Contract Heroes

In this installment of Contract Heroes, we had the opportunity to chat with Susan Packal, the Vice President of Legal Ops at Snyk. Throughout our conversation, Susan provided a wealth of information about the current state of the legal ops realm as well as some essential tips for anyone just starting out in the space and those looking to hire legal ops roles.

In this installment of Contract Heroes, we had the opportunity to chat with Vice President Associate General Counsel at Thriveworks, Stefanie Frank. Stefanie has been practicing law for about 8 years, having attended law school in North Carolina. She became the second attorney employed by Thriveworks, a mental health organization that offers both in-person and virtual appointments with licensed clinicians across all 50 states.

Throughout our conversation, Stefanie shared her experiences working with a very small in-house legal team as well as some of the nuances that come with managing contracts and legal issues in the realm of healthcare. Listen in to discover how she and her team have adapted to the ever-changing regulations of the healthcare system and the unique needs they sought to meet when selecting their own contract management tool.

In this installment of Contract Heroes, we had the good fortune to be able to sit down for a chat with renowned AI expert, Jim Chiang. Jim is the founder of My Legal Einstein, an AI-powered contract acceleration platform. He has been submerged in the contract management space for some time, catering mostly to the AI side of CLM. He was the head AI engineer for major names in the CLM industry such as Apttus and Icertis and brings a wealth of both experience and knowledge to improve the way AI interacts with contracts. His goal and the goal of My Legal Einstein is to investigate how AI can transform the way people work in the contract space.

Our conversation with Jim touched on several aspects of the interaction between AI and contract management, exploring how the two can work together most effectively, the importance of honesty in technology, and the future of AI-based solutions as a whole in the world of contracts.

In this installment of Contract Heroes, we had a chat with contracting superstar Nada Alnajafi. Nada has been practicing law in-house for about 12 years, working mainly in the tech industry. She enjoys handling contracts throughout all phases of the process, from drafting to negotiating, even stating that contracts are her favorite part of the job. During our conversation, we discuss her blog (Contract Nerds) success, tons of tips around red lining, and her book: Contract Redlining Etiquette.

Building an in-house legal team from the ground up with Jack Terschluse We recently sat down to chat with Jack Terschluse, the corporate counsel for Balto based in St. Louis. Jack started his career at a large law firm, however, once the pandemic transitioned everyone into remote work, new opportunities became available and he moved to the in-house side of the law. He accepted a position as corporate counsel for Balto as a legal team of one and has since helped their team grow the legal department into what it is today. During our conversation we discussed: - Tips & tricks for a legal team of one - How to successfully build a business case and implement a CLM solution - How to build out a legal ops team at your organization

In this episode of Contract Heroes, we had a chat with soft skills specialist, Patrick Barry. Patrick has been working in-house as Associate General Counsel with Emerson Electric (more specifically their Commercial Residential Solutions subdivision) for 12 years. He explained that his role involves supporting the Emerson businesses in order to help them negotiate efficient and well-understood contracts by acting as a business partner with them. The ultimate goal is to create contracts that make the business happy while ensuring that customers and vendors always understand exactly what is expected of them.

Slightly different from our usual conversations, our focus during our chat with Patrick was on his list of 6 soft skills that lawyers and sales associates can use to cut through the bureaucracy involved in the contracting process and make sure negotiations run as smoothly and efficiently as possible. Read on to dive deeper into Patrick’s tips and how you can start applying them for yourself and your organization.

Finding commonality is at the top of Patrick’s list for a reason. It is the first skill he typically recommends to lawyers. Most people on the sales team likely have a natural instinct for finding commonalities in order to sell more efficiently, but lawyers may not be used to taking the time to form connections like these prior to getting into the legal talk. Common ground does not have to be something complex either. In fact, the simpler the better, as it will be easiest for both sides to relate. Patrick recommends checking out the other party’s LinkedIn profile before the first phone call in order to locate that commonality and use it to bond right away. Whether it be the weather or attending the same school, bringing up common ground early on in the conversation sets a positive tone for the rest of the negotiations and makes it easier to work through any complicated issues that may arise later.

