CCBJ June 2024 Edition

Corporate Counsel Business Journal JUNE 2024 EDITION VOLUME 32, NUMBER 4

Top Qualities of a Great Leader MELANIE MCGRATH, GENERAL COUNSEL, CBCL, SHARES THE BEST LEADERS LEAD WITH THEIR FOLLOWERS IN MIND

INSIDE Using Artificial Intelligence Tools in Research Standing Out in a Crowded CLM Environment Generative AI is Changing Contract Lifecycle Management AND MORE!

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In This Issue JUNE 2024 EDITION VOLUME 32, NUMBER 4

AT THE TABLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2

LAW BUSINESS MEDIA

Kristin Calve EDITOR & PUBLISHER

Jennifer Coniglio ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER & VP, EVENTS

Top Qualities of a Great Leader Kristin Calve

FRONT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

SVP & MANAGING DIRECTOR OF EVENTS

Matthew Tortora SENIOR DATABASE DIRECTOR

Lydia Boecke

ADMINISTRATOR, EDITORIAL AND GRAPHIC DESIGN

Katie Mills ACCOUNTING

The participants in the CCBJ Network demonstrate, through their many contributions, their unwavering commitment to the advancement and success of corporate law departments. The engagement and support of these “partners of corporate counsel” assure we continue to develop and distribute the news and information this unique and sophisticated audience relies on to meet the evolving legal and business needs of their organizations.

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Just Say No To Wishy-Washy Control

Strategic Partners

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Required Reading

Agiloft

10 Fallout

Neil Signore

NETWORK

PULSE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13 13 Using Artificial Intelligence Tools in Research Robert Scott

16 Standing Out in a Crowded CLM Environment Laura Richardson

20 Generative AI is Changing Contract Lifecycle Ziad Mantoura

24 How a Specialist Approach to Contract Lifecycle Management Positions Customers for Explosive Growth Karen Meyer

LEGAL TECH SPOTLIGHT . . . . . . . . 28

American Arbitration Association Axiom Barnes & Thornburg Contract Logix Exterro Inc. McGuireWoods LLP Mitratech Thomson Reuters

Advisors CobbleStone Software Epiq OpenText

Contributors Advologix Epona Everlaw iManage

28 Legal Tech Spotlight Series Indico Data

Legal Files Lighthouse OneTrust Onit Protiviti SimpleLegal SCCE Trellis UnitedLex Please help us improve and expand our services to corporate counsel by sharing your ideas with our publisher, Kristin Calve, at 203-722-1188 or kcalve@ccbjournal.com.

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Kristin Calve At the Table

Top Qualities of a Great Leader

 Melanie McGrath, General Counsel of CBCL shares the best leaders lead with their followers in mind.

CCBJ: What led you to join CBCL? Melanie McGrath: It was a twist of fate. Someone with whom I had worked 20 years prior messaged me and said their best friend was a vice president at CBCL and that the company had a job posted for a risk manager which my former colleague thought I would be perfect for, and even told the vice president as much. Long story short, I interviewed for the role and ultimately joined CBCL and within a short time was elevated to general counsel and risk manager.

Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your leadership style and who or what has influenced it?

Obviously, you’re influenced by people that you see around you—that you work with and for. I’ve had the privilege of working for a number of different companies and what I have found is that there are 2 types of leadership style: those who raise up their entire team so that they all flourish together, and those who push their team down so that they alone can take the credit. Unfortunately, I’ve had a few of the latter; I refuse to call them leaders, and when I was developing my own style, I was determined not to be like them, but rather to be a leader who offers space to grow, to learn, to safely fail and, ultimately, to succeed and flourish as a team.

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What qualities are you looking for when you’re hiring new people for your team?

My 1-word answer would be diversity—of skill, thought, approach and aptitude. I don’t need people who are like me; I’m like me. I need people who are going to complement me in my skills. I’m a strategic thinker and I need people who are going to help fill in the details and, more particularly, who are going to get things done. I look for a positive attitude, for people who thrive on providing service to others and who embrace change. Above all, it’s about surrounding myself with people who can work together as a

team and complement each other.

How would you describe the culture of your organization?

CBCL is growing into a larger company but still has a small company feel, so you can forge your own path, which fits well with my personal approach to work. It’s also big enough to allow people to develop in their preferred area. We’re small enough that it still feels like family and people can still have 1-to-1 time with the president who knows almost everyone’s name, but big enough to work on some cool and interesting projects in some cool and interesting parts of the world.

What’s the most influential career advice you’ve ever received?

Early on in my career, a senior lawyer advised me that no matter who in the firm asked me to work on a project and no matter what the subject matter of the project, don’t say no. That approach has served me well, providing me with a lot of different opportunities to develop skills, build new areas of expertise, and become exposed to issues, events and projects that I would not otherwise have had.

And that positioned me well for the role I currently have as general counsel by giving me a much broader strategic view, more of a business lens, and the ability to take on the role of strategic partner with the executive team here at the company.

Offer space to grow, to learn, to safely fail and ultimately, to succeed and flourish as a team.

What changes would you like to see within the legal profession?

I’ve worked with a lot of different lawyers. While there are some whose approach I find to be unnecessarily unreasonable and adversarial, there are many who advocate effectively for their clients and provide great service. So if I could advocate for one change, it would be to encourage those in the first category who seem to lean into the TV lawyer stereotype to tack toward the second category, with a focus on service and a goal to improve the reputation of the entire profession.

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Front

Just Say No to Wishy-Washy Counsel In this piece from BTI Consulting’s Michael Rynowecer, aka The Mad Clientist, lays out a dream scenario: “Imagine paying exorbitant hourly rates for legal advice and receiving exactly what you expect — no surprises, no breakthroughs, no game-changing insights.”

Yes, heaven. “Now imagine this again in a world where 70 percent of clients want new and breakout ideas to help them,” he continues. “These rates become even more mundane.”

All of which is a lead-in to the idea that BTI’s 2024 client service all-stars are not just attorneys. They are, he writes, “unexpected navigators in uncharted waters . . . singled out for defying the mundane with 5 distinct qualities redefining client service.” Hence, they command the highest rates through top-shelf client service arising from their “willingness to disrupt, innovate and lead with audacity.” Rynowecer lays out 5 things these all-stars do that wow clients into willingly paying rates that to mere mortals might seem exorbitant:

Eyes on the Prize:

Corporate law departments are bombarded with the complex issues arising from supply chains, regulatory headwinds, activist labor forces and geopolitical risk.

“Clients want ideas on how to advise their management teams,” Rynowecer says. “Some see it as a pivotal career stepping stone. Good ideas are prized.”

Success Bred Of Insights

A deep understanding of clients’ issues, along with potential answers, help clients better understand how to get the best outcomes. Even more important, it helps clients succeed as individuals.

Getting Out Front

Being first is important as clients can brief management and often gain an advantage. As the rate of change accelerates, clients who are the first to know have come to rely on their BTI Client Service All-Star to stay ahead of the pack.

Why Settle for Less?

