disciplines personnel to follow process.</small> | ||
|- style="vertical-align: top;" | |- style="vertical-align: top;" | ||
| rowspan="3" style="vertical-align: middle;"|'''Drafting''' | | rowspan="3" style="vertical-align: middle;"|'''<small>Drafting</small>''' | ||
|Template Management | |<small>Template Management</small> | ||
|Centralised templates database or clause library for approving and warehousing approved forms and boilerplate | |<small>Centralised templates database or clause library for approving and warehousing approved forms and boilerplate</small> | ||
|'''Medium''': Should drive efficiency, but part of that ineffable world of [[legal eagles]] that management doesn’t understand | |<small>'''Medium''': Should drive efficiency, but part of that ineffable world of [[legal eagles]] that management doesn’t understand</small> | ||
| | |<small>'''High''': Quite a lot of implementation, and legal ops will be disinterested. Once implemented, a lot of work to sort and upload templates, compare them, weed them out, and assign owners to them, which noone will want to do.</small> | ||
|<small>'''Medium''': A useful productivity tool once implemented, saving a lot of tedious bureaucracy, and a good platform for standardisation and quality control later on.</small> | |||
| | |<small>'''Depends''' on how implemented: this could be a fulltime career for a squadron of nosey parkers, or it could be light touch and self-service tool.</small> | ||
|- style="vertical-align: top;" | |- style="vertical-align: top;" | ||
|Document | |[[Document assembly|<small>Document automation</small>]] | ||
| | |<small>A preconfigured questionnaire to generate first drafts of standardised contracts.</small> | ||
| | |<small>'''High''': This is genuine high-five, look-at-me stuff: potential for handsome [[MIS]] is great. Also, it ''pitches'' really well. Reg tech providers love it.</small> | ||
| | |<small>'''Very high''': requires input from lawyers, legal ops and reg tech providers. You have to extract the logic from your templates, code it, and build a machine to make it. Ongoing maintenance a chore, too.</small> | ||
| | |<small>'''Theoretically high, practically low''': one of those things that seems great in concept, but sucks in practice. User becomes a form filler-outer. No lawyer wants that.</small> | ||
| | |<small>'''High''': highly likely to take a bad contract situation and make it worse. Maintenance of templates becomes an IT ticket: expensive, slow, and out of lawyers’s hands.</small> | ||
| | |||
|- style="vertical-align: top;" | |- style="vertical-align: top;" | ||
|Freehand Document Assembly | |<small>Freehand Document Assembly</small> | ||
| | |<small>An add-in to word to allow lawyers to access the inhouse clause library to quickly assemble novel drafts from standard building blocks.</small> | ||
| | |<small>'''Low''': What do I care? All the cool stuff is a function of the template management system it feeds off (if you haven’t got one of those, forget about it).</small> | ||
| | |<small>'''Low''': Assuming you can find the software, it is a straightfoward plugin. This is the basic promise of a distributed end-to-end system.</small> | ||
| | |<small>'''High''': this is a neat tool that saves time and ensures I don’t forget anything. What is not to like?</small> | ||
| | |<small>'''Low''': Disintermediates nicely.</small> | ||
|- style="vertical-align: top;" | |- style="vertical-align: top;" | ||
| rowspan="4" "3" style="vertical-align: middle;"|'''[[Negotiation]]''' | | rowspan="4" "3" style="vertical-align: middle;"|'''[[Negotiation|<small>Negotiation</small>]]''' | ||
|Document mananagement system | |[[Document mananagement system|<small>Document mananagement system</small>]] | ||
| | |<small>A matter management system for creating drafts, storing emails, documents, version controls, and collaborating</small> | ||
| | |<small>'''Yuuuuge''': This is the daddy. A DMS promises to give the lawyers infinite productivity and workflow, while delivering management total detail about what every lawyer does.<ref>It soundly breaks that promise, though not really by any fault of its own.</ref></small> | ||
| | |<small>'''Immense'''. A multi-year project to extract your legal team from infrastructure the rest of the firm uses and put them on a “better” system. And that’s before you try to integrate it into your external spend control regime.</small> | ||
| | |<small>'''High in theory, low in practice''': [[Legal eagle]]<nowiki/>s think this is what they want: when presented it, they find their byzantine folder structure in Outlook PSTs wasn’t so bad after all.</small> | ||
| | |<small>'''Higher than it ought to be'''. Suddenly there are information security officers, usage monitoring metrics, champion groups and stakeholder surveys</small> | ||
| | |||
|- style="vertical-align: top;" | |- style="vertical-align: top;" | ||
|Automated contract review | |[[Contract analysis|<small>Automated contract review</small>]] | ||
|AI | |<small>AI — call it [[Neural network|neural networks]], [[machine learning]], or some [[Proverbial school-leaver from Bucharest|school-leavers from Bucharest]] —reviewing and marking up standard form contacts.</small> | ||
