From Bottlenecks to Breakthroughs in Legal Teams With Laurie Ehrlich

Made with speech-to-text software, so a few words may be off.

0:00You're listening to the Contract Heroes podcast, your one-stop shop for all things contract management. And now here are your hosts, Marc and Pepe. Lori, well, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a, a couple of years since we've had you on the podcast, so it's great to have you back. And, you know, I think, I think you've been a little busy since our last conversation. So before we flip things over to Pepe so you can give us a little bit of a more info on, on what we're gonna be chatting about, we'd love to, uh, give the listeners just a, a quick update, you know, on your background and what you've been working on, and then from there we'll, we'll kind of dive in. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to talk to you guys again. So I was the chief legal officer at Dioptra, and in November we had the very exciting moment of acquisition by Icertis, which was actually the first contract lifecycle management tool I ever used early in my career. And so it felt like I, I came full circle, and it's just, it's been very exciting.

1:01I'm kind of in the same sort of multi-headed role that I had when I was at Dioptra, where because we were a small startup, you know, at a startup everybody does everything. But because I'm one of the deepest people with the deepest knowledge of the Dioptra tool, which is now integrated into the Icertis product suite, it rebranded as Vera Engage. I am doing customer success, and I'm doing product development, and I'm doing company education and training, and customer training and education, and it's all in my favorite area, which is contracting efficiency, which is kind of my first... I'm going way overboard on this, but I was a commercial attorney. I, I started as an IP attorney. I went in-house, I became a commercial attorney, and I was bored out of my mind until I realized that I could do transformation in my role as commercial attorney. And I started doing transformation work when I was at Cognizant, and then jumped into legal ops and, and once I realized I could do transformation, the, my passion has been transforming commercial contracting and how we do it, and can't we possibly do it more efficiently than we do it today?

2:04Because it slows the gears in a company. And, well, for people who didn't know about this, Lori was an in-house counsel a couple, couple of years ago, actually, when we met. Couple years, right? It, it's been a while already. It has. So, wow. So Lori, what I want you to talk about now, because I think it's, like, very interesting, how was all those changes of, of roles to work in a big company, then a startup, and then now you're working again, or was acquired by another big company. So, like, do you think something when you were back in the in-house, uh, help you or you learned some stuff that help you in your time working in the startup and then in an M&A deal and then working again? Like, can you give us a- Yeah... a little bit on how that, uh, roadmap looked like? You know, my first in-house role was Cognizant, which was 300,000 people plus.

3:08It was clearly like the, that expression of, like, steering a battleship. That is what change management was like at, at Cognizant. It was a big lift. But I, I did learn how to do it and was able to do... I created intake, centralized intake for contracting, and we had a playbook, which was fantastic. It was 300 pages, which is a lot, but it worked. And then I went to Datadog, and it was very interesting. So different stages. Cognizant, when I joined, somewhere in the 10 years I was there, we celebrated our 25-year anniversary. Datadog, when I joined, had just IPO'd the year before, and it was very much in the stage of how do we create scalable processes, because that's what we need for rigor as a public company and to, to speed our, our continued revenue growth, was scalable processes. And it was fantastic because every team at every level in the company wanted to work together to create efficiencies, and there was tremendous partnership.

4:03And whereas Cognizant was big and very siloed because it was so big, Datadog was, you know, still large, 6,000 people, but not quite as impossible to know what left hand and right hand were doing. And then of course I jumped into Dioptra, a startup. I... And it was perfect for me, 'cause when I wanted to be in the center of every business decision, and as the first employee at, at Dioptra, I was at the center of every business decision. Plus obviously as the CLO, you're right in the mix of things. But no processes, no procedures. We are not going for scalability. We are going for any little bite of revenue we can possibly bring in as a startup, because that is the lifeblood of any startup, and how do you achieve product market fit? And that was the entire journey. Like, the entire... I had to learn how to be more flexible and more comfortable with speed than I'd ever been, and I like speed. At Datadog I was constantly told, "You're exhausting everybody around you. You need to slow down. Don't do so much." Whereas at Dioptra, like, I had to be like, "Wait, wait. Should we be doing that yet?" And they're like, "Yes, we have to go. We have to go."