Even when clients disagree, clear and concise recommendations can drive results by driving cleared thinking and better decisions. According to Rynowecer, unequivocal recommendations, foundational to developing alternative views, can be pivotal in solving new and novel problems.

Beyond the Horizon

The upshot is that BTI Client Service All-Stars look further into the future and sort the signal from the noise. These advisors stay a cut above by making sure their clients know today how tomorrow’s issues will impact them — and dishing up creative ideas on what to do.

CORPORATE COUNSEL BUSINESS JOURNAL

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Required Reading Too busy to read it all? Try these books, blogs, webcasts, websites and other info resources curated by CCBJ especially for corporate counsel and legal ops professionals.

Briefly

MIT Technology Review

Michael Scoville Joins McGuireWoods as Partner

In this piece by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, co-founded Schmidt Sciences, Schmidt calls for an “Apollo program for the age of AI.” Schmidt lauds President Biden’s executive order on AI, which launched a pilot program for the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR), but says it is a baby step. “The NAIRR pilot, while incredibly important, is just an initial step,” Schmidt writes, noting that that the $2.6 billion budget is “far from enough” and worries that Congress may not authorize the NAIRR beyond the pilot. He wants to go further – to the moon, so to speak.

“I believe it’s high time for America to have its own national compute strategy: an Apollo program for the age of AI,” writes Schmidt, noting that other nations are devoting sustained, ambitious government investment to high-performance AI computing and we can’t risk falling behind. It’s a race to power the most world-altering technology in human history. “Just as the Apollo program galvanized our country to win the space race, setting national ambitions for compute will not just bolster our AI competitiveness in the decades ahead but also drive R&D breakthroughs across practically all sectors with greater access. Advanced computing architecture can’t be erected overnight. Let’s start laying the groundwork now.”

AAA Launches ClauseBuilder AI (Beta) to Streamline Arbitration and Mediation Agreements

ARTICLE:

Jacob Flax is Appointed as Axiom’s Managing Director in Australia Axiom’s New Permanent Recruitment Solutions Now Available in Asia Stephan Chan Joins Dentons as Partner in Hong Kong Leonora Shelet Joins Morgan Lewis as Partner Resident in NY OpenText Cloud for Government Solutions Achieves FedRAMP Authorization

Contract Logix Experiences Another Record-Breaking Year as Momentum for Digital Contract Transformation Accelerates Barnes & Thornburg Racial and Social Justice Foundation Raises Over $290,000 in Annual Spirit Of Giving Campaign Epiq Wins Partnership with Landrum & Shrouse Law Firm Mitratech Adds Advanced Document Automation to its Legal and Compliance Platform with Strategic Acquisition of HotDocs OpenText Named a Leader in 2 IDC MarketScapes for UEM for SMBs and Client Endpoint Management for Microsoft Window Devices CobbleStone Software Launches New Release Update Including Exciting Features

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MAGAZINE:

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ABA Law Practice Today In this piece for the ABA, Michael D.J. Eisenberg, host of the podcas, The Tech Savvy Lawyer, calls on lawyers to “observe critical boundaries and ethical considerations when leveraging AI.” While clearly upbeat about the benefits of AI for the practice of law, he throws up some guardrails with a list of potential pitfalls: Don’t violate client confidentiality. Sharing sensitive or confidential information with AI systems, especially those that are not secured or operated by third parties, can lead to breaches of confidentiality,” Eisenberg writes, noting that if you are using a free AI product, there is a good chance the information you provide will not be confidential.” Don’t let AI write your brief. “AI, particularly language models, can sometimes produce content that seems plausible but is entirely fabricated or irrelevant to the context,” he writes. “If you do use AI to write a brief, make sure you thoroughly review it — down to the case citations.” Don’t misrepresent AI’s use or capabilities to clients. “It's unethical for lawyers to overstate the capabilities of AI to impress or mislead clients,” writes Eisenberg, who suggest erring on the side of caution by disclosing AI use to clients.”

Don’t accept AI results without question. “AI systems learn from large amounts of data and algorithms, which sometimes can include biases that can lead to unfair results. Using AI without understanding how it works can lead to biased results in legal advice, legal analysis and legal decisions and ultimately harm fairness and trust in the legal system,” cautions Eisenberg. Don’t ignore your ethical obligation to stay informed about and maintain competence in AI. “The integration of artificial intelligence into legal practices has opened up a myriad of possibilities for efficiency and innovation,” says Eisenberg. “But lawyers must observe critical boundaries and ethical considerations when leveraging AI.”

Contributors Thanks to the law firms, technology companies, alternative legal service providers, management consultants and other supporters of corporate law departments who share their insights and expertise through the CCBJ network. Your parti­cipation is appreciated.

Pamela Gage Joins UnitedLex as Chief People Officer

Ziad Mantoura is General Manager of the legal transformation services business at Epiq. Before joining Epiq Ziad was the Senior Vice President at Axiom where he was responsible for leading some of the largest transformation initiatives in the legal industry in the U.S. and U.K. He was also part of the executive team that led the spin out and establishment of Factor as a stand-alone entity from Axiom. In addition to his experience in legal technolgoy and services, Ziad was a management consultant at the Boston Consulting Group and an attorney at CMS Cameron McKenna in London. Ziad earned his MBA from Cambridge University and his law degree from Nottingham Law School.

Melanie McGrath is General Counsel and Corporate Secretary at CBCL Limited, which is a multi disciplinary engineering and enviormental services company operating in 13 offices in 5 provinces. Melanie oversees legal, risk, insurance, contract, and compliance concerns with the firm.

Melanie joined CBCL in Februrary 2020 and throughout her career has worked in private practice as well as in house at several difference insurance companies. She also spent several years as the Director of the Lawyers Insurance Association of Nova Scotia, which is the professional liablity program for all Nova Scotia lawyers.

Karen Meyer is the CEO at Contract Logix and oversees all aspects of the business. Karen brings more than 20 years of SaaS experience building organizations to scale and drive growth. Karen held leadership roles prior to ContractLogix at Qvidian, Manulife Financial eHealth and Imagine Software. Karen holds a BS from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

OpenText Cybersecurity MSP/MSSP Survey Finds Customers Seek AI-Led Comprehensive Security Expertise for Threat Detection and Vulnerability Management New UnitedLex Survey Reveals 92 Percent of In-house Legal Teams and 84 Percent of Law Firms are Prioritizing Litigation Modernization Efforts CobbleStone Software Releases Dun & Bradstreet integration Update in Version 22.2.0 Epiq’s May Small Business Filings Increase 53 Percent Over the Same Period Last Year CobbleStone Software Simplifies OFAC Search with Version 22.2.0

Laura Richardson is an experienced technology attorney who enjoys applying her broad background to help businesses scale humanely.

Before joining Agiloft, Laura was General Counsel and Corporate Secrtary as Osso VR, Inc. Prior to Osso VR, Laura was Senior Counsel at Intel Corporation. Laura is also a former litigator, serving as a Judicial Clerk in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee before entering private practice as Sidley Austin in Los Angeles. She has a JD from the UCLA School of Law and a bachelors degree from Kenyon College.