| | |<small>'''High''': Because it presents, misleadingly, as low-hanging fruit, legal operations folk glom onto this as a way of making waves. Plus, the [[General counsel|GC]] hears AI and thinks “[[2001: A Space Odyssey|HAL 9000]]” and not “glamourised deltaview plus temps in Gdansk” as she really should.</small> | ||
| | |<small>'''Low''': If you make the mistake of displaying any interest, replying to their email, vendors will be at you like a plague of locusts and will never let you go. all you need is a playbook and remember the email address.</small> | ||
| | |<small>'''Low''': It reduces lawyers to form fillers, the form takes too long to come back, and it’s easy just to do it yourself. Full analysis [[Contract analysis|here]].</small> | ||
| | |<small>'''High''': A job your team used to do off the side of the desk now costs £400k annually, and requires a weaponised procurement and internal audit system.</small> | ||
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|- style="vertical-align: top;" | |- style="vertical-align: top;" | ||
|Manual review assistance | |<small>Manual review assistance</small> | ||
|Comparison, formatting tools, | |<small>[[Document comparison|Comparison]], formatting tools,</small> | ||
| | |<small>'''Low to nil''': This is not exciting, the procurement people will hate it, and IT will say things like “why don’t you just use document comparison function in word?”</small> | ||
| | |<small>'''Low''': Usually a plugin to Word, though undoubtedly will be some configuration clashes with some other filters and metadata analysers already in use.</small> | ||
| | |<small>'''Medium''': lawyers ought to love the productivity bump: they’re good with deltaview, but tend to leavev the formatting and janitorial stuff alone.</small> | ||
| | |<small>'''Low''': No humans required. Genuine disintermediation. Puts power in lawyers’ hands.</small> | ||
|- style="vertical-align: top;" | |- style="vertical-align: top;" | ||
|Negotiation platforms/portal | |<small>Negotiation platforms/portal</small> | ||
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|- style="vertical-align: top;" | |- style="vertical-align: top;" | ||
| rowspan="2" "3" style="vertical-align: middle;"|'''[[Execution]]''' | | rowspan="2" "3" style="vertical-align: middle;"|'''[[Execution|<small>Execution</small>]]''' | ||
|Execution Approval | |<small>Execution Approval</small> | ||
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|- style="vertical-align: top;" | |- style="vertical-align: top;" | ||
|Digital execution | |<small>Digital execution</small> | ||
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|- style="vertical-align: top;" | |- style="vertical-align: top;" | ||
| rowspan="3" "3" style="vertical-align: middle;"|'''Contract Management''' | | rowspan="3" "3" style="vertical-align: middle;"|'''<small>Contract Management</small>''' | ||
|Contract management | |<small>Contract management</small> | ||
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|- style="vertical-align: top;" | |- style="vertical-align: top;" | ||
|Metadata extraction | |<small>Metadata extraction</small> | ||
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|- style="vertical-align: top;" | |- style="vertical-align: top;" | ||
|Obligation management | |<small>Obligation management</small> | ||
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|- style="vertical-align: top;" | |- style="vertical-align: top;" | ||
| rowspan="2" "3" style="vertical-align: middle;"|'''Tracking''' | | rowspan="2" "3" style="vertical-align: middle;"|'''<small>Tracking</small>''' | ||
|Onboarding process management | |<small>Onboarding process management</small> | ||
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|- style="vertical-align: top;" | |- style="vertical-align: top;" | ||
|Legal term benchmarking | |<small>Legal term benchmarking</small> | ||
| | |<small>Heatmaps for determining which of your contract provisions are most hotly negotiated</small> | ||
| | |<small>'''High''': Plays to the “[[high-modernist]], I can control everything by [[data]]” mindset.</small> | ||
| | |<small>'''High''': involves you having implemented a ton of other innovations first. If you have, and they are working, it should be easy enough to generate. But you won’t have, and they won’t be.</small> | ||
| | |<small>'''Medium''': if lawyers are allowed to freely interrogate the data. But, being “data” it will be kept at arms”s length and they will have to raise a ticket and wait to days to see any of it.</small> | ||
| | |<small>'''High''': In order for it to be available, let alone working, there must already be a [[military-industrial complex]] of rent-seeking already in place.</small> | ||
|} | |} | ||
With gratitude to {{author|Alex Hamilton}} for setting this out in his excellent book {{br|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: | With gratitude to {{author|Alex Hamilton}} for setting this out in his excellent book {{br|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: | ||