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Episode summary:
A short summary of Clarilis a new breed of doc automation tool, as well as an interview with James Quinn, Clarilis CEO.
Episode transcript (What does Clarilis do?)
This week we are talking about one of the first disruptive technologies ever introduced to lawyers, document automation, one that many lawyers are now very familiar with, but still not all have adopted. For that, we will be learning about Clarilis and how they are approaching doc automation in their own way, as well as speaking with James Quinn, Clarilis CEO to get his thoughts.
In a nutshell, doc automation tools are exactly what they sound like, they allow the automated generation of usually complex contracts to be done in a semi-automated way, so that you can draft complex documents in less time, but also importantly reduce risk of drafting errors too. Usually this is done by asking a user to complete a questionnaire about their business situation, the application can then take the data entered and responses to create a tailored document from an existing template or set of standard clauses.
This tech tends to get used in two typical ways, at one end of the spectrum supporting the drafting of really time consuming documents like share purchase agreements or syndicated loan agreements where simply changing a single defined term, company name or pronoun can result in hundreds of changes throughout the documents, alternatively for very simple documents like NDAs it can allow you to make them self-service, reducing business friction.
To some of you listening that might have been old news, solutions like Hot Docs and Contract Express have been on the market for quite a while, so what is Clarilis doing differently that sets it apart?
Principally Clarilis differs in its approach by having its web-based interface be organised around a transaction rather than a single required document like other solutions. This means that Clarilis can be used to automate a whole suite of documents needed for a matter in one fell swoop. Technically this is something you can also achieve with other tools, but is just a lot more complicated to do given their document centred interface.
One further differentiator that Clarilis is keen to emphasise is their managed service that comes packaged with its software subscription. In this the Clarilis team of lawyers provides professional services to do the full contract automation setup and ongoing maintenance, all you have to do is share your existing contract templates, then they can work back from those to setup the necessary automation.
This offering is useful not because setting up doc automation is incredibly technically difficult, most systems are pretty user friendly even for lawyers. It's useful because setting up tools like these can be organisationally difficult, requiring collaboration between different teams and an investment of time to setup more complex automation. Realistically though lawyers have to prioritise their time for client work and so just want to use an out-of-the-box solution, which is exactly what this is.
Episode transcript (Who should use Clarilis?)
It can be seen from how the market has developed that doc auto is probably best suited for use by lawyers practicing at law firms, and Clarilis is no different. It’s not to say that there are no use cases at in-house teams, just that the highest value use cases like repeat corporate transactions are more frequently handled by outside counsel.
Although Clarilis is more than capable of supporting large firms it may appeal most to mid-market firms as a result of the packaged consulting services. These would be beneficial for any sized firm, but particularly mid-size firms that may not have the internal resources to dedicate to design, build and maintain the doc automation.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit legaltechtapas.substack.com -
Episode summary:
A short summary of ThoughtRiver an AI contract negotiation tool, as well as an interview with Tim Pullan, ThoughtRiver CEO.
Episode transcript (What does ThoughtRiver do?):
After a brief departure on the show this episode we are returning to look at AI contract negotiation tools, the original comfort food of the podcast. As part of that, we’ll be digging in to a portion of ThoughtRiver and are delighted to share that meal with Tim Pullan, ThoughtRiver CEO.
For those that have been tuning in to the podcast for a while you'll know that we've covered quite a few AI contract negotiation tools in the past, LawGeex, Scissero and Legalsifter to name a few. All of these are tools that help you to review and mark up third party contracts more quickly, although many of the tools can be used for large contract review projects as well.
ThoughtRiver approaches contract review using AI to boil a contract down to its constituent points of meaning using something they call the Lexible Framework. An easy way to think about the Lexible Framework is essentially as just a list of questions you might want to ask about a contract, for example "does it auto-renew?" or "is the indemnity mutual?". Once this analysis is concluded ThoughRiver then compares the answers to these questions with what is considered acceptable from your businesses' playbook, if something is found that appears to deviate from what is acceptable it's flagged as a risk for further review.
To give you a topical example, if you were reviewing a contract for Force Majeure, ThoughtRiver would not just tell you whether that clause is present or not in the contract, which really wouldn’t be that helpful because we know Force Majeure is in most contracts. Instead it could answer the question “Does Force Majeure include or exclude payment obligations?”. Now whether excluding payment obligations is a good thing for you will depend on whether you are customer or a vendor, so then ThoughtRiver compares this point to your playbook to find that out.