Patrick next emphasized the importance of knowing who is the quarterback on your side of negotiations. Many might automatically assume a lawyer is a quarterback, but in some cases, it could be the sales or procurement departments. It is essential to determine who is the number one priority, and who is the person who has this agreement as to the first thing on their desk. Without a clear indication of the quarterback, negotiations can quickly become jumbled, and not everyone understands the game plan that will allow you to get across the goal line.

In fact, it is often the case that lawyers should not be quarterbacks, as they typically do not need to be involved with every contract. Coaching up the sales and procurement employees to know exactly when consulting the legal team is a necessity can be extremely helpful for keeping lawyers sane and putting more power in the hands of the business people. For example, NDAs are very standard documents. Utilizing a CLM tool to assist with the drafting process and simplifying the language of clauses can allow sales and procurement employees to handle standardized NDAs without needing to consult the legal department about them.

Understanding the personalities of everyone involved in the negotiation is another key soft skill to emphasize. You should strive to understand the personalities not only of people from other organizations but also of your own internal employees as well. If you anticipate early on or even before initiating a conversation that this person may be aggressive or stubborn with you, you can plan ahead with effective strategies to handle that behavior and still create a productive conversation.

Redlines are viewed very differently by the sales team and the legal team. Lawyers likely see them as a typical part of the negotiation process while business employees are more likely to view them as an inconvenience. Patrick explained that minimizing the number of redlines often leads to much smoother agreements, as it often avoids weeks of extraneous negotiation. For example, suppose you can spend an extra 10 minutes with a document and only change a few words rather than deleting an entire paragraph. In that case, it will be extremely helpful for avoiding frustrations, hang-ups, and confusion on both sides.

One of our hosts, Pepe, shared an example from his experience working at a bigger law firm. He recounted that he received a document from a client to review and did not see any problems with it, so he sent it back to his partner saying just that. His partner, however, was shocked and could not believe that they would be billed for reviewing the document without providing any changes. Many lawyers have this same stigma in their heads and may believe that if they do not make changes, then it may seem that they have not properly reviewed the document. This is not the case. In fact, making fewer changes will help the deal move forward faster and keep the client happy.

Setting priorities with all involved parties is another important soft skill. Before lawyers spend weeks redlining a document, Patrick encourages the sales or procurement team to spend 10 minutes deciding the top 5 issues that are deal-breakers within the agreement. If those issues cannot be resolved, then it is not even worth looking at the rest of the document. Outlining these priorities in exact detail prevents lawyers from having to guess what the main issues are. Guesses typically lead to wasted time and an insurmountable roadblock in the end. The goal is to avoid spending time on less important negotiable terms and instead prioritize those which actually bring more value to the contract.

The final soft skills tip that Patrick gave us was to view all contract terms as commercial terms. In this way, you can make sure that the business employees are involved with the agreement and understand the terms from their own perspectives. You do not want sales and procurement teams to view the legal department simply as a roadblock that impedes their attempts at making deals. In fact, business employees can often be the best advocates for lawyers and important contract terms once they have an understanding of them, as they can take that knowledge back to their own department and explain why the terms need to be negotiated in the first place. Lawyers should be viewed as business enablers instead of as roadblocks. After all, the ultimate goal of the contracts being drafted is to create a new commercial relationship with an outside party, so viewing items in commercial terms instead of only in legal terms can be extremely helpful to everyone working on the agreement from all sides.

For more exclusive chats with expert guests in the contract lifecycle management sphere along with valuable legal-tech advice, check out past installments of Contract Heroes, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode! If you have any questions for our guest, Patrick Barry, he can be found on LinkedIn and is always excited to share stories or chat about experiences in the legal community.