Robert Scott is the Chief Innovator of Monjur, a pioneer in offering Contracts-as-a-Service soltuions, designed specifically for the IT industry. Their SaaS-enabled legal solution is based on industryleading templates, customized for each client, and periodically updated to ensure that MSPs are always legally compliant. With the rapidly evolving landscape concerning privacy laws and regulations, Monjur helps IT businesses adapt through their integrated approach to contract management and legal compliance.

OneTrust Integrates with the IAB Diligence Platform, Powered by SafeGuard Privacy Jackson Walker Represents Deep Blue in Successful Acquisition of Lagoon’s Midland Basin Water Business Daniel Marschollek Joins K&L Gates LLP as Partner Michael Urschel Joins Kirkland & Ellis as Partner OpenText Elevates Knowledge Workers at SAP Sapphire 2024

SUBMIT YOUR ANNOUNCEMENTS TO editor@ccbjournal.com.

CORPORATE COUNSEL BUSINESS JOURNAL

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FALLOUT

When a 40-year-old precedent is overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, as happened recently in a case brought by New England fishermen, the ramifications can be staggering.

Here’s the tip of the iceberg on what the Court has wrought with its decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which sunk Chevron deference. Bloomberg Government Public Policy & Regulation Group Leader Rich Gold focuses on what the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision overturning the Chevron doctrine means for lobbyists:

“Under the doctrine, courts gave deference to executive agencies interpreting laws when issuing regulations to enforce said laws.” Mr. Gold characterized the 6-3 decision overturning the doctrine as ‘earthmoving’, saying “Chevron underpins all of modern policymaking” and explains that Congress will now need to craft more detailed legislation.

“Broad delegations of authority are not going to survive judicial review under the new standard, he said.” “For those of us who consider ourselves as drafting legislation for a living, that's a whole different way of solving problems as you draft going forward. If we think 1,000-page omnibuses are annoying, wait until they’re 5,000 pages because staff have to be clear.”

And here is what Bloomberg Law had to say about the decision’s impact on corporate litigators: “The Supreme Court’s move to gut a decades-old precedent on agency authority is a big boost for corporate litigators, incentivizing companies and industry trade groups to challenge government regulations and stirring business for the firms that represent them. The June 28 decision to overturn the Chevron doctrine, which empowered regulators to interpret unclear laws, also shows how a single case at the high court can send wide ripples across the legal sector.” As Gordon Todd, leader of the regulatory litigation group at Sidely Austin, said, “In the short term there will be more chaos, a lot of uncertainty and a lot more litigation.”

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Pulse Using Artificial Intelligence Tools in Research ROBERT SCOTT SCOTT & SCOTT AND MONJUR

CCBJ: Why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself?

Robert Scott: I’m the managing partner of the law firm of Scott & Scott LLP, a leading intellectual property and technology law firm in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and one of the co-founders and chief innovation officer of Monjur, focused on delivering innovative Contracts-as-a-Service solutions.

How can artificial intelligence be used to enhance research efficiency while preserving the intricacies and thoroughness of analysis?

AI has the power to digest information at a pace that humans can’t come close to. When you’re talking about research, the first thing you need to be thinking about is issue identification.

No matter what tools you’re using, articulation of the legal

question to be researched is a threshold priority independent of the technology that you’re going to use to ultimately conduct the research. Thus on the front end of the process there’s a huge amount of human creativity about what are the research questions and how to frame them.

The use of AI in legal research is not new. It was in place long before generative AI captured the popular imagination in late 2022. What genAI brings to the table is the ability to take a huge amount of data and get the questions about what topics are to be answered in an automated way. That’s the biggest, most significant part of how genAI impacts research. Chat-based searching is not that much different than natural language based search that has been around for years. Purely in terms of search capability, it’s not bringing a whole lot to the table that Lexis, Westlaw and the other leading legal research platforms didn’t already have.

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The real game changer for genAI is, at the front end, how to conduct that search initially. Then, on the backend, after you get the search results, the ability to replace the human legal researcher who had been sifting through the results. The way that the legal research platforms work is you put in a search and it returns results, in order of priority, the documents that it thinks match what you’re looking for. But that’s still a huge data set and AI tools can take and digest and summarize and find things in that data set at a speed and with an accuracy that is not possible by humans. AI also changes the game when it comes to briefing the results of the case law into a memorandum or pleading. Here is where AI will create the most efficiency and accuracy gains.

What are the risks of relying on AI for research, and how can these risks be minimized to uphold quality standards?

Risk in research, as it relates to the nature of the arguments that lawyers will present to a tribunal and the substantiation of those arguments, is rooted in both the potential for legal malpractice and violation of the rules of court and the ethical rules of attorneys. Specifically as relates to citation of authority, there are rules in every court that say that a lawyer shall not falsely state that a law is one way when in fact, it’s otherwise.

Misrepresenting to the court the nature of the law based on the research can violate multiple rules and expose lawyers to both sanctions and legal liability for malpractice.

Number 1, the first-line lawyers that are doing the work and operating the tools have to be aware that there’s an independent obligation to conduct their own thorough due diligence, which includes checking the results presented by any AI tool.

It’s not sufficient to rely on the results of an AI tool without independently exercising one’s professional judgment as to whether or not the AI has gotten it right.

I’ll give you a perfect example. When ChatGPT came out, there was an interesting issue in the United States regarding the copyright ability of written works that contained AIgenerated content. There was a rush at the copyright office to file registrations of works that were completely generated

by AI. So the Copyright Office issued a guidance document on the copyright ability of works created with AI. I entered that document into ChatGPT-4 to draft an article titled “How to Get a Copyright in the United States For Works Containing AI

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Generated Content.”

The point of this is that the ChatGPT review of that guidance reached the complete opposite legal conclusion of what the Copyright Office actually was providing as guidance. Fortunately for me, I had read the original document and I exercised my own professional judgment in reviewing what the AI wrote, which was convincing but wrong.

So all lawyers, whether you are the researcher, associate, partner or general counsel in charge of a matter, have a heightened obligation to thoroughly vet, review, double check and triple check the results of any tools relying on AI for outputs or decision-making.

How do AI-generated predictions in legal cases support decision-making judgements, and will that remain pivotal in the process?

The use of AI applications for predictive analytics—the branch of analytics that takes a huge amount of statistical data and distills it into predictive algorithms and results that forecast future outcomes in all manner of human endeavors—is one of the key values that AI brings to the table. I expect to see it used in jury sciences for sure, if it’s not already. Ultimately, I would also expect it to be used by the courts themselves to digest and summarize the arguments that are being presented by both sides, to gain an understanding of what other judges faced with those same issues have decided and how they presented it in their decisions.

I can see a huge increase in the use of AI-based predictive analytics that will significantly change the justice system in the United States, similar to when lawyers were, for the first time, able to bring demonstrative aids into the courtroom and to the use of jury consultants to decide, who should be on the jury based on how people acted and what their mannerisms were. It’s just the next wave of technology that’s going to have a significant impact on how cases are presented, tried and decided in our courts.