At this point you might be thinking this sounds great, but configuring my negotiation playbook in the application is going to be difficult, and you are probably right, fully configuring your playbook for every contract type and eventuality might be hard. Many companies don’t even have their playbook formally written down anyway. However, ThoughtRiver does have a neat feature that goes some way to help with that. Instead of manually setting all your policies in the application, if you upload your own contract template ThoughtRiver will analyse it and configure negotiation responses for you by mimicking language that's in that contract. Additionally in the tool there are some sensible pre-set negotiation notes and clause suggestions you can use.
In terms of leveraging all of this functionality, ThoughtRiver has decided to keep the traditionalists happy offering a plugin that shows you all the results while you are working directly in MS Word, alternatively you can also view them in the contract viewer within ThoughtRiver, up to you.
Episode transcript (Who should use ThoughtRiver?):
I’ve mentioned a few times on the show that tools like ThoughtRiver are best suited to those that negotiate a higher volume of contracts, so I won’t labour that point again.
Instead I’ll say this, primarily ThoughtRiver and other similar tools are best for those that negotiate 3rd party contracts, procurement teams could be a good example. Third party contracts take longer to review when you have to reconcile what they say with what you can accept, which is exactly what ThoughtRiver is good at. If you are negotiating contracts that start from your paper, you still have issues don’t get me wrong, but reconciling what has changed with what you can accept just isn’t as hard to do.
About ThoughtRiver:
ThoughtRiver addresses a fundamental problem for lawyers (in-house and private practice): you simply don’t know which part of a contract to focus on without reading it all. In doing so we also address a key problem for CEOs, "how do I increase deal velocity?" Our automated contract review technology speeds up the contracting process by reading the contract, answering key legal questions and then serving up detailed advice and guiding users through remediation within Microsoft Word. The end result is a team of more efficient lawyers who directly increase deal velocity allowing companies to pull revenues forward.
About Legaltech Tapas:
Legaltech Tapas is a regular podcast that serves up bite sized summaries of the latest legal tools, what they do, and why you might use them. Each episode discusses a different legal tool, and includes an interview with a guest from that company so you can hear directly from the horses mouth why you should be using their product. To get the next episode direct to your inbox, sign up @ https://legaltechtapas.substack.com or follow us on Twitter @legaltechtapas.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit legaltechtapas.substack.com -
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Episode summary:
A short summary of Athennian a legal entity management tool, as well as an interview with Adrian Camara, Athennian CEO.
Episode transcript (What does Athennian do?)
For a change this week we will be looking at a legal tool that doesn’t claim to use any AI (for the time being at least), an entity management application Athennian, that makes it easy for businesses to keep track of and manage their corporate records. Joining us to talk about all that and more will be Adrian Camara, Athenian Founder and CEO.
Now legal entity management may not seem like the sexiest topic in the world, but it is an important and necessary activity for businesses especially those that have complicated entity structures. It's not uncommon for big businesses to have hundreds of different legal entities so they can comply with regulatory regimes or even just do business in different parts of the world. This unfortunately makes staying on top of the reporting requirements time consuming and easy to forget about, which isn’t ideal when missing your reporting deadlines could land you with a hefty penalty. On top of that, managing entities can be labour intensive as you have to deal with multiple parties and antiquated government systems.
In general entity management tools look to solve these problems by doing two things. Firstly, they act as a kind of CRM for your entities keeping all relevant records in a single place, which makes it easier to share that data when regulators or somebody else needs it. Secondly, they help facilitate related workflows like issuing equity, registering new entities or filing your annual reports, so your team can spend less time doing routine paperwork and more time tackling real business problems.
To give you one specific example, if you needed to create a new business entity, Athennian would automatically generate the required documents (share certificates, minutes and the like), submit the registration electronically, automatically store all the entity information and then next year remind you when it is time to file annual reports. Sounds like a lot right? And I haven’t even touched on things like issuing dividends, changing directors or company amalgamations.
However, where Athennian really differs from legacy tools which surprisingly people are still using on-premise, is that it brings these functions in to the cloud, kind of making Athennian the Salesforce of the entity management world. One specific benefit of using Athennian in the cloud, on top of the usual ones, is that Athennian has much better connectivity with government portals and other external systems, meaning that you can register a new entity or e-file your annual reports with the required authorities without having to leave the application.
Episode transcript (Who should use Athennian?)
In general the organisations that benefit from using entity management applications are the ones that have a high volume of entities to manage, which means either law firms that are managing a lot of entities on behalf of clients, or large corporations that tend to have complex entity structures for regulatory, tax or other purposes. If you don’t have a high number of entities then chances are managing your entities is not really much of a pain point for you.