In this installment of Contract Heroes, we had a chat with a long-term partner in the legal tech space, Roland Vogl. Roland is the executive director of CodeX, the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, which is a joint center between the law school and the computer science department at Stanford University in California. The mission of CodeX is to bring information technology to the legal system in order to make work more efficient for all kinds of stakeholders.

Born and raised in the Austrian mountains, Roland grew up with the intention of practicing law in Austria. However, once he was introduced to the international climate while studying abroad in the UK, he quickly decided to seek out global work, eventually partnering with European institutions in Brussels. There, he became interested in privacy law and data protection, a major point of contention in the late 90s, and ended up attending Stanford University for his Masters program. After working at a tech law firm, he found an opportunity to rejoin Stanford as a teaching fellow in a new program focused on law science and technology. During his time at Stanford in the past 20 years, he helped co-found CodeX and has been involved in the overall growth and development of legal technology and computational law.

Throughout our conversation with Roland, we learned all about the foundation of CodeX while also gaining some insight into how legal tech has changed over the years from his perspective working intimately in the space. Read on to hear more about some of Roland’s unique experiences as well as some tips he shared for lawyers and law students looking to involve themselves in a less traditional career path.

To kick things off, we wanted to know a little more about how CodeX came to be and how it has evolved over time. Roland began by explaining that about 15 years ago, they held a workshop at Stanford in which his former boss co-taught a course on computers and law. At the time, the internet was starting to take off which meant there were more data available as well as new legal modeling and knowledge representation techniques. They decided that it would be an excellent time to devote attention to these topics and came up with the idea to create CodeX. 

The name CodeX itself stems from the intersection of legal code and computer code (and the fact that several other centers at Stanford also used “X” in their titles). The second part of the name, “Stanford Center for Legal Informatics,” was a bit of a toss-up at first, as they had trouble choosing between the phrases “legal informatics” and “computational law.” While the center's main focus involves the automation of legal reasoning (which is essentially computational law), they wanted to be inclusive of other techniques as well, landing on the phrase “legal informatics” instead.

The center experienced a swell of interest in new approaches from around 2008 to 2010, and they began holding weekly group meetings for more and more people to pitch their ideas. Over time, CodeX became not just about research, but also about building a community in which people could discuss their ideas with like-minded individuals. It showcased the power of making a network. This eventually led to the establishment of the Future Law Conference about 10 years ago, which is a flagship program that seeks out important trends to pay attention to in the legal innovation community. It offers a platform for people to showcase their work and share their expertise while meeting others involved in similar spaces. April 2022 was the first time the conference was held in person since the start of the pandemic, and Roland encourages everyone to check out recently released videos documenting the conference.

Since Roland has been involved in the legal tech realm for a while, we asked him to tell us about how the space has evolved over the years from his perspective. He explained that it is difficult to pinpoint one exact area that has changed because the space as a whole has exploded with growth. We have provided a list of the innovations that he described across a huge variety of divisions all located within the legal tech space:

- Law schools: Awareness has exploded for law schools, which have begun figuring out how to teach legal tech and computational law to their students and properly integrate it into the curriculum.

- Law firms: Looking to change the way they deliver services to their clients as a result of more pressure from clients to be efficient and deliver services in a tech-enabled way. Creating new services for clients like predicting legal outcomes and computational law systems that allow them to navigate through a workflow and receive legal answers via machine.

-  In-house departments: Using legal tech to improve how they serve their internal clients and keep costs at bay while not having to reinvent the wheel over and over with each newly drafted document.

- Courts: Looking for innovation in providing a better user experience for litigants.

- Government: Employing AI systems across various agencies.

Roland also mentioned a research project being conducted that focused on using computational law and computational contracts in the insurance space in order to generate a better experience for consumers. Clearly, legal tech can reach into any number of different places and will continue to extend into new communities. In fact, Roland stated that it is an exciting time to be a lawyer who knows how to integrate technology.

To wrap up this amazing conversation, Roland shared his knowledge about founding a startup and a few unique career paths available to those looking for something a little different from the traditional legal paths. Here are a few of his valuable entrepreneurial tips:

- Startups bring out the best and worst in people, so find teammates who share your values.