What ethical dilemmas are arising from the use of AI in research and how do you recommend professionals address these concerns?

The primary ethical concern, and I’m limiting the scope of my answer to lawyers conducting legal research for clients and in connection with court cases, relates to the obligation to, number 1, zealously advocate for your client and make sure that you’re doing everything you can to put your best foot forward for your client, which means not relying on tools that bring efficiency at the sacrifice of quality. Number 2 is your ethical obligation not to misrepresent the facts or the law in connection with the case, either one of which would be an ethical violation for all the attorneys involved, whether they were or were an associate or an associate general counsel or whether they were supervising and didn’t know but should have known; really all the lawyers in the chain, from the managing partner of the law firm to the general counsel, are going to have ethical risks associated with the adoption and use of AI tools. Regardless of whether it’s for legal research or some other aspect of legal practice, the key is developing the right processes for everyone in the chain. We have to ask ourselves, in light of the AI revolution, what is the role of human contribution by the lawyer and what is the role for tools? What I can say for sure is that the lawyer will always be in the loop and will always be ethically and legally responsible for the outcomes.

How can the legal sector balance the use of AI technology and lawyers’ desire to maintain personalized relationships with their clients?

There are a lot of misperceptions about the impact of AI on the attorney-client relationship. I would say that, used correctly, AI can free up the lawyer from doing menial tasks to doing more things that are higher touch and higher value for the client, such as spending more time with them, asking them more questions and talking to them about their goals. Meanwhile, using AI will increase customer satisfaction because of the efficiency, the scalability and the accuracy of the output. I believe that in order to deliver the best value for your clients, you need to automate as much as you can.

Your question illuminates a myth that exists with regard to the impact of AI on the attorney-client relationship. I use AI in my practice and will tell you that it has done nothing but impress my clients to the extent that it frees me up from tasks that would

have taken me longer to perform. I’m now more available to my clients to have phone conferences and to review things they want my opinion on. Used correctly, AI is an enhancement to the customer experience and a benefit to the overall attorney-client relationship.

Anything else you’d like to add?

As lawyers, it’s very important to understand, from an ethical perspective, your confidentiality obligations as they arise with respect to AI and the use of public systems. When it comes to confidentiality and the use of AI, my simple rule is: If it comes from the client, it may not go into the AI; if it comes from the court, it may. In other words, don’t use a public AI to digest and summarize client documents that have been submitted to you for review. However, you may put your pleadings and your adversary’s pleadings into the AI to prepare for a hearing.

Because those pleadings are already public record, there’s no confidentiality concern regarding the use of AI. Similarly, if you want to draft a letter for a client, you can say to the AI, “I need to draft a letter to an unnamed client with these facts” and you can write a letter without breaching client confidentiality. But, again, you have to be careful never to use your client’s name when using public AI unless it’s in connection with a publicly available record such as a pleading.

I just wanted to add client confidentiality to the list of ethical concerns we discussed earlier because it’s a murky area as the landscape evolves and there are different types of AI solutions requiring an understanding of where that data is being stored and how that impacts on the data privacy and confidentiality obligations of the lawyer using these tools. 

Robert Scott is the Chief Innovator of Monjur, a pioneer in offering Contracts-as-a-Service soltuions, designed specifically for the IT industry. Their SaaS-enabled legal solution is based on industryleading templates, customized for each client, and periodically updated to ensure that MSPs are always legally compliant. With the rapidly evolving landscape concerning privacy laws and regulations, Monjur helps IT businesses adapt through their integrated approach to contract management and legal compliance.

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Standing Out in a Crowded CLM Environment

LAURA RICHARDSON AGILOFT

CCBJ: Please discuss your in-house career journey. How do you find yourself as the GC of Agiloft?

Laura Richardson: I love answering this question because I think my story illustrates how you can have all the expectations in the world, but the best thing you can do for yourself is to follow your own path and lean into the unexpected opportunities. I’ve had an organic career path because I was open to radical change at every step.

I went to law school to become a public defender for juveniles. However, like many law school students who rack up debt, when I was offered a summer associate position with a corporate law firm. I ended up taking the biglaw track, doing all the little “gold-star” things you should do if you want to have a successful legal career.

After clerking, I started my practice as a biglaw litigator but quickly realized it was not for me. After a few years I had an unexpected opportunity to go in-house at Intel through Axiom, an early managed services provider for lawyer support and later transitioned to working directly for Intel.

It was at Intel that I discovered how much I had not learned in law school and law firms about being an effective inhouse lawyer, about technology and other more businessrelated things that were starting to be more widely adopted in legal departments. And it should come as no surprise that the Intel legal department was wildly ahead of its time. I’m so grateful that I had the opportunity to work with a world-class legal operations team at Intel, which has made such a difference in my career. Gerald Wright, a Senior Legal Operations Manager at Intel, was my office neighbor and we worked together on a number of projects to improve contract processes. I often volunteered to serve as a guinea pig for legal operations because I loved seeing how even small changes can dramatically improve outcomes and velocity.

When I ended up leaving Intel to take on my first GC role, my first hire was not another lawyer, it was a legal operations manager, because I knew how critical legal 16

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Contracts are the foundation of the business relationship. operations is to improving the efficiency and effectiveness of a legal department and to aligning that department with the business it supports.

Even before hiring a legal operations manager, I knew that we needed to invest in the right tools, which included CLM. Contracts are the foundation of the business relationship; they’re critical, not just in terms of how they start a relationship or what they capture, but the contract has so much of the information that helps make sure the relationship is successful. I’ve always been focused on how you can increase your impact through technology.

After that first GC role, Mike Haven, Head of Global Legal Operations at Intel, then president of CLOC and someone I’d gotten to know through Intel, introduced me to Eric Laughlin (Agiloft’s CEO). Eric and I hit it off from the start.

I think he appreciated my passion for technology, and my belief that there is no reason to continue to do the same things in the same way, which is fundamental to how I approach my life and my job. As a GC, I look all over for inspiration because the more you look outside of legal, the more you can stop being tied to the inefficiencies that have held us back from truly integrating with the wider business and the more you set free the information that we’ve tended to keep to ourselves.

Nobody is closer to the company’s contracts than legal departments. They do the negotiations, write the agreements and, more often than not, own the actual document once it’s fully executed. Letting go of the need to control everything is also a great opportunity for legal departments to demonstrate their value, share knowledge, and improve their organization. I think legal gets a bad rap but with help from legal operations it can become one of the most critical providers of key business information within any business.

As GC, how have you seen CLM impact corporate legal departments?

Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) has evolved significantly. At first, it was understood that it was hard to find documents, so CLM’s impact was, "How can we figure out where our documents are and easily find the documents that we’re looking for?” While a small company may not have that many contracts, a big one has hundreds of thousands, if not millions, and that is a large data pool to search. So, the task was finding the contracts we want and then figuring out how to expand that contract’s purview; in other words, how do we store templates and give people access to them?