Because this problem is not a new one, many organisations will already have some solution in place. Therefore the organisations I expect will benefit most from Athennian will be the ones that are still using older legacy on-premise solutions. Upgrading to Athennian (or another cloud based offering), would enable them to connect disparate processes that are currently silo’d, creating a seamless flow of information in addition to just storing entity data.
About Athennian:
Athennian.com is the top reviewed legal entity management cloud platform used by the world's leading law firms and legal departments. Integrating entity data management, document assembly, eSign, org charts, and e-file, Athennian is selected by modern legal and tax teams to scale legal entity governance. Athennian offers rapid migration for customers from any legacy database including ALF, CorpLink, EnAct, GlobalAct, EnGlobe, FastCompany, Corporate Focus, Blueprint (Diligent Entities), GEMS, Secretariat, hCue, Effacts and more.
About Legaltech Tapas:
Legaltech Tapas is a regular podcast that serves up bite sized summaries of the latest legal tools, what they do, and why you might use them. Each episode discusses a different legal tool, and includes an interview with a guest from that company so you can hear directly from the horses mouth why you should be using their product. To get the next episode direct to your inbox, sign up @ https://legaltechtapas.substack.com/ or follow us on Twitter @legaltechtapas.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit legaltechtapas.substack.com -
Episode summary:
A short summary of ROSS Intelligence an AI legal research tool, as well as an interview with Andrew Arruda, ROSS Intelligence CEO.
Episode transcript (What does Ross do?)
This week on the show we will be serving up a new take on a classic dish with ROSS Intelligence an AI enabled Legal research tool. ROSS is one of the early pioneers in Legal technology using tech to approach the age old task of legal research a little differently, and to explain all of this we will be joined by none other that Andrew Arruda CEO and Co-founder of Ross.
Now…. legal research tools are not anything particularly new, most lawyers will be familiar with the likes of Westlaw and Lexis which have been on the market for some time. In a nutshell these tools provide an online way to access research materials a lawyer might need when arguing a court case, think statutes, regulations and of course existing case law. So if you need to build and substantiate an argument these tools help you to do that more quickly and more robustly.
Ross of course primarily allows lawyers to access these same materials too, but what ROSS does differently is change the way in which lawyers interact with the research tool itself. Instead of having to detail your search with complicated keyword sets and other selected options, Ross simplifies the experience by letting the user ask a question in natural language. To give an example you might ask ROSS "what is the distinction between a contractor or an employee in NY?” Following which ROSS would bring up a list of relevant cases and also identify which are likely the most relevant for you.
Another fun feature of ROSS is the Doc Analyser this tool among other things automatically finds previous negative citations for cases that you upload to the tool. Using this you could quickly check for weaknesses in the arguments used by opposing counsel and strength check your own. If you aren’t sure exactly what a negative citations is, all you need to know is that cases with more negative citations are less trustworthy.
Episode transcript (Who should use Ross?)
If you are a lawyer supporting litigation in any context you are likely going to need some kind of legal research tool whether it be a newer AI enabled product or one of the classic research tools, so the question is really who stands to benefit most from the advancements ROSS offers.
My expectation is that smaller law firms or even individual practitioners would probably gain the most from using ROSS, basically anyone that doesn't have the substantial number of junior lawyers to throw at legal research that large law firms do. ROSS’s enhanced ability to surface only relevant results makes the workload manageable for a smaller team, while the simplified interface means you don't need to be a research tool specialist to conduct effective research.
ROSS may also appeal more to individual practitioners that work on a contingent fee basis. In those instances you could use the ROSS Doc Analyser to undertake a relatively low effort check on the strength of a certain case before agreeing to take it on, committing your full time and resources to the matter.
About ROSS Intelligence:
ROSS Intelligence, founded in 2015, is building technology to help everyone to obtain the best possible legal outcomes. ROSS’s AI-powered legal research service is the fastest way for lawyers to find all the relevant law they need, enabling them to deliver excellent results to their clients. Today, ROSS is in use at the world's largest law firms, at mid-size and boutique firms, and in solo practices.
About Legaltech Tapas:
Legaltech Tapas is a regular podcast that serves up bite sized summaries of the latest legal tools, what they do, and why you might use them. Each episode discusses a different legal tool, and includes an interview with a guest from that company so you can hear directly from the horses mouth why you should be using their product. To get the next episode direct to your inbox, sign up @ https://legaltechtapas.substack.com/ or follow us on Twitter @legaltechtapas.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit legaltechtapas.substack.com -
Episode summary:
A short summary of Juro an contract management and collaboration tool, as well as an interview with Richard Mabey, Juro CEO.