- Listen closely to the customer. Do not operate in a bubble and come up with big theoretical ideas without checking back with customers first to make sure it caters to what they really want.

- Build both your dedication and your ability to overcome adversity.

- Fail fast and fail often because oftentimes the best way to learn is through trial and error.

- Match up a legal expert who knows the shortcomings of their area with a technologist who has the right skills to engineer a solution to those problems.

In terms of exciting and innovative career paths outside of the typical law firms, in-house counsel, and academia, Roland recommended looking at areas like contract lifecycle management (CLM) and e-Discovery. Even if you are not interested in going the competitive startup route, there are plenty of jobs available at existing companies as a legal technologist.

For more exclusive chats with expert guests in the contract lifecycle management sphere along with valuable legal tech advice, check out past installments of Contract Heroes, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode! If you have any questions for our guest, Roland Vogl, you can check out the CodeX website or email him at [email protected] to set up a time to discuss any and all things legal tech-related.

In this installment of Contract Heroes, we sat down to chat with fellow legal tech podcaster, Nick Rishwain. Nick started his show, LegalTechLIVE, in 2015, when the realm of legal technology was still in the process of ramping up. Though he is currently on hiatus from the show, they have a log of 130 episodes, all showcasing fascinating interviews with founders of legal tech companies and startups. 

Nick first became interested in exploring the expanding universe of legal tech as a result of his employment with Experts.com, a marketing platform for expert witnesses and business consultants. The site started out somewhat akin to a directory but has since evolved into much more, allowing expert witnesses to market themselves to attorneys, businesses, and industries, and even offering flat fee searches for attorneys who do not want to perform searches themselves. Nick has been working there in a legal tech role for about 12 years and has done his podcast for 7 years. The idea for LegalTechLIVE struck him because he wanted to get to know other people in the industry and become more involved in the legal tech space. By promoting founders and the new, exciting things they were working on, he was able to network and build a community.

Read on to hear some of the highlights from our chat with Nick, including his perspective on how legal tech has evolved over the years and some excellent tips for marketing with lawyers.

Since Nick has been involved in legal tech for 12 years, we wanted to kick off our conversation by hearing about the changes that occurred in the industry from his perspective, as both a podcaster and a member of the workforce. He explained that when he started it felt like most products were primarily eDiscovery, law practice management, or case management, but the industry has broadened significantly since then. There were only a few AI-based legal research tools receiving attention back in 2015, with CLM not even being a phrase utilized until a few years later. The startup space for legal research and IT solutions for offices, in particular, was not very vibrant when he first began the podcast. 

Nick stated that there has been both a broadening and a narrowing when it comes to the evolution of legal technology. The variety of tools and the number of concepts that now fall under the blanket of legal tech have most certainly broadened. Tools now are created with any number of unique purposes in mind, whether they are geared more toward a specific area such as compliance or justice, or they are designed to perform a specific function like managing text communications between lawyers and clients or innovating court reporting and legal intelligence. Some tools are created to go directly to the consumer while others are meant to be more enterprise-driven. All-in-all, the market is saturated with a huge amount of software, with many more options than were available in 2015.

The narrowing aspect comes into play when you consider what companies are prioritizing. As more options for tools become available with each one having its own unique perks and quirks, organizations can be more specific about what they want their legal tech software to accomplish within the company. An organization no longer needs to select from one or two extremely broad tools but rather can hone in on software that prioritizes the current and future needs of the company. In this way, legal tech solutions have both blossomed and somewhat narrowed in their scope.

We asked Nick to tell us a little bit about how he built up the community around LegalTechLIVE and how he went about finding guests to interview at the start. He explained that he was always most interested in speaking with legal tech founders before they became a big deal, those who were working on startups or series A companies. He did plenty of reading about the legal tech realm in general, which led him to find a number of people he could reach out to for interviews. He also utilized Google Alerts and social media like Twitter and LinkedIn to build connections with his peers and start making friends in the industry. In fact, he found searching through the legal tech hashtag on Twitter to be helpful as well.