For many legal departments, the core need grew into an idea of what CLM could be. CLM companies may have started in one area, but the best ones recognized that a contract lifecycle isn’t just signature to search. On the back end, it’s about managing renewals, accessing information and getting the data out of the contracts and into other systems of record. It’s tracking obligations.

It’s understanding and being able to explain the key terms of those agreements to people outside of the legal department, who might be looking at those agreements and asking, “Well, what does this actually mean for this relationship?” You need to see and understand all the terms, standard and nonstandard.

On the front end, it’s about creating agreements, updating clauses in agreements, negotiating agreements and documenting those processes. It’s about capturing information at all phases of the life of a contract. And a cool thing now, with generative AI, is building on top of these systems so that you can do that more efficiently, automatically and with better results. It’s an exciting development to watch. While CLM isn’t new, it’s an excellent framework for super-productively using generative AI. Can you expand on generative AI in contract management systems, and what else do you see being used today and looking ahead over the next 5 years?

While Agiloft doesn’t just sell into legal departments, the vast majority of our customer base involves 2 or more departments, like procurement and sales, I like to use legal teams as an example because they’re constantly balancing risk. Most legal teams recognize that we need generative AI, but they are also aware that there are a lot of risks associated with that nascent and evolving technology. Not just from a regulatory or data privacy perspective. It’s really about accuracy. Agiloft talks a lot about the role of the human element. Human-centric AI, or HCAI, used in a practical, pragmatic, use case-specific way appeals to a lot of legal departments who are using generative AI and struggling with how to make sure that what they’re getting is accurate and usable.

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Right now, lots of AI implementations are still in pilot.

People are not just buying into the hype—and there’s a ton of hype—but they are trying to understand what use cases are actually going to be useful to them. What people want are pragmatic AI solutions; something they can start using on day 1 and that leverages the information and technology they have and takes it to the next level. People worry about whether their data will be used to train a model and if there is a risk that their data will be leaked. Companies who take those concerns seriously, who build a trusted product and brand, are the ones who are able to deliver usable AI. It would be hubris for me to predict 5 years from now because 2 or 3 years ago, I wouldn’t have predicted where we are now. The way technology is evolving and the speed at which it is changing is so incredible that I don’t know what it’s going to be. But I’m excited. I know some people are afraid about displacement of jobs, but the truth is, there’s always going to be a need for a collaborative intertwining of humanity and technology. It is both a tool and a partner, and it will be most useful and efficient if we lean into that partnership and see it as a way to extend our individual and collective impact.

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Can you speak a bit more about the sensitive data aspect of using generative AI and what corporate legal and IT teams should be thinking about in terms of that data? Do you foresee any new laws governing AI? AI regulations are coming in all the time and it’s important to be aware of them. But I wouldn’t get too attached to any because the area is evolving so rapidly. Separate yourself from the pace of regulatory change and focus on common sense principles. If you are the kind of company where you have extremely sensitive information, you’re probably going to want to work with trusted providers and avoid fringe companies that are pushing the boundaries of this nascent technology. And you’re going to want to ask hard questions of your providers and expect honest answers.

Agiloft is focused on pragmatic and trustworthy AI because we want our customers to be successful on their AI journey. That is part of our reputation: that we care deeply about the success of our customers. Part of that is making sure our customers understand how we’re using their data.

As legal departments get more invested in the use of AI functionality, they should ensure they’re working with a trusted partner.

What impact will KKR’s recent majority investment in Agiloft have on the company’s future in a crowded CLM market?

Nobody is closer to the company’s contracts than legal departments.

We are incredibly excited about the KKR, FTV and JMI’s investments in Agiloft-it’s a huge vote of confidence in CLM and in Agiloft’s future. It shows we are a leader and that some of the World’s most respected growth investors see that and understand that we are doing something different and it’s working. What is going to be on the horizon for us? Honestly, a lot of the same. KKR invested in us because they believe in what we’re doing, and we don’t expect a radical shift in our approach. That said, I’m a firm believer in constant improvement and their investment will help us to get better. One of the best parts of being at Intel was working with engineers and being inspired by the cycle of continuous improvement. We look for that at Agiloft as well, holding ourselves accountable to being better at everything that we do. Always.

Anything else you’d like to add?

This might sound cheesy, but we talk a lot, about “EX equals CX,” employee experience equals customer experience. And we think we prove that over and over again. We are laser-focused on our employees and the employee experience and the culture that we have. We regularly hear from our customers, and even prospects that don’t end up going with us, “You have a great attitude. You are transparent. You took care of us.”

That’s something we take a lot of pride in. Technology (and technology companies) can be very impersonal, and AI is inherently impersonal, so what we strive to do is keep that human element at the center of everything Agiloft does, whether it’s how we treat our employees and our customers, how we think about AI, or how we think about ourselves as a technology company. We’re not all code and algorithms. I’m excited about KKR being here because it shows that our human-centric approach is paying off.

I care a lot about building the legal department of the future. What that means to me is the right tools, the right people, and the right environment. Providing the right tools for your team is the only way that we can continue to improve the impact of a legal department and scale humanely. So I continue to invest in using our CLM internally, in education, in process improvements, in all of those little, sinewy, legal operations things that hold a legal department together, because I know it strengthens what we’re able to do, strengthens our morale and strengthens our ability to take the time that we need to recharge. We take vacations, and I’m proud of that. We make our health a priority, and our ability to recharge and live full lives is something of a KPI for my team. Also important is creating safe spaces. I am very Laura Richardson is an experienced pro high-EQ leadership technology attorney who enjoys that’s focused on the applying her broad background to individuals you work help businesses scale humanely.

Before joining Agiloft, Laura was with and recognizing that General Counsel and Corporate we all thrive in different Secrtary as Osso VR, Inc. Prior to environments and one’s Osso VR, Laura was Senior Counsel job as a leader is to figure at Intel Corporation. Laura is also a out the best way to help former litigator, serving as a Judicial Clerk in the U.S. District Court for everyone thrive.  the Western District of Tennessee before entering private practice as Sidley Austin in Los Angeles. She has a JD from the UCLA School of Law and a bachelors degree from Kenyon College.

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Generative AI is Changing Contract Lifecycle Management

ZIAD MANTOURA EPIQ

CCBJ: Would you give us your perspective on how contract lifecycle management technologies have evolved over the past 5 years, and where we are now?

Ziad Mantoura: Over the past decade we’ve gone from a small number of CLM technology players to a plethora of players. You can’t go to a conference now without seeing new names, new products and new launches. Part of that growth is because of people recognizing that technology has a meaningful role to play in unlocking the value of contracts across the enterprise. And part of that is also the fact that it’s easier and cheaper to build modern technology on a cloudbased architecture than it has been historically.

How would you describe the current state of generative artificial intelligence within CLM technology and what exactly is it helping contract professionals do?

There’s a lot of buzz around generative AI, both in society generally and in legal, and contracts is one of the areas where I expect generative AI is going to have a meaningful impact. When we talk about generative AI as opposed to more traditional AI, the “generative” part refers to the creation of new content that doesn’t currently exist. That can be words, images, music, etc. In the legal industry, and in contracts more specifically, we’re talking mostly about words, and we’ve seen related generative AI capabilities come in different waves. If we rewind to early 2023, we started seeing some of the first generative AI features coming out within CLMs. What they were essentially doing is helping with the drafting aspects of contract negotiation; the idea that you could [Right Click], highlight a clause, ask it to “Make this mutual” and it would do so.

