Live: Common CLM Implementation Pitfalls - Lewis Bretts

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. All right, everybody, welcome back. Today, or right now on the podcast, we're gonna be introducing Lewis Bretz. He's the group managing director in the USA for LOD and Syke. Lewis, thanks for being here. Thanks so much, Marc. Thanks, Pepe. So Lewis, tell us a little bit about yourself, uh, some of, of your background, what you've been working on. Sure. So look, um, I was a commercial barrister in the UK, and I did that for a number of years, and, uh, I kind of found myself thinking, "Hey, there's gotta be a better way of doing some of the things that I was doing for my clients." And there was a particular, particular moment I did a long trial about, um, whether a, it was a standard form contract, and, uh, no one had entered the start date on the standard form, and it was a long trial, and it cost my clients, uh, lots of money, and we won. That was great. Uh, but for me, I left that experience thinking, "I can't believe we're still relying on people handwriting start dates in contracts. There's gotta be a better way of doing that."

1:08And, uh, that set me on a journey, and now with LOD and Syke, we help, uh, large organizations and some law firms as well do contracting better, uh, in a variety of different ways, so. And how are you envisioning, like, contracts in, in the future? Yeah, that's a great question. Look, I, I think for me, great contracting... This, look, look, I spend a lot of time doing CLM implementations, right? That's our core business, and so I've implemented, you know, most of the leading products on the market. But for me, success starts with, with paper processes and understanding of what you're trying to achieve, what makes contracts good, what, uh, what are your risks, what are your trade-offs, what's your process? And for me, contracting of the future will, will kind of, um, be a more streamlined process, first and foremost, and then we'll see that act as a catalyst for technological improvement, right? So actually, what we'll see is, uh, you know, having that kind of structured data available for people to make decisions about, and we'll kind of close that loop so we can continually improve and, and shorten the contracting cycle.

2:10I think that, at, at high level anyway, that's kinda how I see it, see it working out, so. No, that's cool. And, and tell us, like, how it's, like, the, let's say, user experience for a, for a customer. You know? Like, I know they, right now CLM is like a, you know, like, a buzzword that is everywhere, and they, and a lot of companies, like, want to have a, a CLM, but how do a company start working with, with you? Yeah, for sure. So look, um, we find a lot of our customers come with kinda one of two problems, right? The first is everyone is doing this CLM thing, and I don't really know where to start. Uh, 'cause it's a hard world out there. There's a load of vendors who are trying to sell their products. Everyone says it's the best. You can look at Gartner or Forrester or all these. They don't really help you understand what's it gonna feel like to implement CLM. And I think it's really interesting 'cause in the legal tech space, we're not like other technological markets, right?

3:04If, y- if you ask a sales guy, "What's a CRM? What's it gonna feel like when we've implemented CRM?" They've probably worked with CRM software before. If you ask a finance person, you know, "How's ERP gonna work?" They'll have some familiarity with enterprise finance systems. For most lawyers and contracting professionals, they, they don't know where to start, and particularly for GCs and senior lawyers, you know, they've, they've been great lawyers in private practice, they've been great in-house lawyers, and probably their exposure to technology implementations has been when they've gone wrong. And so we spend a lot of time, you know, thinking about, like, what's the starting point and how can we help you understand what's the market like? So that's kind of the first way that our clients come to us and where they see the value. Because we're an independent provider, we've implemented pretty much everything that's out there, we've seen it go well, we've seen it go badly, and we can help navigate that process. And then I think the second, um, area where we see our clients come to us is, um, where an implementation hasn't gone so well, and, um, you know, the question is kinda, "How can we, how can we get it back on track?" Right.

4:11Yeah, and I, I think, you know, both of those are, are so important. Um, th- the f- the first piece is, is something that, you know, we see a lot too, is, is that y- you, you need somebody to lean on when it's the first time that your part of the organization has, has really implemented a tool that's, that's going to help them do almost everything that they do on a daily basis better. True. And, and there's just so many organizations out there that don't know where to start, and, and, you know, maybe they start with a Gartner report. But there's a lot of applications that, you know, either aren't on there or maybe they're focusing on the wrong segment. And, um, I, I just think it's so important to, to have folks out there like us that, that can give this expertise because we've done it before. And- True... and that leads me into the, the second part, which is, you know, we, we see where the pitfalls of these implementations are and what the risks are. Yeah. And, you know, I, I guess, you know, my question is how, how can people or organizations that are, are going through this process, how can they avoid something like that happening to them? No, it's a great question. Look, success comes from... Put it a different way. Getting to the end result, uh, whatever you're doing, whether you're taking your car on a journey or you're implementing CLM, starts with deciding where you wanna go, right?

5:26And for us, you know, you absolutely need to be totally focused on what are you trying to achieve in this journey? You know, where are, um, where are the improvements gonna come from? Is it about reducing cycle time? Is it about reducing risk? Is it about improving the user experience? Like, it could be m- loads of different things. You need to decide, you know, what are your core priorities, and then you need to design your program about, ab- around, uh, achieving those core priorities and, and evidencing them as well, right? Because, you know, you, you're gonna need to have something to show some people that this is working. Uh, because if you can do that, then you'll be able to take the next, the next, um, the next step and say, "Hey, look, this has worked for this phase," or this contract type or whatever it is, this user group. This is why we wanna roll it out more broadly. Um, and so starting, the starting point should always be the end result, right? Uh, that's honestly what I would say. Mm. And what about bringing other stakeholders besides legal? Like, have you seen any, of course, interest from procurement or any other department?