Nick also stated that he typically sought out people who had new, exciting ideas about legal tech. There may have been hundreds of startups that all had the same concept, but Nick chose to highlight those who stood out with something more unique that had not already been done a thousand times. For example, many of the tools and services existed outside the legal realm already, but creative innovations needed to be made when adapting that software to work specifically for legal practices. Adding legal to a solution is essential if you want to be able to sell it to attorneys, and incorporating those aspects seamlessly could be quite difficult.

Laughing, Nick added that his superpower, if he has one, is promoting people and making friends. Since the start of his career as a podcaster, he has been able to help promote a number of founders and has even kept in touch with some, creating long-lasting friendships. Thanks to his expertise and the way he has built his reputation, some guests have even started to come to him to be interviewed instead of him reaching out first.

To wrap up our chat with Nick, we asked him to give a few tips to our viewers who may frequently find themselves trying to sell to lawyers. Ironically, his first tip was not to sell to lawyers at all, if you can avoid it! Instead, look for other stakeholders in the company, even paralegals or legal assistants. After all, many solutions will be enterprise solutions that help departments outside of just legal, so getting your foot in the door with these other departments may make it easier to finalize the deal. He also advised not to call lawyers on the phone to try to sell to them, as this can eat into their already packed schedules and leave a bad taste in their mouths. Keeping them in your email campaign and waiting for them to make the move on their own time is usually a better option. The final tip Nick provided was to attempt to integrate your legal tech solution into the company’s existing workflow, such as Microsoft Word or Outlook. Software that fits rather seamlessly into the established practices may sometimes be received more openly than stand-alone software.

For more exclusive chats with expert guests in the contract lifecycle management sphere and valuable legal-tech advice, check out past installments of Contract Heroes and subscribe so you don’t miss an episode! If you have any questions for our guest, Nick Rishwain, he is available on Twitter @LegalTechLIVE. You can also find episodes of his podcast on Apple, Spotify, and his website, https://legaltechlive.com.

This episode of Contract Heroes featured Dan Hendy, the Executive Vice President of Corporate and Commercial Solutions at UnitedLex. Dan has been working in legal operations since 2015 when he was first introduced to a legal ops role while employed at GE. Throughout our conversation, Dan shared his experiences with how the world of legal operations has evolved since its early days as well as some of the biggest mistakes and most valuable outcomes he has noticed during CLM implementations.

Since Dan has been hard at work in the legal ops world for 7 years now, we decided to start the show by picking his brain to find out more about how legal ops has evolved in his eyes and what it was like at its genesis. He explained he was interested in taking on his role at GE because he noticed a lot of moving parts in the legal department just were not working. The desire to fix these issues is a huge part of how legal ops began. As legal departments expanded, it became clear that they too would need a way to manage budgets, filter projects from other parts of the organization, and leverage spending on outside counsel. Back then, they were unable to collect operational data on the throughput and performance of the law department, making it difficult to meet today’s expectations of the legal team being governed the same way a CFO might run a finance department. 

Currently, legal ops are headed in a direction that builds the legal team as a business enabler. The chief legal officer is expected to present more than just details about individual cases being handled by the legal department. Instead, they must quantitatively show the impact they are having on the business via the data collected from contracts. This elevates legal team leaders and senior lawyers to the status of business partners, making them more credible with their peers and garnering well-deserved respect from other departments.

In summary, legal ops have evolved from merely managing outside counsel and your stack of technology to now having the proper data to make strategic decisions about how to run and structure the legal department.

Dan then gave us an excellent analogy to illustrate how a CLM solution can help the legal team provide better and more satisfying interactions with other departments who may have previously been hesitant to approach in-house counsel with their contract issues. Bringing up a handful of different food apps, he mentioned the concept of real-time tracking and how much it does to improve customer experience. By simply viewing the app, you can see where your food is and how long it will be until it arrives. A CLM solution can provide similar information for requests submitted to the legal team.