Episode Transcript (What does Juro do?)
So on the menu this week we have London based Juro, an end to end contract management tool that combines flavours of contract generation, negotiation and ongoing contract management. Later on we’ll also be joined by Richard Mabey, Juro CEO to get his perspective on where Juro sits in the market and where it is going.
Because Juro seems to straddle a few different categories of tool I want to give a quick summary of each of those so people know what we are talking about.
Firstly, contract generation tools, typically these are workflow tools that enable business users to quickly generate tailored contracts within the constraints set by their legal or leadership teams, rather than having to get a contract from someone.
Secondly, negotiation tools as we have covered on the show before are review tools that increase the speed at which a contract reviewer can negotiate a contract. Often they incorporate AI functionality to locate clauses, but not always.
And finally, contract management systems, these act as a repository of contract data, enabling management of contract obligations via alerts and also the generation of reports and visualisations for leadership decision making. Confusingly however there can be overlap as in order to get access to the data these systems often incorporating the first two tools mentioned as well.
Back to Juro now….in plain English what does it have?
Well, it has an interface for legal teams to create template contracts and then if you are a sales person or HR person in that business, a way to request them without having to go to legal. It has a word style document editor for doing contract redlines with the counter party, an e-signature tool and a nicely designed contract approval workflow. None of this is particularly unique on its own, but Juro really stands out for packaging these features nicely in a consumer-like clear and appealing UI.
In terms of AI functionality Juro doesn’t have the same depth of AI that other tools do, only being able to auto-locate a few more basic data points in a contract.
The built-in reports and visualisations are also not as configurable as you might find in other products, but that might not matter to you as it has integrations with both Salesforce and Greenhouse (the HR tool), which you might prefer to use for reporting anyway.
I think at a high level I think it would be fair to summarise Juro as a Contract Management System light. One that has focused on user design rather than comprehensive feature coverage like some larger existing players.
Episode Transcript (Who should use Juro?)
Now that we’ve heard the pitch and have a sense of where Juro sits, who do we think should use it?
The integrations, simplicity and well designed interface of Juro I think generally lend themselves for use by external facing business teams (e.g. Sales, HR, Customer Success), teams that traditionally have been frustrated with the lack of control, visibility and speed of the contracting process.
The design-centric collaborative document editor and approval flows, helps those non-legal teams to easily understand where they are in the contracting process as well as what they need to do to move things forward.
Juro's design first approach would also be a good fit for organisations keen to improve their customer's contract experience. A testament to this being that even though contracts can be downloaded from Juro and redlined in Word, 98% of counter-parties choose to remain in Juro throughout the negotiation process.
Juro however cannot be all things to all people, and as a result of its simplicity I could see larger Legal teams being disappointed with limited functionality in areas like reporting, ongoing obligation management or AI. Larger Legal teams might do well by using Juro as a secondary tool or in conjunction with other systems.
About Juro:
Juro is an end-to-end contract collaboration and management platform that helps businesses agree terms faster, while giving deep insight into contract data. The AI-enabled system offers contract creation, negotiation, e-signing and analytics, saving businesses like Deliveroo, Reach plc and Skyscanner up to 96% of time spent on contracts. Visit Juro to find out more about contract management.
About Legaltech Tapas:
Legaltech Tapas is a regular podcast that serves up bite sized summaries of the latest legal tools, what they do, and why you might use them. Each episode discusses a different legal tool, and includes an interview with a guest from that company so you can hear directly from the horses mouth why you should be using their product. To get the next episode direct to your inbox, sign up @ https://legaltechtapas.substack.com/
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit legaltechtapas.substack.com -
Episode summary:
A short summary of LawGeex an AI contract negotiation tool, as well as an interview with Noory Bechor, LawGeex CEO.
Episode transcript (What does LawGeex do?)
This week I’m genuinely excited to be learning about LawGeex, an AI tool in the contract negotiation arena, and yes we have already covered Scissero and Legalsifter in this space, but hopefully this episode will make it easier for you to put some distance between all of them. In particular I'm interested in LawGeex because they have been going through a lot of change since they took a $12m investment round last year, and we are fortunate enough to be talking about some of those changes with LawGeex CEO, Noory Bechor.
Just to do a quick refresh for everyone, tools in the AI Contract Negotiation category are tools intended to help with the back and forth negotiation and redlining of day to day contracts, with the aim of helping you do that more quickly, more consistently and with fewer errors.