That approach was helpful to show what was possible with the products, but it didn’t deliver that much value when you think about the needs of many large enterprises. If you are in a B2B, large volume contracting business, you want as much standardization as you can drive in your contracts, but with the flexibility to get the deal done with your counterparty.

So, if every time you’re asking to make the clause mutual, you have no standardization across process.

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What we’re seeing now is the next evolution of CLM, where the providers are linking live negotiations back to your contract repository by way of VectorDBs and/or a RAG-based methodology. If we take the same “Make this mutual” request, the LLM will go back to your repository to make it mutual in a way that you’ve made things mutual in other approved contracts.

The other approach we’re starting to see that is showing some real promise is saying, “Well, the problem with my repository is I’ve got some documents there that are great, but I’ve also got some documents that I wish I’d never signed.

We had to sign that agreement because the counterparty had all the power, but that doesn’t mean I want that in my next agreement.” So we moved on to saying either you have a golden source repository of the contracts you want to refer to or you go through a playbook process. We’re seeing CLM providers build out both of these alternatives in their product.

At this point it’s not clear which is going to prove to be the better option.

What we’re now seeing— an emerging 3rd wave—is the ability to use generative AI to help you produce a playbook, or at least get it 70 or 80 percent of the way there. So rather than saying, “Hey, we need lots of time from some senior attorneys and we’re going to start with a blank piece of paper or a template that might or might not be appropriate,” we’re saying, “Okay, we’ve got the template. We’re going to use generative AI to populate it with a first review based on what we’ve seen across a sample of agreements from your starting points, first markups and final versions, getting you to that playbook world much quicker, which then allows you to have much more effective negotiations.”

The world we’re going to be in is not one where you’re saying, [Right Click], “Make this mutual”. It’s got to be [Right Click] “Give me the same concession as I gave to this customer six months ago.” Or [Right Click] “Is there a pre-approved compromise position I can offer this customer?” that follows your playbook. Firstly, it is a time-saving device. But more importantly, it allows the legal department to get away from negotiating every agreement and to a place where they can confidently say, “Contracts below X value can be self-service by the salesperson, the product lead, the business lead, whoever it might be in their business, because they’ve got the right parameters and technology assisting them.”

What does the timeline look like for the regular adoption of gen AI that is generating these playbooks and helping create golden sources?

The underlying technology is here now. It’s not 1, 2 or 3 years out. That said, the timeline for adoption of new technologies in legal has always been slow. I think anybody looking at a CLM today should be looking and saying, “What is this company doing on the AI and the generative AI fronts? Where are they going? What does their product roadmap look like?”

There are companies out there that already have in play, at least in demo environments, everything I’ve described to you.

But of the dozen or so CLM providers I’ve spent meaningful time talking to, it’s on everyone’s roadmap.

Of the CLM technology vendors you have spoken to about this, are they hesitant? Motivated? When do you think they’re planning on testing use cases?

I’d say there’s a spectrum. There are some folks who view it as a little bit of a novelty; something they’ve got to have because everyone else has got it. Then, there are those who have been ‘all in’ for a while, and they’re a little bit ahead of their competitors. We are also seeing CLM providers make acquisitions of smaller companies with AI expertise. I expect that trend to continue as part of a broader consolidation of the CLM market.

For most genAI technologies out there today—not just in the CLM space and not just in legal—the underlying LLM has been OpenAI’s GPT models. That’s the most prevalent.

CLM vendors are looking at alternative models, at what’s available from different providers or open source. They’re experimenting with what’s more effective and making sure that they have an underlying architecture that allows them to quickly move to new models, as well as address customer concerns on data security, and make sure the price-point of the LLM works for the CLM’s pricing and customer business case.

You need to have an architecture that can take advantage of different LLMs as they get released because we simply don’t know who’s going to win that race. And there’s literally billions of development dollars pouring into the next generation of LLMs. How will generative AI’s impact on contract management technology benefit your typical legal departments?

How will it change the way organizations look at their contracts?

When I think about the impact generative AIs can have across legal—law firms, in-house counsel, alternative legal service providers—there’s a huge wealth of data that we’ve had in legal for some time, but it’s been trapped, locked and often unstructured. Generative AI, combined with modern cloud infrastructure, presents an opportunity for that data (and the value therefrom) to be unlocked. In the contracts space, there is huge value that sits in executed agreements and knowing what is in those contracts from both a business and risk point of view.

There’s also value from the finance point of view. I can’t tell you the amount of times we’ve spoken with finance teams about a contract problem, and they want to remove key financial data such as payment terms, penalties, automatic price raises, etc.

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From a large organization point of view, being able to know what’s in your contracts, having a good contract repository that you can run analytics across, that you can ask questions and get answers, is going to be important.

That’s what I see the future model looking like.

Where else do you see generative AI having enterprise impact?

Outside of contracts and CLM, there are a number of areas where generative AI is showing promise on both the corporation and law firm sides. On the corporation side, a lot of organizations look at genAI as a large opportunity for their core business or, in some instances, as a significant threat to their business. So, there are many corporations spending large sums of money around generative AI because they think it will bring transformative efficiencies, or because there are potentially competitive threats out there.

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Microsoft is ahead of the pack here. We are their 2023 “Partner of the Year” and we’ve been working with them and dozens of the world’s largest companies on how to roll out the Microsoft Copilot product line-up in a safe and secure way that legal teams are comfortable with; which addresses such concerns as, “What data is Copilot going to have access to? And are we comfortable with it having access to that data?”

We see this big wave of generative AI happening across the corporate world, and legal has a role to play in that. They’re looking at how to leverage that Microsoft technology, including how it can be used for the legal departments. We’re seeing that play out in terms of more effective search and knowledge management. It’s not just about drafting but also being able to find and ask questions and get answers, and we’ve seen multiple use cases across organizations and legal departments.

Within law firms, it’s slightly different. The main reason why is there’s a significant economic opportunity for law firms to unlock the data that they’ve been sitting on. At its core, a top tier law firm is a collection of incredible legal intellects with knowledge of different practice areas, subject matter expertise and experience. Generative AI is providing a interesting opportunity in this broad knowledge-management space. In the past several years we have seen KM departments in large law firms become increasingly tech-forward recognizing the unlocked value in the data they sit on.

Large law firms are investing significant capital in generative AI because they see it as an opportunity to have the data they’re sitting on elevate themselves ahead of the pack.

Generative AI enables law firms to do their work more efficiently and make higher margins, or to justify charging higher rates. Ultimately there’s a big incentive for large law firms being able to unlock the power of their data, because if they get it right, it will make them even more successful than they’ve been over the past decade.

