General counsel can expect to get more salespeople and other business colleagues to buy into a self-serve tool for creating contracts if the tool is embedded in work spaces they’re already using, like Slack, Teams or Gmail, Tom Dunlop, co-founder and CEO of Summize, a contract management software company, says.
Contract management tools typically have a component that interacts with popular work spaces, but these components tend to send people to a web application within the legal department, where the contract drafting, redlining and other work is done. It’s more efficient, and more user friendly, to enable people to use a guided chat function to draft contracts within the workspace they’re already using without having to leave it, Dunlop says.
“They answer a few questions in a chatbox and, depending on their answers, the contract gets dynamically built in the background and delivered back to them,” Dunlop told Legal Dive. “The benefit for legal is, it’s a controlled experience, because [business colleagues] are essentially answering a very guided route [and] they don’t actually have to go to legal.”
Nondisclosure agreements can serve as a quick win because they’re relatively routine, Dunlop says.
In this use case, a salesperson can initiate and get an NDA signed entirely within Slack or another workspace and have the contract filed away in a repository without involving an in-house attorney. Other contracts can be handled the same way, with additional steps included to account for increased complexity. The common thread is that the work is done in the workspace that the person is already using.
Dunlop calls this an example of a point tool, which he says is growing in popularity among software developers because it locates the application where the user is rather than requiring the user to go where the application is.
“A lot of people are talking about the end of CLM because point tools are here,” he said. “The actual experience is embedded in that tool. That’s why it’s popular. So, we’ve applied that across the full contract lifecycle.”
General counsel that want to create and manage more complex transactions using this point tool approach would have to do more upfront work, like building in their playbook. That way, if a business colleague is creating a contract and there’s a back-and-forth on terms, the tool can flag problem clauses and suggest changes to align the clause with what’s acceptable to the company or offer fallback clauses.
“You just give us those statements in the background — it’s basically a set of rules, like, we don’t accept indemnities in NDAs, or the confidential information definition needs to include this and this — and we convert that end to end,” he said.
If general counsel want to start small, they can limit the tool’s use to NDAs. That takes a couple of weeks to set up, Dunlop said. From there they can add more use cases, culminating in more complex contracts that can be built using the company’s playbook.
“It’s a sliding scale,” he said. “Not one or the other. Wherever along that scale you want to go in terms of complexity.”
Every contract that gets written is tracked throughout the process and filed in the repository, where the legal team can search, summarize and extract key terms and dates, and run analytics. For contracts that need legal involvement prior to signing, the system can be set up to route tasks to the legal team.
“The workflow is set up by legal, so they know where the contract is starting, what the Docusign flow is, who’s signing it, and which folder it’s going into afterwards,” he said. “They’ll get notifications at certain points. You can increase these and put approval layers as safeguards as well.”
In short, it functions like the typical contract lifecycle management tool but its access point is wherever the person is working. Dunlop thinks legal teams in the United States, where Dunlop’s U.K.-based company has been focusing heavily in the last 18 months, are primed to find the approach attractive.
“The U.S. is a more mature market” than the U.K., he said. “If they had a bad experience previously with the rollout of a CLM, a buyer understands why that [embedded approach] is important.”