For those already familiar with LawGeex, you'll know that like other AI tools on the market it automatically locates clauses in contracts to speed up review time and also lets you configure some logic based on your standards. For example you can tell the tool to only accept governing law in a contract if it is New York. Typically LawGeex focuses this functionality on the simpler high frequency contracts, NDAs and the like.
Something however that separates LawGeex from most tools on the market is that they have technology plus service offering, not just technology. Back at LawGeex HQ there is a permanent team of human lawyers double checking uploaded contracts in situations where the AI raises its hand and says "I struggled a bit on this one can you help me out”.
If you've used LawGeex before you’ll know that in previous versions there was a user interface that let you review changes and make edits, but in what is a pretty dramatic departure from that, LawGeex has now done away almost entirely with its user interface, opting instead to have you simply submit and receive contracts via email, a format most lawyers are probably more comfortable with. Really the only interface that’s still there is one that allows your to do the setup and configuration of what your contract policies are.
As if that wasn’t a dramatic enough, LawGeex has one more trick up its sleeve. They now also claim to be using AI to automatically edit contract language in line with your particular policies, not simply locating language and flagging issues as we've seen before. This would make it a direct challenger to Scissero which claims to have pioneered this technology in the market. However, now that LawGeex doesn’t have much of a user interface it is quite hard to actually see the technology in action, as you just receive back the redlined contracts, which may also have been reviewed by their in-house lawyers.
Episode transcript (Who should useLawGeex?)
So who wants to use LawGeex?
Given this is the third tool in this category we've covered, I think we can safely assume that the AI assistance is going to speed up and improve contract review, with efficiency and quality benefits being greatest for large organisations.
For LawGeex now that they have pared down their user interface I can see them in particular appealing to larger change resistant organisations, lawyers will be able to maintain their existing email workflow and shouldn’t have to adapt or learn much. The caveat to this being that upfront configuration of policies will still be needed during implementation, it is hard to know exactly how much effort this will require as it will vary based on organisation requirements.
The additional option of human reviewers that LawGeex offers in-house might also appeal to first time adopters of AI that are looking for some extra quality guarantees, even the best AI can’t be 100% right all the time. Speaking from experience though, this may present an additional security hurdle for some businesses to overcome, so perhaps isn’t for everyone.
About LawGeex:
LawGeex automates the review of everyday contracts through its AI Contract Review Automation (CRA) platform, ensuring contracts are compliant with company policies. LawGeex saves up to 90% of contract review time and cost, allowing lawyers to focus on impactful work. It enables legal teams to reduce risk while supporting business growth, and helps ensure that review guidelines are up-to-date and applied consistently. LawGeex is recognized by Gartner, Red Herring, Wired magazine, and CB Insights as a leading force in bringing innovation and technology to the legal world – and is trusted by global firms such as eBay and White & Case.
About Legaltech Tapas:
Legaltech Tapas is a regular podcast that serves up bite sized summaries of the latest legal tools, what they do, and why you might use them. Each episode discusses a different legal tool, and includes an interview with a guest from that company so you can hear directly from the horses mouth why you should be using their product. To get the next episode direct to your inbox, sign up @ https://legaltechtapas.substack.com/
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit legaltechtapas.substack.com -
Episode summary:
A short summary of Neota Logic a no-code automation tool, as well as an interview with Jackson Liu, Go-To-Market Strategy Lead at Neota Logic.
Episode transcript (What does Neota Logic do?)
On the show today we will be getting a taste for Neota Logic, a no-code automation tool that helps lawyers build their own legal apps. For those not familiar with the no-code automation term you may also have heard it referred to as an expert system. At the highest level these are software tools that let users build new software applications (in this case legal focused apps) and you can do this without having to learn a technical programming language. As a result lawyers that have in-depth understanding of particular problems or subject matter areas, but that are not technically minded can still build software solutions to address particular problems.
As you might guess, Neota has a nice, simple user interface that lets you build applications, largely by dragging and dropping objects around the screen (which they refer to as a ‘canvas'). Although this is quite versatile and could be used to create a wide variety of different apps, in practice the two most common uses are for digital advice apps and document creation apps.
In case you were wondering what those apps actually are, I’ll give you some quick examples. An example of a digital advice app would be something like a data breach advisor app, where if a user in your business provides the relevant context of a recent breach to the app it can offer legal advice on the most appropriate immediate actions to take, as well as informing the required people in your business automatically. And document creation apps are as you’d expect, they allow non-legal users to request contracts without going to their legal team simply by entering the key required data.