We’re starting to see it with some of the big firms. They’ve always been okay with embracing third-party technology that doesn’t touch their data. Now the competitive advantage is not only in using a third-party tool better than other law firms—which will continue to happen in the same way it’s always happened—but in unlocking the power of the knowledge these firms have been sitting on to deliver additional value.

It’s early stages. No one is saying that they can 100 percent guarantee they’ll be successful. But there are firms that are saying, “This is a real opportunity for us to differentiate ourselves from our peers,” and they are prepared to put some money behind it, which I find really exciting in an industry where too many firms have taken a wait-and seeapproach to new technology.

Generative AI is going to have a real impact on our world and understanding the funadamentals will form the foundation for creating an effective generative AI strategy.

Any final thoughts?

Anybody who is in legal and plans on being in legal for the foreseeable future, should learn some of the basics around generative AI, think about some of the use cases that could be effective for their organization or their law firm, be prepared to experiment with it, and don’t be afraid to try and fail. Generative AI is going to have a real impact on our world and understanding the fundamentals will form Ziad Mantoura is General Manager the foundation for creating of the legal transformation services an effective generative AI business at Epiq. Before joining Epiq strategy. 

Ziad was the Senior Vice President at Axiom where he was responsible for leading some of the largest transformation initiatives in the legal industry in the U.S. and U.K. He was also part of the executive team that led the spin out and establishment of Factor as a stand-alone entity from Axiom. In addition to his experience in legal technolgoy and services, Ziad was a management consultant at the Boston Consulting Group and an attorney at CMS Cameron McKenna in London. Ziad earned his MBA from Cambridge University and his law degree from Nottingham Law School.

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How a Specialist Approach to Contract Lifecycle Management Positions Customers for Explosive Growth KAREN MEYER CONTRACT LOGIX

CCBJ: Tell us a little about yourself and your background.

Karen Meyer: I’ve been CEO of Contract Logix since February 2022. Prior to joining the company, I led Upland Software’s Global Customer Success organization where I was responsible for the Commercial and Customer Engagement teams of more than a dozen products. I have more than 20 years of SaaS experience building organizations to scale and driving growth, and I have always loved helping people and solving technical problems. My role at Contract Logix allows me to do both. Not to mention, most of my career has centered around managing contracts with customers, partners, and suppliers to run many teams and product lines.

What kinds of problems does Contract Logix solve?

Contracts are a business’ lifeblood. They can tell you so much about an organization’s health, trajectory, profitability and business relationships, but many companies are not able to handle their contracts effectively. And it’s not for lack of trying. Getting a handle on your contract lifecycle management (CLM) can be extremely hard, but the risk of mismanagement can be anything from overlooked penalties to lost revenue, lost savings, noncompliance, and overall brand damage.

Contract Logix, founded in 2006, is one of the longest-tenured contract management software companies in the market, with some of the original pioneers of the industry on staff. We offer a complete CLM platform and help in-house legal, legal operations, finance, IT, procurement and sales professionals across dozens of industries, including highly regulated industries such as pharma, healthcare and energy, to manage their end-to-end contract lifecycle and the processes around contract management. In addition to helping organizations achieve tremendous operational consistencies and efficiencies through better contracting processes, we help them get visibility into where their risk is, so they have the information needed to mitigate it. Risk management lays the foundation for ongoing improvements to our customers’ overall CLM strategies.

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The CLM market is growing. What makes the company unique?

At Contract Logix, we are true contract lifecycle management specialists. We live and breathe CLM. A lot of vendors in the legal tech space are so focused on selling that they don’t understand how to guide customers to success after they buy the software. Our tenure in the industry and singular focus means that we work with tens of thousands of users on CLM implementations, so when a customer asks us how to ‘do’ contract management, we can share credible knowledge.

Our product is great, but our implementation and change management expertise is even better. We’re big believers in quality over quantity and one of our main goals is to help customers successfully achieve fast time-to-value and broad user adoption with the software so they can uncover and mitigate legal and financial risk quickly and gain efficiencies in their organizations. Once a customer has ‘gone live’ with Contract Logix, we continue to serve as trusted advisors – helping them continuously improve, delivering new capabilities they can use to optimize their processes and introducing them to partnerships that will help our customers manage contracts in a way that is fast, accurate, and efficient. This has been a real contributor to the company’s growth.

We’d love to hear more about your momentum. Why do you think you’re growing so much?

Contract Logix’s team has decades of SaaS-based software experience across multiple markets, and our Product Management and Technology teams thrive on innovation, customer feedback, and the company’s own legacy. To date, we’ve used that experience and knowledge to build an intelligent, data-driven, and intuitive contract management platform that customers love.

What was truly exciting in 2023, and so far in 2024, is that our customers seem more ready than ever to embrace the next levels of change. There are more and more organizations

prioritizing CLM improvement projects and our customers are on board! In 2024 already, we’ve seen notable growth in areas of contract automation, analytics and digital transformation to mitigate business risk, increase compliance and get actionable insights from the wealth of data in contracts. This includes: • 80 Percent increase in automated workflows for contract reviews, approvals and obligation tracking • 154 Percent increase in the number of dashboards and reports to track contract and process performance • 72 Percent increase in contract requests • 28 Percent increase in real-time collaboration and negotiation • 108 Percent increase in contracts executed via E-Signature Organizations are looking for secure and efficient ways to finalize business and our software enables them to benchmark and track contract KPIs, getting instant visibility into their business and agreements with advanced analytics.

Our mission is to continue to evolve our platform to help meet their most pressing needs.

You mentioned highly regulated industries. Can you talk about your work in some of those industries?

Yes, we work closely with organizations in healthcare, pharmaceuticals, biotech, energy and transportation and logistics just to name a few. While they may not seem similar on the surface, all are extremely regulated – both internally with certain requirements set by stakeholders within their organizations, as well as external compliance requirements set by regulatory agencies. Think HIPAA and Medicare in healthcare, the Clean Air Act or EPA in energy, or the FDA for pharma.

Contract management solutions like Contract Logix serve as critical tools to mitigate risk and ensure internal, industry, and regulatory compliance, automating operations and reducing the risk of error-prone manual processes. In highly regulated industries, this is particularly impactful as the stakes are significantly higher.

For example, automated compliance checks and alerts can notify stakeholders about potential violations in real-time, enabling corrective action and avoiding costly penalties. CLM can also protect intellectual property by ensuring documents are stored in a secure, centralized repository, mitigating the risk of unauthorized access and data breaches.

Contract management software can help demonstrate governance, risk and compliance maturity to investors, showcasing a robust framework for managing regulatory requirements. Automatic audit trails are valuable when seeking FDA approval or just having to quickly respond to ad hoc audit requirements, as maintaining meticulous records and demonstrating adherence to regulatory standards is essential.

Version control features ensure that all stakeholders are working with the most up-to-date documents, reducing the risk of discrepancies and ensuring consistency. Automated alerts and reminders about contract renewals, deadlines and compliance requirements help organizations stay proactive and avoid lapses in obligations.

Can you share any customer success stories?

I could brag about our customers all day. We learn so much from them, but our latest crop of Digital Contract Transformation Awards winners really went above and beyond in transforming their CLM processes and strategies, as well as delivering excellent results to their internal and external customers.