5:02And so it was, it was, um, a crazy, crazy pace. And I was like, "Should we document them?" Like, "We don't have time for documentation. What's documentation?" And then I... Now at Icertis, it's kind of in the middle, right? It's not yet a public company, so you don't have the same stock compliance requirements that you have at, like, Datadog, where you're building that out, but it's much, much bigger than a startup, and we have enterprise customers that are looking for reliability, stability, and they, you can't move at the same lightning speed because then you're creating disruption for your customers, which is not a desired state for a large enterprise. And so it's learning how to recalibrate again and how to figure out what you should be creating that's scalable today and where we're still in that learning mode of finding the right product market fit, especially today, because I think probably more than any other time in the life cycle of contract tools, we are at a point of tremendous disruption, and there is a need for speed that is different from what it was pre-generative AI. And so it's kind of adjusting to figuring out, like, where is the market going? Where do we need to go to be ahead of the market?

6:07And how can we move fast enough, but still create that stability for our existing customers? So it's, it's a net or a new interesting point. Well, yeah, I mean, right now with AI, there's, there's, like, a lot of disruption. I've been using, uh, AI agents lately just to get a sense on what you can do. OpenCloud, there's a new one. CloudWork, I think is, is the other one, and it's amazing, like, what you can do now. Like, it's so fast, and now if, if you're not as fast, like, you're just going to get behind there. And one of the things that as lawyers, we are both lawyers, and, you know, like, since we are in law school, you have, like, these two paths. You either go in-house or you go in a law firm. But since you've been already in an exit in a startup, like, what would you recommend for some... I mean, you don't have to be a lawyer, right? But let's say for somebody who is thinking to go into, let's say, maybe legal or maybe in AI, like, now that you've been involved in, in an AI startup, do you see something that maybe people should pay attention maybe to build a product?

7:15And how can you think about to start building an exit plan? I think that it's a challenging time to be entering the legal profession, right? The, the-- it's very clear. People who have been lawyers for a long time are still incredibly valuable because the years of expertise that you've built. Coming in, I wrote a, a blog a while ago about how we're all managers now, and I think that's true for lawyers, true for any other white-collar job, that you have to be able to know how to orchestrate agents. And I don't mean, like, you have to have a handle on prompting. I don't mean, though, that you have to, like, know how to program AI. It's that you have to understand that your job is not to sit and do the work. It's to think about how the work can be done smartest using the tools that are available to you, and knowing what to question, what not to question, what you can really automate versus what still needs a viewpoint.

8:13And I think it's really incumbent upon senior attorneys, whether they're in-house or whether they're in a law firm, to find better ways to mentor. I was very, very lucky early in my career when I was at a law firm because I happened to be a very strong writer, and my writing skills were recognized by the head of the department. And so a lot of the very junior work you get when you're, like, don't know how to write a brief at all, I didn't get. Like, I went straight into, like, writing briefs and getting direct feedback from the partner on, on strengthening how to write a brief and how to use legal reasoning and what judges are looking for. And, and that level of mentorship significantly contributed to my ability to exercise legal judgment when I had my own clients and as, as I went in-house. And so I think that my experience needs to be the common experience for all incoming attorneys right now.

9:06My advice to anyone coming into the profession is AI is now part of this profession, and if you do not know how to prompt, you better start learning how to prompt today, uh, and really be comfortable with a rapidly changing technology landscape, because today's current tech stack for any company is not gonna be the same as the tech stack even in a year, because the rise of agents is gonna accelerate everything. Yeah, no, I... And I think that brings up an interesting question or something that I'd like your take on, Lori, and, and it is just, you know, how rapidly things are changing. And, you know, when the team was developing this solution, you know, how did you decide where to focus? Y- obviously, we know that, you know, there's many different ways that, that AI can be used right now, but how did you decide on where to focus in the space? Was it solving a problem that, that you had had, you know, personally, that you had, uh, seen other organizations trying to solve? W-what did that look like?

10:05So one of the very early transformation projects I wanted to do years ago at Cognizant was I was like, "Our playbook is black and white rules. Why can't we automate it?" But you couldn't really automate it with machine learning because of the variety of language. And so I was super excited when Dioptra asked me to join because now I could do what I wanted to do, right? Their entire tool when we first, when I first joined, their tool was just a playbook tool. So you would create a playbook, and it would automatically redline it. It was one of the very first AI agentic offerings in the market. And then May of last year, we launched our chat, and it was because we wanted to not build playbooks all the time because it, it was a lot of work. We wanted... Not that we shied away from work, but if we had to build a playbook for a customer, we had to step away from all this other product development that we wanted to do because the playbook was taking our time, and we wanted to be able to use our time to build new features. And so we were like, "Well, how can we have a tool that's useful to-- very useful for our customers, but doesn't require as much upfront investment from us just for the purposes of, like, a POC?"

11:05And so we launched the chat agent. And now that I start, once I started using it, I was like, "I don't know how I practiced law before I had this chat agent." The volume of work that I could get done and the insights that I can derive quickly. Like, one of my favorite prompts that I created was for creating a new amendment, where you upload all the prior amendments in the original agreement, and we-- it creates a table that shows you what happened at each prior amendment and how it changed what the current terms are of the agreement, and then would draft a new amendment based on what was there. Like, that project would have taken me, because you get interrupted all the time, probably at least two days if I didn't have the tool, and I was done in, like, 15 minutes with this chat assistant. And so I really... Like, I don't know how anyone can keep pace with the volume influx we're gonna have at contracts without using a tool like ours. And then what was super exciting, like, what we were working on right before our acquisition was this idea of bring your own repository, where you could get insights on how you wanted to negotiate or how you want to redline based on what you had done in the past.

12:11And now this is what we're bringing now to our service customers as we've continued on that journey. And so now the- Our customer's entire Icertis repository is gonna be available for them when they're in the chat assistant to say, like, "Oh," like, "how have we resolved this impasse with other customers?" And you, you'll be able to figure out, like, which, uh, band of customers you care about, 'cause not... You might not care about a Brazilian customer when you're negotiating with a German customer or whatever, but it'll give you those insights. And then I think where we're going is it's not just about the contract anymore and not about the contract terms, but it's about the entire... Contracts are the operating system for a business, and so what matters is not what's happening on the, the words on the page. It's what's actually happening in the relationship. So being able to pull in information on the customer success systems and sales systems and technical support systems, and being able t- on the vendor side to pull in information from Coupa on, like, the financial aspects of the deal or from whatever team is using it from, you know, like, their Slack messages with the vendor or whatever, like, and really give the people who are looking at the contracts and the organization itself a much more rich understanding of where there's more value to be had or where you're leaving value on the table and where, like, as you're negotiating future deals, what holes you need to close in your organization or what doors you need to open.

13:34Because now you have this, really this 360 of every relationship that's coming into a centralized system. Very excited. And yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of things, and one of the things that I really like is that even we like it or not, CLM are going to still be in the middle of every... I don't like the term legal tech because I still think it's more like an enterprise software, but whatever, let's call it that. I agree. It's enterprise software. Exactly, enterprise software. And, and you can see that easily, right? If you go to the big events like, you know, Clock, World CC, Legalweek, they're always the diamond sponsors. They're, like, the big ones, right? And they're focusing a lot on AI, and one of the things, what I think that what they're struggling right now is that they're moving into more AI. They're not AI native, but they want to use AI tools. But the thing is that a lot of the times customer wants to have AI, but they still don't know what they can do, right?

14:42Like, you can even see them, uh, with the RFPs of big customers. Mm-hmm. Right? Do you have AI? Yes. Then Yes... like, how do you think the market is going to look maybe, I mean, this is going to be, like, super fast. So let's say maybe in the next couple of months or maybe in the next year, like, uh, which pain points or which other pain points do you think that CLM vendors already have that do you think are going to be maybe fixed or tried to be fixed by using or including AI into their futures? Yeah. Yes, the use discovery, I think, is a really big issue. So I do a lot of the customer success calls. When a customer first starts using us, I'm the one who does the meetings with them every week to find out how it's going and help them along during the enablement period. And what usually happens is they first log in on, and they're like, "Oh, well, we were really busy, so we didn't have time to use the tool." I'm like, "Oh, really? What... Tell me some of the things you were busy with."