So other than creating apps does it do anything else?
Well ….Yes, behind the scenes Neota has a relational database that collects data entered via any of the apps you've built as well as from other sources linked via integrations. Now this may not sound super exciting to the average person, but because Neota is a no-code environment this means that users who traditionally would need technical support from a SQL developer to query a database are now able to find and access information themselves.
And if all this app development is still sounding a little daunting….well Neota has you covered with an existing app template library, so rather than having to build from scratch, you can start with an existing template and just tweak it from there as you need.
Episode transcript (Who should use Neota Logic?)
We’ve heard a few examples of how you can use Neota, but who should be using it? And why?
As I see it principle benefit of Neota Logic is that it enables non-technical SMEs to build apps they otherwise wouldn’t, immortalising their expertise in a tool so it can be utilised at scale and even continue to be used if that SME later leaves the organisation.
And in today’s business environment with its never ending quest for greater efficiency Neota offers an opportunity to use technology to address very company specific problems, ones that larger software vendors might not be interested in addressing because they are too niche and wouldn’t necessarily be a scalable business for them.
So if you have a complex or unique business where your legal processes are just stored in your employees heads, Neota might be something worth considering.
About Neota Logic:
Neota Logic provides no-code artificial intelligence software for automating legal and other professional service delivery. Neota Logic's platform allows clients to rapidly automate their professional expertise, helping to improve the quality of legal and business decisions while reducing risks and costs. For more information, visit www.neotalogic.com
About Legaltech Tapas:
Legaltech Tapas is a regular podcast that serves up bite sized summaries of the latest legal tools, what they do, and why you might use them. Each episode discusses a different legal tool, and includes an interview with a guest from that company so you can hear directly from the horses mouth why you should be using their product. To get the next episode direct to your inbox, sign up @ https://legaltechtapas.substack.com/
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit legaltechtapas.substack.com -
Episode summary:
A short summary of Clause a smart contract creation platform, as well as an interview with Head of Revenue at Clause, Parsa Pezeshki, and Diana Stern, Lawyer and Legal Innovation Designer on the IncuBaker team at BakerHostetler.
Episode transcript (What does Clause do?):
Let’s start with the basics, what is a smart contract? O.K., so exact definitions vary here depending on exactly who you feel like talking to, but typically this means something like an automatic self-executing contract, where the terms of the contract are written as a series of rules a computer can follow. These contracts are often stored on a blockchain, but that doesn’t have to be the case, they could be just saved on your company’s network.
And why would you use them? The same reason you’d automate anything else really. Being able to automate the execution and management of obligations in your contracts will save you time, reduce execution error and provide improved data.
Specifically what Clause is offering us here is a software tool that makes it easier for you to create those smart contracts, think of it as kind of like Microsoft Word but for smart contracts. Usefully Clause realised early on that codifying entire contracts would be difficult to do because in many cases the grey areas of contracts just do not translate into hard and fast rules that a computer can follow. Because of this Clause emphasises using their tool to create smart clauses, which you can then overlay on top of your human language contract rather than creating the entire contract digitally, this allows your to partially automate the obligations which are more clear cut.
Other than just writing those smart clauses, the platform also helps you to manage some of those contract actions with a growing list of integrations to external tools, things like Slack, Stripe, Docusign and more. Allowing you to automate payments, communications or even just do data entry to your other systems.
This may still be a little abstract to understand for some though, so let’s do a quick example.
Imagine your business has licensed some cloud based software, and as part of that contracts the vendor has an SLA to maintain 99% software availability uptime, if that is not achieved there is a partial refund. Using Clause you could create a smart clause that measured the availability of that website and if it fell below 99% automatically trigger the appropriate refund be sent to your bank account.
Episode transcript (Who should use Clause?):
As far as legal technologies go, smart contracts are certainly a more nascent one, so it is worth posing the question who should start using this?
As with most enterprise technology there is some initial effort to implement the tool. So you need to make sure the benefits will offset the effort.
I’d suggest that organisations where there are complex contracts that require high touch management, over a long period of time, would be a good fit as there is a greater opportunity to automate transactions over that contract life. Likewise if you have high number of standard but single transaction contracts that could be good too.
In order to benefit from the really endless list of things you could do with smart clauses it does help (although is not totally essential) if you are an organisation that already has some good data to work with (supply chain for example), as the smart clauses have to make decisions based on something. It can also really help if you have access to a good internal IT team, because the existing integrations that Clause provides while good, are not likely to cover off every system that you want Clause to integrate with.
Correction: Diana Stern's full title is 'Lawyer and Legal Innovation Designer' on the IncuBaker team at BakerHostetler not 'Product Designer' as stated in the episode
About Clause:
Clause is the leading provider of smart legal contracting technology, enabling users to add Smart Clause® provisions to turn their existing legal agreements into “living documents” that integrate with enterprise software systems and blockchain networks. Companies in industries as diverse as supply chain, insurance, telecom, financial services, retail, and others can use Clause to automate compliance with legally binding contract obligations, reducing operating costs and minimizing revenue leakage. The Clause platform also provides real-time visibility about the contract performance of partners, suppliers, customers, and other counterparties. Connected Contracting® functionality from Clause can be accessed via a web application or the Clause API. Clause’s Smart Clause® technology is a driver of the DocuSign Agreements CloudTM. Clause also established the Accord Project with leading law firms, standards bodies, and technology organizations to develop the foundations of smart legal contracts and distributed ledger applications for transactions. For more information, please visit www.clause.io and contact [email protected].
About BakerHostetler:
Recognized as one of the top firms for client service, BakerHostetler is a leading national law firm that helps clients around the world address their most complex and critical business and regulatory issues. With five core national practice groups – Business, Labor and Employment, Intellectual Property, Litigation, and Tax – the firm has nearly 1,000 lawyers located in 14 offices coast to coast. BakerHostetler is widely regarded as having one of the country’s top 10 tax practices, a nationally recognized litigation practice, an award-winning data privacy practice and an industry-leading business practice. The firm is also recognized internationally for its groundbreaking work recovering more than $13 billion in the Madoff Recovery Initiative, representing the SIPA Trustee for the liquidation of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. Visit bakerlaw.com.
About Legaltech Tapas:
Legaltech Tapas is a regular podcast that serves up bite sized summaries of the latest legal tools, what they do, and why you might use them. Each episode discusses a different legal tool, and includes an interview with a guest from that company so you can hear directly from the horses mouth why you should be using their product.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit legaltechtapas.substack.com -
Episode summary:
A short summary of Scissero an AI contract negotiation tool, as well as an interview with Mathias Strasser, Scissero CEO.
Episode transcript (What does Scissero do?):
Just as a quick refresher for you, tools in the AI Contract Negotiation category are tools intended to help with the back and forth negotiation/redlining of day to day contracts, with the aim of helping you do that more quickly, more consistently and with hopefully less error.
Now, Scissero is a little different to some of the other Negotiation tools, so what is it that it actually does?
Similar to other tools in the space Scissero uses a combination of AI and data science to automatically find clauses in a contract you upload to the tool. Right now Scissero is focused on finding clauses in a smaller set of day to day contracts things like NDAs and Hold Harmless Letters, but no doubt the range of contracts and clauses it can find will only increase over time as the the company grows.
Where Scissero gets interesting though is that it claims to be the first tool that goes one step further than using AI to simply just find a clause, but also then automatically makes wording edits to clauses in a counter-party contract or in response to counter-party redlines.
If you are wondering how the tool knows what changes to make, it has initially been trained by Scissero’s partner law firm, so that is how it knows how to identify clauses and also what wordings would be considered best practice. Scissero does say though they can train the tool to make edits based on your specific standards, but at present it is something they would have to do for you, its not a self service option, so this would be an upfront activity you’d need to work out with them
Finally, Scissero does still have most of the workflow features you’d expect in a negotiation tool, like doc editing and places to save guidance/language for your contract reviewers, just in case you still feel like doing some of the work yourself.
Episode transcript (Who should use Scissero?):
The value of using AI to locate clauses is a well tested one, it speeds up contract review and reduces the chance of reviewer error. However to find an ROI from this my guess is you pwould need to be an organisation that is reviewing a meaningful number of contracts.
When it comes to the automated redlining however, this is certainly newer to the market and I honestly just don’t know how much efficiency people will get from this feature. But I can see how having a machine make contracts edits in a systematic way would help a company to maintain consistent application of their contract standards.
One further thing to consider is that if you do want to tailor the tool, training it for your specific standards, you are going to have to commit some time and also have a reasonable amount of training data to teach the tool. This leads me to suspect that this tool will work best for medium or large organisations that have access to training data and resources.
About Scissero:
Scissero is a cloud-based legal AI platform that can read, draft and mark up legal agreements to a standard that is (almost) indistinguishable from human lawyers. It enhances traditional machine learning approaches with deep domain knowledge to create a legal AI platform that can solve difficult, real-world problems. Scissero has been designed to automatically mark up routine legal agreements (e.g., NDAs) and thus cut both the time needed to negotiate such agreements. Scissero's data extraction technologies can also be used for large-scale repapering exercises and due diligence reporting, such as the impending move from interbank offered rates (IBORs) to alternative risk free rates (RFRs).