For example, if another department needs an opinion on a contract from someone in the legal team, they can submit their request and then have the ability to check the status of that request as well as who is handling it. Providing that visibility in real-time of how the task is being managed from within the legal department goes a long way in building the bridge between departments. It indicates the standard for different types of requests, allows lawyers to prioritize certain tasks, and gives others an idea of how long they can expect to wait before they hear back. In this way, the legal team clearly sets up and manages the expectations being placed on them.

As we often discuss here on Contract Heroes, one of the biggest mistakes a company can make is to purchase a CLM tool without first fixing their contract processes, thus automating broken processes and wasting valuable time and resources. Dan provided us with an extremely helpful list of ways to avoid mistakes like this while implementing your own CLM solution.

- Start with your desired outcomes and work backward. What does the system need to produce by the end of the implementation? Utilize the “5 Whys Rule.” Choose an outcome that you think is a necessity, such as “I need to track approvals.” Ask yourself why you need to track approvals. “I need to show an audit trail.” Why do you need to show an audit trail? Keep following the statement back until you illuminate the real purpose, eventually reaching a much simpler process.

- Engage stakeholders and encourage executive sponsorship. A senior stakeholder in the company must make the implementation a priority and push people to adopt it. Without that backup from important groups outside of just legal, it will be difficult to make people excited about the change.

- Understand your contract processes. Not every contract process is created equal, so they should not all be treated the same. One out of hundreds of business associate agreements will not require the same attention as an 80-page agreement that takes 6 months to negotiate and is the driving force of your revenue. Pay attention to the differences in the processes and build the discipline to manage them properly.

Dan explained that there are generally two goals when it comes to CLM implementation: improving the employee experience or creating value via the use of technology. Clients need to sit down and figure out their motivating force for utilizing a CLM solution and how their business values that force before they begin the implementation itself. He went on to provide 3 illustrations of how different types of organizations may find value in their tech solution.

- Growth organizations: The motivation for a company that is focused on growth is speed and efficiency. They need to be able to process contracts quickly in order to gain more revenue. The focus may be on quantifying the timeline of the contract process and finding ways to speed it up.

- Big organizations: Established companies are often overrun with legacy contracts and may have no idea what information is locked away inside them. Moving all these documents into a repository and focusing on tracking certain data points within those contracts may help to identify areas where value erosion is occurring. The focus here may be on counteracting the value erosion that comes when you lack transparency in your contract portfolio.

- Compliance organizations: Companies that work in a higher-risk environment may need to prioritize the avoidance of litigation and commercial issues. Though this is harder to quantify than the other examples, CFOs are particularly understanding of the fact that not having a direct line of sight into your contract data can create unnecessary risks in the organization.

For more exclusive chats with expert guests in the contract lifecycle management sphere along with valuable legal-tech advice, check out past installments of Contract Heroes, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode! If you have any questions for our guest, Dan Hendy, you can easily reach him on LinkedIn.

In this installment of Contract Heroes, we had the opportunity to chat with none other than Krzysztof Kwiatek, the associate director at Deloitte Legal located in Kraków, Poland. Kris works in legal management consulting and runs the technology center of excellence, mostly focusing his time on CLM tool implementations. His induction into the world of CLM occurred in 2014 when he began working to manage the tech aspect of the new contract management team at Capgemini. Kris has 20 years of experience in widely understood IT and has spent the last 8 years involved specifically in contract lifecycle management. 

With Kris’s experience in implementing CLM software in mind, we focused our conversation around gaining his advice about successful implementations with high user adoption rates while also learning a bit more about how to go about choosing from the wide variety of CLM solutions currently available on the market.

