LawHawk Blog

In many Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) solutions, the contracting process traditionally begins with a contract request.

However, to achieve optimal contracting outcomes, it is crucial to acknowledge that the process should commence well before that stage.

Before committing to a contract, a good process might already have a procurement plan in place. The business may have gone through some form of procurement process and discovery workshop and have some form of a term sheet or heads of agreement setting out key terms. These preliminary steps aid participants in structuring their thinking, identifying the problems they aim to solve, and establishing the desired outcomes and how they will work together to achieve them.

By the time we reach the stage of requesting or drafting a contract, a considerable amount of necessary information should, therefore, already be readily available.

The key lies in ensuring that the previously agreed upon or determined information is accessible for use in the contract without the need for redundant data entry.

Fortunately, there are various approaches to accomplish this.

Topics: Legal Automation, Legal Operations, Contract Management

In the fast-paced world of contract management, the rise of comprehensive Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) solutions has been remarkable.

These solutions offer an array of impressive functionalities and continuous improvements that promise to revolutionise how legal teams and contract managers handle contracts. However, amidst this excitement, we’ve observed many projects that struggle to take off, falter at early stages, or fall into disuse after an initially promising start.

At the heart of this issue lies a disconnect between the capabilities these full-featured solutions offer and what legal and procurement teams and organisations actually want and are capable of utilising.

In a recent conversation, a General Counsel succinctly expressed the sentiment shared by many: after extensive exploration of numerous options, all he really wanted was a fully searchable SharePoint library with all contracts in one place, accompanied by essential metadata such as expiry dates to ensure no renewal slipped through the cracks.

Topics: Legal Automation, Legal Operations, Contract Management

Because of our focus on document and legal automation, you might expect us to advocate for automating everything, but as with most things, it’s about context.

Automation is great when you have very high volumes, many standard options you need to choose from, and/or details that need to be entered multiple times. In those situations, you can save 75% or more of the drafting time while ensuring that the right clauses are inserted in the correct format. It can get you 90% or more of the way there, allowing you time to add the final 10%.
You don’t need to automate all documents, though.

Topics: Document Automation, Legal Technology, In-House Legal, Document Assembly, Self-Service Legal Automation, Legal Automation, Legal Operations, Contract Management

“A good contract can go in the bottom draw and never be looked at again” was what people said when I started as a lawyer in the 1990s. Contracts were seen as legal documents to be written by lawyers, negotiated by lawyers, and read by other lawyers - if there was a dispute. 

Topics: Document Automation, In-House Legal, Legal Automation, Legal Operations, Contract Management

An issue that affects almost every organisation that we have worked with is formatting of their Word templates.  

In most cases they are consistently inconsistent and terrible.   

It not only reflects badly on the organisation and how the substance of the document may be perceived, but it’s a huge cost as it takes a lot of time for highly paid staff to fix, and refix, formatting each time a document is created.

If you want to automate your documents, its really important to fix your Word styles first.  Even if you don't want to automate right now, it's still worth fixing your templates. 

Topics: Legal Technology, In-House Legal, Legal Automation, Legal Operations, Contract Management

I often talk to in-house lawyers who are unhappy with a technology solution they're using and are looking for a replacement.

When digging deeper, it often appears that they are not using it as intended to be used and are overlooking core features, which is a large part of the issue. Without using it properly, I think it's unfair to make judgements about how good it is, and hard to tell what you need in an alternative. 

Topics: Document Automation, Legal Technology, In-House Legal, Document Assembly, Law Firm Management, Digital Signatures, Legal Automation, Email Management, Legal Operations, Contract Management

Earlier this month I was at the ILANZ conference. It was an excellent event - the best ILANZ I have been to.

There were several indications that technology for lawyers has matured a lot over the last year.

Topics: Document Automation, Legal Technology, In-House Legal, Document Assembly, Digital Signatures, Self-Service Legal Automation, Compliance, Legal Automation, Legal Operations, Contract Management

This year's ILANZ conference got off to a great start with Craig Hudson, until recently Xero's Country Manager, giving the opening talk about his personal journey, how that led him to Xero, and how vital a sense of purpose has been to him.

Xero has been such an incredible success story that most New Zealand software companies have at some time described themselves as the Xero of [insert market here].

It's still a very relevant analogy for technology companies helping lawyers.

Topics: Document Automation, Legal Technology, In-House Legal, Legal Automation, Legal Operations, Contract Management

Artificial Lawyer recently published an article by Karl Chapman, the CEO of Kim Technologies. The Democratization of Document Automation: We have Reached the Tipping Point.

I'm sure that Kim is an excellent piece of technology, and anything that can make it easier to create automated templates at lower cost is a good thing. But this article significantly oversimplifies the work required to get good outcomes from an automation project.

Topics: Document Automation, Legal Technology, In-House Legal, Document Assembly, Law Firm Management, Digital Signatures, Self-Service Legal Automation, Automated NDAs, Legal Automation, Matter Management, Legal Operations, Contract Management

A lot of the focus when procuring new technology is on the initial upfront costs and the ongoing software and support costs. Fair enough, these are important in evaluating the cost of the new solution.

What often seems to be overlooked are the costs of the current process and the costs of delay. This often comes up when someone in charge of the business process has determined that they have a problem they would like to fix. When a solution they would like is agreed upon, they then need broader support from other teams, such as IT or procurement.

This can result in months, sometimes years, of delay, perhaps while the IT team consider if it would cost less for them to build a solution themselves.

Topics: Practise of Law, Document Automation, Legal Technology, In-House Legal, Law Firm Management, Digital Signatures, Legal Automation, Matter Management, Legal Operations, Contract Management