About Legaltech Tapas:
Legaltech Tapas is a regular podcast that serves up bite sized summaries of the latest legal tools, what they do, and why you might use them.
Each episode discusses a different legal tool, and includes an interview with a guest from that company so you can hear directly from the horses mouth why you should be using their product.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit legaltechtapas.substack.com -
Episode 1:
A short summary of Legalsifter an AI contract negotiation tool, as well as an interview with Kevin Miller, Legalsifter CEO.
Episode transcript (what does Legalsifter do?):
What are AI Contract Negotiation tools I hear you say. Well Broadly speaking these are software tools that assist you when you are redlining or negotiating a contract. They let you upload that contract to their software at which point AI will automatically locate or change language in that contract, helping the contract reviewer to negotiate a contract more effectively and efficiently.
Right first things first, now we are talking about Legalsifter specifically, so what does it do?
The most important function of LegalSifter is that it has pre-trained AI that knows how to find hundreds of legal concepts, LegalSifter uses this AI (which they call Sifters) to automatically find important parts of the contract and then simply show the user where those clauses are in a friendly interface so that the end user can find the contract sections they care about more quickly and then themselves determine acceptability or not in that particular negotiation.
You are also able to some degree incorporate your businesses specific playbook in to the version of the software that you use. Practically speaking this means that if for example you couldn’t agree to non-competes in your NDAs, you would setup that rule in a dashboard in the tool. Later on when you upload a contract, legal sifter would send you an alert telling you it found a non-compete and you can’t agree to this. It's worth noting though that this function does not review the content of a clauses for acceptable wordings, simply whether a clause in their entirety are present or not.
Moving on from the AI functionalities of the tool for a bit now, Legalsifter does also have a user interface that has been specifically been designed to assist you when redlining a contract. The interface has things that you would expect like a Word style document editor, but also provides places to store things like rationale for certain company positions or fallback language, that way if your contract reviewer needs to make an edit or understand something they have everything they need at their fingertips make those edits more quickly.
Episode transcript (who should use Legalsifter?):
Naturally some organisations will benefit more from this tool than others. Organisations that are spending more time reviewing contracts will likely find greater efficiencies. In order to justify using a tool like this directly you probably need to be reviewing thousands of contracts annually, with those that are reviewing complex 3rd party contracts finding the most benefit. However organisations with lower volumes may still be able to benefit from the technology via one of Legalsifters Law firm partners.
The second major benefit as I see it is the improved review consistency and application of your organisations contract standards. Ensuring that contract standards are being properly implemented can significantly reduce an organisations legal and commercial risk. Therefore organisations with large legal teams and teams especially one that are geographically distributed could benefit more from this than others.
About Legalsifter:
LegalSifter is dedicated to bringing affordable legal services to the world by empowering people with artificial intelligence. LegalSifter intends to achieve its mission by working with the legal profession, not against it. Headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA), LegalSifter offers its products directly to organizations as well as through and with law firms.
About Legaltech Tapas:
Legaltech Tapas is a regular podcast that serves up bite sized summaries of the latest legal tools, what they do, and why you might use them.
Each episode discusses a different legal tool, and includes an interview with a guest from that company so you can hear directly from the horses mouth why you should be using their product.
About the host:
Andrew is a legaltech enthusiast + ex mgt consultant + former Kira Systems employee.
As an early stage joiner at Kira, Andrew saw time and time again that customers struggled to understand the many new legal technologies entering the market and didn’t have good resources to go to for support.
Legaltech Tapas is his one very small effort to try and address that.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit legaltechtapas.substack.com -
Episode 0:
A short two minute explainer episode introducing you to what the podcast series will cover and why you want to listen. 🙂
About Legaltech Tapas:
Legaltech Tapas is a regular podcast that serves up bite sized summaries of the latest legal tools, what they do, and why you might use them.
Each episode discusses a different legal tool, and includes an interview with a guest from that company so you can hear directly from the horses mouth why you should be using their product.
About the host:
Andrew is a legaltech enthusiast + ex mgt consultant + former Kira Systems employee.
As an early stage joiner at Kira, Andrew saw time and time again that customers struggled to understand the many new legal technologies entering the market and didn’t have good resources to go to for support.
Legaltech Tapas is his one very small effort to try and address that.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit legaltechtapas.substack.com