To kick off the discussion, we first asked Kris to tell us about his view of contracts and why CLM is important to every organization. He explained that since contracts and services are everywhere, permeating nearly every inch of an organization, and they need to be signed more and more often, the process surrounding them must be efficient. Contracts are touched by everyone in the company, but they are not owned by one specific department. Even though practically every other process within a company may already be automated, from ERPs to HR, the contracting process, not home to anyone department, was often overlooked. However, there are two main reasons that automation is so beneficial for contracting processes: signing contracts faster and quickly extracting information that you need at the moment you need it. Even if you are only able to implement a contract repository at the start, you are still going to start seeing the benefits of faster searches, tracking approvals, and learning how to make your contract process more efficient.

Kris then took us through the implementation process, beginning with a pilot or minimum viable product (MVP). The goal of an MVP is to narrow the scope of the system, usually to just one template or one department, in order to gauge how well it will fit a company’s needs. In fact, these needs are what must be detailed before the pilot can even commence. The organization and the implementation team must first come to an agreement internally about the success criteria for the tool and what it will be expected to fix. Without these criteria in place, it will be impossible to measure the software’s actual success throughout the pilot and determine whether or not it will be properly deployed.

Kris explained that deploying the pilot quickly is a must and that it needs to be deployed to real users who can provide real feedback. Outside of a contract repository, the MVP will typically include two integrations (single sign-on and E-signatures), one or two templates (NDA and another which must be used for the duration of the pilot), and a limited group of about 100 users who have been properly trained to work with the system. Once the pilot concludes, you are then faced with two options: go deeper into the functionality by extending everything in the same department and testing again, or launching the MVP throughout the whole organization. The latter is the usual choice as long as the pilot was deemed successful.

As we then asked Kris about his experience recommending certain vendors, he constructed a very handy visual when it comes to the different purposes that a CLM tool may be designed to fulfill, which we later deemed the CLM Quadrant. Essentially, CLM solutions are created with one or more of these vantage points on the contract process in mind: buy-side, sell-side, pre-signature, and post-signature. Depending on the needs of your organization, especially placing focus on the must-haves instead of the nice-to-haves, you may look for a solution that adheres to one quadrant more than another. As the tools grow and develop, and your contract processes do as well, you may also find that a tool expands with you down the road, accommodating more aspects of the quadrants than it previously did.

Deloitte is tool agnostic, meaning that they do not have their own solution and can provide the client with the best option for them without any bias. Despite being tool agnostic, however, they do remain tool opinionated, with years of experience providing them with enough information to develop preferences between vendors. That being said, Kris does try to have at least two or three solutions available for each shelf of the market, from the biggest organizations to the middle players to the smallest companies too. 

With tools, surveys, and questionnaires in hand, Kris and his team have managed to scale down the implementation process to anywhere from three to six weeks, depending on the size of the company. However, even the quickest and most seamless implementations do not always guarantee user adoption of the software. This is where building up hype for the implementation becomes necessary. The closer you get to going live, the more buzz you should be creating around the CLM tool. But, the buzz that you generate cannot come from preaching about small technicalities within the tool because not many people will engage with that. Instead, try sending short videos or animated movies about how great life will be once the CLM solution has been implemented. Almost akin to movie trailers, you need to be making people excited for the final product.

The human aspect of implementation plays a huge role in generating buzz and facilitating user adoption. Your test group for the pilot will become the ambassadors to the software, as they are the experts who know exactly how to work it and how much it will increase the quality of life for employees. It falls to them to spread rumors about how great the CLM tool is among their colleagues. The implementation team will be responsible for making sure all questions about the system are addressed in a timely fashion. After the system goes live, it is important to host daily training sessions with an open invitation that allows anyone to join the call and ask questions about how to use the tool. Following up on questions quickly and providing hands-on solutions is the best way to ensure that no one feels left behind or frustrated while working with the new system.

For more exclusive chats with expert guests in the contract lifecycle management sphere along with valuable legal-tech advice, check out past installments of Contract Heroes, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode! If you have any questions for our guest, Kris Kwiatek, he is available to message on LinkedIn.