15:37And then I show them how all these things on their list of busyness they could have done with Dioptra, and it would've saved them so much time. We often called it a discoverability issue, right? The tool can do so much, but how do you help customers to realize what the tool can do? I think that right now where the industry is still, we're in the making what we did already faster mode. So, like, reviewing a contract, you can redline faster than you redlined before. You can summarize faster. You can draft your emails faster because the AI does some of that lift. I think where we need to go, and it's a much bigger lift and, and we're, very few companies are there right now, is transformational. Like, how do you not just automate or speed up what you did before, but how do you change your sh- scaffolding about what it should be? So, like, I think, like, contracting, for example. You know, we talked about maybe a decade ago, we talked about smart contracting, where the contracts would auto-execute, and you have some of that in, in supply chain. I think that is the norm.

16:39But we could potentially get there with many other contracts because you start having agents built into your systems. And so the contract gets signed, it doesn't go into your repository. I mean, that's what happens today, right? The contract just goes into the repository. There's notifications. There's, "Yay, we won another deal," or whatever. But nothing's happening. Obviously, there's, you know, for on the sell side, there's an implementation team. On the buy side, there's getting and starting to use the product. But the contract itself is not alive. It just sits there. And I think what we're gonna see in the future in terms of transformation, and I don't think it's in three months, but I do think it's within a year or two, where as soon as the contract is signed, you have agents that are then, you know, going out and activating the contract, so to speak, right? It's, it's dealing with the compliance aspects of the contract. It's dealing with the operational aspects of the, of the contract.

17:31Everything is just starts going the moment the contract is signed, not by people, but by AI agents. And I think that is... And that's why I think even more than before, CLM is gonna move into an enterprise space even more solidly because the contract operations is never legal, right? L- legal is never the one who's gonna make sure you're, oh, did you, you know, meet those SLAs, uh, doing the operations, right? It's the, it's the delivery that's meeting the SLAs or, or that's the, um, receiving team that's measuring whether or not SLAs were coming through or not coming through. And so I think that once the system itself operationalizes contracts, it moves it solidly into an enterprise system as opposed to people thinking of it, "Oh, it's legal." No, I think that's a great takeaway, and I think if we ask you again in 60 days, it'll probably have a different answer for us, right? And, and that's the extremely cool thing and also scary thing, right, about the times that we're in right now. But Laurie, thank you so much for joining us today.

18:29It's great to, uh, always great to chat with you. I know we see you in, in person a couple of times a year, but it's great to have you back on the podcast again. So we really appreciate you jumping on. If folks wanna learn more about, uh, this new functionality that, you know, Icertis is, is leveraging or, or wants to connect with you to learn more about your, your journey and things of that nature, where's the best place to do that? So anyone can find me on LinkedIn, laurieb.erlich, and they can email me at laurie.erlich@icertis.com. And I'm, I'm really happy to talk to people. I'm, I'm excited about what we're doing, and I'm excited about what it's been like to go from, like, just being a lawyer to being a lawyer technologist. Um, and, uh, if people want it, or lawyer legal operations, both sides of that. So if people wanna talk about career journeys with me, I'm always happy to. Awesome. Laurie, thank you so much. It's always a pleasure chatting with you. And thanks everybody for listening to another episode of Contract Heroes. This episode of the Contract Heroes is sponsored by Koho Consulting.

19:28Koho helps organizations of all shapes and sizes find, implement, and manage their chosen CLM tool. Whether your project is buy or sell side led, Koho can help you navigate the waters of the CLM space to make sure that you're getting a product that's going to fit like a glove years to come. If you'd like to learn more about Koho, visit their website at C-O-H-O consulting.com.