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: