Legal tech for in-house lawyers is coming of age

The legal tech­nol­o­gy renais­sance is here, final­ly. The legal sec­tor is tra­di­tion­al­ly tagged as an archa­ic indus­try that is slow to accept and adopt change. How­ev­er, a gen­er­a­tional shift in legal lead­er­ship has led to a will­ing­ness to har­ness the poten­tial of tech­nol­o­gy in gen­er­al and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) in par­tic­u­lar.

Sto­ries of the use of legal tech, and AI specif­i­cal­ly, among major law firms that are striv­ing to pro­vide their cus­tomer with true val­ue-add expe­ri­ence are well doc­u­ment­ed. Less known is the grow­ing rev­o­lu­tion among in-house legal depart­ments of cor­po­ra­tions to trans­form their legal func­tion dig­i­tal­ly using AI-pow­ered tech­nolo­gies.

This is no truer than for con­tract man­age­ment where those in gen­er­al coun­sel posi­tions are now tak­ing deci­sive lead­er­ship roles in trans­form­ing this broad­er busi­ness func­tion through the use of tech­nol­o­gy.

That ter­rain is vast­ly dif­fer­ent from where we were even six years ago when I left a career as a prac­tis­ing com­mer­cial lawyer to start Con­tract­Po­dAi. I estab­lished the organ­i­sa­tion as an end-to-end con­tract man­age­ment plat­form “designed by lawyers, for lawyers” with built-in out-of-the-box work­flows and func­tion­al­i­ty to meet the scal­ing demands of in-house legal teams in rela­tion to con­tract man­age­ment.

At that stage, the gen­er­al coun­sel with a cor­po­rate busi­ness was, at best, an influ­encer in the deci­sion-mak­ing process for procur­ing any legal soft­ware. Fast for­ward to 2018 and gen­er­al coun­sel mem­bers are now the clear deci­sion-mak­ers when it comes to pur­chas­ing legal tech­nol­o­gy.

Fur­ther­more, they have spe­cif­ic bud­gets allot­ted for pur­chas­ing these soft­ware and new roles, such as legal engi­neers and legal oper­a­tions man­agers, are grow­ing ram­pant­ly as the bal­ance of pow­er with­in the sec­tor moves to stronger, more deci­sive in-house legal teams.

The game-chang­er for our suc­cess has been the addi­tion of EV, our end-to-end AI con­tract ana­lyst

Journey so far

In many ways, Con­tract­Po­dAi has been a bene­fac­tor of this tec­ton­ic mar­ket change; in a short, six-year peri­od we have evolved from an upstart to becom­ing one of the world’s fastest-grow­ing legal tech providers. We have sup­port­ed dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion projects for in-house legal teams of some of the world’s largest cor­po­ra­tions. With­in the last 12 months, we have com­plet­ed more than 40 such enter­prise imple­men­ta­tions.

The game-chang­er for our suc­cess has been the addi­tion of EV, our end-to-end AI con­tract ana­lyst. EV is pow­ered by IBM Wat­son, devel­oped by senior com­mer­cial lawyers, and rig­or­ous­ly test­ed, using thou­sands of con­tracts’ worth of train­ing. It can read, analyse and inter­pret legal lan­guage with­in con­tracts and pro­vide the user with a near-instant sum­ma­ry of prin­ci­pal legal oblig­a­tions.

AI tech­nol­o­gy auto­mat­i­cal­ly pop­u­lates these oblig­a­tions into the plat­form, sav­ing lawyers hun­dreds of work­ing hours in review­ing con­tracts and abstract­ing key legal infor­ma­tion.

While our suc­cess has been over­whelm­ing­ly excit­ing, I am a firm believ­er that we have only scratched the sur­face with­in this mar­ket seg­ment. Tech­nol­o­gy providers will need to focus on ease of use, com­pet­i­tive pric­ing and quick­er imple­men­ta­tions to dri­ve more holis­tic and faster dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion for in-house coun­sel.

Key elements

I am often asked whether dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion is sim­ply about buy­ing the right soft­ware for a par­tic­u­lar organ­i­sa­tion. There is no ques­tion that is a most cer­tain­ly a start­ing point and time should be tak­en to deter­mine the cor­rect tech. But while think­ing about imple­men­ta­tion, gen­er­al coun­sel need to con­sid­er four key ele­ments of man­ag­ing imple­men­ta­tion from both a finan­cial bud­get­ing and resourc­ing per­spec­tive.

These are the best legal tech plat­form; IT infra­struc­ture, includ­ing host­ing whether on-site or in the cloud; legal engi­neer­ing; and machine-learn­ing sup­port, in the case of AI-pow­ered solu­tions.

We, at Con­tract­Po­dAi, dif­fer­en­ti­ate our­selves from most of our com­pe­ti­tion by pro­vid­ing all four of these ele­ments as part of our legal AI as-a-ser­vice fee struc­ture, thus sav­ing in-house coun­sel time and mon­ey to pro­cure all the four ele­ments sep­a­rate­ly.

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it www.contractpodai.com