LawHawk Blog

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

Topics: Document Automation, Legal Technology, In-House Legal, Document Assembly, Compliance, Legal Automation, Legal Operations

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

An issue with getting a legal technology project approved in an organisation is proving the importance of the project and that there will be a good return on investment.

It can be easy to focus too narrowly on what the benefits will be.

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

In an earlier post, I suggested that customers should focus more on the relationship with their suppliers and less on the current technology features. Because requirements are changing so quickly, the supplier must be able to keep up.

A great relationship should not just be reactive. A good supplier will understand and care enough about the customer's business and changing requirements to proactively suggest improvements that the customer can adopt to get even better results.

Topics: Document Automation, Procurement, Legal Technology, In-House Legal, Digital Signatures, Legal Automation, Matter Management, Legal Operations, Contract Management

One of the challenges in legal process automation projects is that it can be hard to figure out the current process and agree on what it ideally should be.

In many legal processes, there is no written process map at all.

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

A lot of technology is bought and sold based on how many features it has.

Vendors are certainly responsible for a lot of marketing, emphasising all their features while simultaneously claiming that their solution is incredibly simple and intuitive.

Buyers, especially those going through formal procurement processes with RFPs, massively overcomplicate things by including spreadsheets with tens, if not hundreds, of requirements.

At some point, everyone loses sight of two of the most important things:

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

The longer I've been working with legal technology, the more convinced I am that customers should be looking for relationships, not technology or particular solutions.

What do I mean?

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

There’s an ongoing debate about whether it’s better to have “point solutions” that only do one thing really well or a single platform that can do nearly everything.

There’s no obvious right answer but here's my thoughts.

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