Our winner was American Choice Healthcare (ACH), a Floridabased Accountable Care Organization. This is a group of doctors, hospitals and other healthcare providers, who come together voluntarily to give coordinated high-quality care to the Medicare patients. Given the complexity and scope of their operations, they manage a significant number of contracts to ensure efficient and effective healthcare delivery. Before working with us, their contracts were maintained in an unwieldy paper filing system, and preparing and sending customized contracts for signature was a lengthy and inefficient process.

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With Contract Logix, the ACH team reduced the amount of time to draft and execute a contract from days to minutes, and the time to complete the lifecycle management process from weeks to days. The ACH team can generate custom reports for Leadership in hours instead of days, without needing to burden other departments. Also in healthcare, Bayshore HealthCare, a Canadian home and community care service provider, reduced the number of emails the Contract team received by 60 percent by centralizing contracts and implementing a streamlined contract request process.

Vitara Biomedical, a Philadelphia-based company developing a therapeutic platform to improve the quality of life for premature infants, also worked with us to successfully centralize contracts and contract requests. By using templates for popular contracts like NDAs (with up-to-date compliant language) and automating the request workflow, the time it takes to review a contract went from 5 days to less than 24 hours, an 80 percent improvement in time spent.

We also work with companies like New Columbia Solar, a Washington, D.C.-based solar company that finances, designs, installs and maintains solar energy systems. Utilizing the Contract Logix solution, the New Columbia team has significantly improved the time its Accounting and Legal team spends locating and reviewing contracts, reduced missed milestones, increased visibility into contract status and allowed the company, for the first time, to report on contract metrics.

Of these success stories cross multiple industries, what ties them together? What similarities do you see?

I think a lot of organizations struggle with getting started utilizing contract lifecycle management software, regardless of whether they are a Fortune 500 company or a smaller business. My colleague, Tim Donaghy, Contract Logix’s CTO, outlined for CCBJ how a lot of organizations try to do too much too soon and run into problems. It’s important to clearly define the problem(s) you want to solve such as getting visibility into what you’ve agreed to in your contracts, putting a centralized request process in place, or maybe it’s all about needing to speed up signatures and approvals.

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These problems, and their different priorities, are critical to define BEFORE you roll out software. Technology is great, automation is great, but projects fail because the roll out initiatives were planned poorly. Working with a CLM specialist like Contract Logix, where the vast majority of what we do includes helping our customers ask the right questions up front, and implementing projects, can really help.

A common thread in these customer success stories is the importance of having a clear vision, direction and goal to avoid distractions. By implementing a focused approach, these organizations achieved substantial operational improvements and efficiencies. Transitioning from cumbersome paper-based systems to streamlined digital solutions allowed them to significantly reduce the time needed to draft, execute and manage contracts. This focus also enabled them to generate custom reports quickly, cut down on unnecessary communication and enhance overall workflow automation. Moreover, centralizing contract management increased visibility into contract status, minimized missed milestones and facilitated better reporting on contract metrics. These successes underscore the value of a strategic approach to contract management in driving productivity and achieving business objectives.

Lastly, we know that Legal teams are always understaffed and under high pressure to deliver. Our most successful, highest achieving customers are the ones whose Legal teams are unified with and supported by others inside of their organizations to really move the CLM needle. Good contracting processes have become top priorities for companies and those who have recognized contracting isn’t Legal’s ‘problem’ or ‘opportunity’ alone to improve have done best. We are thrilled to see Legal teams get way more support than in the past from Finance, Procurement and IT teams.

Do you have any legal or CLM predictions for the remainder of 2024?

Despite advancements in legal tech, we’re still seeing that a staggering 90 percent of prospects we talk to are managing contracts manually. This suggests there’s still a huge potential for digital transformation in the CLM space.

Of course, AI is another trend to watch in the CLM space.

Our AI-Powered Data Extraction tool allows organizations to automatically import and create contract records, saving time and reducing risk associated with manual data entry.

This technology enables bulk uploading of contracts, automatically extracting key information like parties, dates, terms and clauses. Organizations can then verify and approve the extracted data on their own timeline to ensure accuracy before finalizing the contract records in their system. By leveraging AI for contract data extraction, businesses can free up countless hours previously spent on tedious manual entry and focus more on strategic contract management and analysis. And this has just been the beginning – assistance with real language analysis of incoming contracts and gaining efficiencies in redlining and negotiation processes through AI technologies are where we see organizations focused and ready to adopt next.

Companies are beginning to realize the inefficiencies and risk associated with manual contract management, and they’re actively seeking solutions to automate these processes. The clock is ticking loudly from what we can tell – organizations must solve their contracting problems with fit-for-purpose technology and partners.

One significant trend we’re seeing, in addition to automation, is the growing emphasis on contract analytics and collaboration. Businesses are looking for ways to streamline their contract lifecycle, gain deeper, actionable insights from their contract data and enhance collaboration. This is where a comprehensive CLM system comes into play, offering tools that not only automate routine tasks but also provide robust analytics to drive better decision-making.

As for Contract Logix, we will continue our laser focus on CLM and specialist approach. We ensure that our clients are not just a number-tailoring our solutions to meet their specific needs and providing a personalized experience that helps them achieve their unique contract management goals.

All in all, I think the remainder of 2024 will continue to see a push towards digital contract transformation. Companies that embrace automation, leverage advanced analytics, and adopt AI-driven tools will be well-positioned to improve efficiency, reduce risk and drive better business outcomes. But if you’re still managing contracts manually, now is the perfect time to explore these innovative solutions. 

Karen Meyer is the CEO at Contract Logix and oversees all aspects of the business. Karen brings more than 20 years of SaaS experience building organizations to scale and drive growth. Karen held leadership roles prior to ContractLogix at Qvidian, Manulife Financial eHealth and Imagine Software. Karen holds a BS from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

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LEGAL TECH STARTUP SPOTLIGHT CEO: Thomas Wilde HQ: Boston, MA # of Employees: 103 Total Raised: $33.55M Institutional Investors: • Jump Capital • Nationwide Ventures • Sandbox Industries @indicoData https://indicodata.ai

4.87x MEDIAN

SIZE MULTIPLE

Description:

Developer of a process automation platform intended to accelerate document-based workflows. The company’s platform leverage deep learning and artifical intelligence to offer contract analysis, regulatory compliance, audit and reporting, customer support automation, claim anaylsis, and contract process automation, enabling businesses to improve the efficiency of labor-intensive workflows and automatically extract meaningful insigh from unstructured data at scale.

Most Recent Financing Status

General Catalyst sold a stake in the comapny to an undisclosed buyer. Previously, the company raised $22 million of Series B venture funding in a deal led by Jump Capital and Sandbox Industries on Decembner 14, 2020, putting the company’s pre-money valuation at $30 million. Six other investors participated in the round.

Source: Pitchbook (As of June 2022)

TO NOMINATE A STARTUP TO BE FEATURED, EMAIL KCALVE@CCBJOURNAL.COM.

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