4 Ways Legal Tech Helps Teams Take Back Time (T&C’s Volume 4)

It’s the last T&C’s of the year. If you’ve been following along with ContractPodAi ’s #12DaysOfGiving, we’ve been sharing jolly good tips for ways legal teams can get a jumpstart in 2023.? In this edition of T&C’s, I’ll share a bit about life before I joined ContractPodAi when I worked on an in-house legal team, and my hunt for the right platform to solve our most significant challenges. After seeing what makes good legal tech great (and bad ones unbearable!), let me help you ensure that yours will make work-life more manageable. ?

Below, see some must-have features to watch for when making CLM investments. Plus, stay tuned for an upcoming poll as I’m curious to hear more about?what’s on your “wish list” to give you and your team time back, and boost productivity, come 2023.

Challenges I Faced Prior to Implementing Legal Technology?

As every in-house counsel knows, there's a very precious commodity we try to conserve every day: time. With packed calendars and demanding jobs, it's imperative that we find, and recover, whatever moments we can from our busy schedules. ??

My in-house team spent hours on manual, mundane, and low-value tasks. I needed a tool to help eliminate repetitive, error-prone tasks and allow my team to provide better service to the rest of the organization. My ultimate goal? To save my team both time and money by digitizing the laborious endeavor known as contract abstracting – which typically involves hours or even days of manually reviewing contracts, extracting key terms and provisions, then summarizing them all. Legal tools can be hard to find when you're outside the tech ecosystem (there are thousands to choose from). ?

Tedious tasks weren’t our only obstacle. ?We needed to address non-compliance in our contracts. Still, I wanted to avoid the hassle of getting other parties' approval (so I didn't have to search five different repositories). Although I had a mid-sized team of lawyers, paraprofessionals, and even a #LegalOperations professional, our team was distributed globally and pressed for time. ?

Due to tight budgets and scarce resources - not to mention a pandemic - finding a compatible CLM was particularly challenging for me. ?Since our office was no longer available, I had to ensure that our team could access files and data from anywhere. During my research, I noticed there were certain features that were most relevant to my team's needs. I’ve summarized them below.?

1. Effortless Access to Data: Make sure the legal tech platform you choose provides convenient access to your legal data, so that teams can quickly find information without long searches through multiple systems or paperwork. This streamlined approach reduces the risk of errors, allowing teams to focus on the tasks that require their expertise and experience.?
2. DIY Contracting: The self-service contract creator (which our teams here use daily) is one of the most asked about features. Non-lawyers can draft, review, and approve contracts without the need for extensive change management or approval from other departments. Say goodbye to inaccuracies, non-compliance, and expensive errors.?
3. AI-in-the-Box: Having automated, intelligent contract review technology designed to identify potential issues and inconsistencies in contracts before they are signed can save a tremendous amount of time and effort on manual review processes. This allows legal teams to focus on high-level tasks and strategy, rather than getting bogged down in the details of contract review.?
4. A Team of Experts at Your Side: Having experts on your side to help with implementation and decision-making, who can help with transformation of your legal department, is critical. The more time (and knowledge) of working legal teams and understanding the unique challenges and pain points they face; the more successful your #LegalTech implementation can be. ?

Adopting technology was, and still is, the most effective way to navigate these challenges. By making the right technology investments, I was able to mitigate these issues and boost our value across the entire business, and so can you.?

PETS - Part 2

So many folks wrote to me about their pets that I wanted to share a second set of ContractPodAi Pets!

BONUS: Richard Tromans of Artificial Lawyer is taking a sabbatical in 2023. This is likely the last set of #LegalTechnology predictions we'll see until he returns! Check them out to see what folks like Otto Hanson ???? , Alex Herrity , Olga V. Mack , Jack Shepherd , Jerry Levine (me), Shilpa Bhandarkar , Electra Japonas , Conan Hines , Roisin Noonan , Noah Waisberg , and others think will happen in 2023 (and what did & didn't happen in 2022)!

That's it for this volume of T&C's! Feel free to drop a comment with any thoughts on what you’ve read and stay tuned for my poll!

Happy holidays, happy new year and see you in 2023!?

Until then, ciao!?