6:24Yeah, anyone, like, honestly anyone that thinks legal own the contracting process is in, in large organizations or even small organizations is wrong, right? And I'm, I, I talk about this all the time, right? In a sell-side use case, the contract starts with the sales guy or girl, right? That's, that's where it starts. It starts in CRM, and it ends with renewal or, um, or, or, or termination, but it goes through delivery as well. And so any vision of the contracting process that has, that starts and ends with legal, my view, that's, that's wrong, right? You, you absolutely need to bring those other stakeholders, um, on the journey with you, for sure. And do you see, you know, when we, we talk about these phased implementations and making sure that you're focusing on maybe getting some quick wins, a specific contract type, or a specific, um, issue that the team is having to solve, solve that problem, uh, are, are there any trends that you're seeing out there right now where there's, there's specific use cases that, that seem to be popping up more than others? Um, I, I, I don't think that there are... It's not like I'm seeing everyone start with an MSA or, like, everyone's...

7:31Because the reality is everyone's industry is, and one of the things we've been talking about here at WCC is different sectors have different focuses. I think what we are seeing more and more is a recognition that you can't start with everything all the time, right? And so I think we're seeing a recognition that I find my clients and prospective clients much more receptive to the idea that we should start with an NDA, roll that out globally, and then we move on to the next thing, rather than trying to do, you know, 15 different contract types across 100 different coun- different countries in 30 different languages, you know, as a single... That's, that's not, um... People are more receptive to that idea, I think, than maybe they once were. What about, like, adoption? Like, do you have seen, like, an ongoing services, like, after you go live, like, how does it looks like? Yeah. Yeah, Lo, another, a great question and I think we, again, like, we all- we see su- success in... Let's start from the beginning, right, with contracting. Contracting is always changing. Legal, the reason we have had human lawyers involved in contracting for such a long time is 'cause contracts always change.

8:42Pricing changes, te- laws change, terms across the globe change. You enter new markets. Any vision of a CLM platform in, in use which doesn't include focus on how are you gonna manage change, and, and that's change in the platform, change with the contracts, change with the processes, changes with the people, right? Because people come and go. Any vision of, of CLM in flight that doesn't think about that and doesn't focus on it, you know, again, I would say is, is always going to struggle. And so increasingly, we are supporting our clients through a, a kind of building that center of excellence, or call it what you want, lots of different phrases for it, throughout the implementation cycle. And, you know, look, we, that's a service we can provide. We've got lots of clients who take up, you know, something like a contract concierge we call it, where they are, um, they're receiving a service which is, like, technology and legal. But, you know, really our ambition is always that to, to get our clients, um, running that stuff themselves. Uh...

9:39And, and how do you see, you know, a- as we're talking about this, it, it, I think it's important to continue to look at the future and, and, you know, it's great to get those quick wins and, and look at that first phase. But how do you help your clients make sure that whatever system they're putting in place is going to be successful three or four years from now when obviously their, their processes continue to scale, they continue to roll out new functionality that they need inside that tool? H- how do you make sure that, that you also are, you know, one, bringing other departments in, but two, uh, getting the, the, the organization to think about future phases- Yeah... during that initial lift? Yeah. It's, it's an interesting question, I think, to think, like, so truthfully, you know, that vision of what's five years out, three years out, it's pretty rare that we have clients who are thinking or openly talking about where they're gonna be in five years' time. So I, I actually think that we start from the same place as we do when we think about what's gonna happen in a year's time or two years' time, which is, look, we need to have same old, same old.

10:46Documented processes, structured workflows, and a, and the capability to drive that change and improvement, and that is what will carry you through, you know, year one, year two, year five, year 10, because it's about building a framework for change, uh, and a framework for delivery rather than a go live. Like, I mean, yeah, that's, that's, that's my, my view about that. Um... What about data? Like, data, like, h- have you seen, like, I don't know, which kind of data should be used between the different- Yeah... um, platforms from the different department? Like, how does it work? This is s- like, this is such an interesting question and I, I, I'm kind of fascinated by the world we're in at the moment, which is we seem to have built up this, and for, like, good reasons, but we seem to have built up this world where we're taking, uh, contracts that were created digitally, we're, like, effectively turning them into a PDF, and then we're creating technology to take all of that unstructured text and try and turn it back into something structured, right? And that, yeah, that, that's necessary because of the way contracting works and the industry we're in and all sorts of stuff.

11:55But fundamentally, good quality data and good quality, good quality decision-making comes from good quality data, and good quality data in a CLM context comes from capturing it early on in the process, right? Thinking about a- at, at the top of the process, you know, again, if, to use a sell-side example- Where is the customer, where is the contracting party derived from? Where are you gonna get that data from? Well, chances are it's probably gonna be f- the first touch is gonna be in CRM, right? And so actually, you need to think about the, the data architecture throughout the contracting life cycle process. And that, in turn, involves thinking about the, the organizational data model and bringing in those stakeholders, you know, rather than just saying, "Right, this is the contracting data model, and we're gonna restart, we're gonna restart the process," effectively, when that arbitrary point at which the contracting process starts, um, it's a, it's, it's, it's a people, it's a people challenge, it's an organizational challenge, not a technology challenge in my view. Um, or, or at least a s- it's a, it's a people solution rather than a technology solution. Right.

13:02And you have any strategy, like when you work with a company, I mean, I would say like most of the companies still do e- everything manual a lot there. Like, when you're bringing legacy documents, like when they have like thousands of contracts, like how does it look? Yeah, look, we've, we've done e- everything from, you know, 1,000 contracts to 100,000 contracts in different languages and sending people out to get stuff out of filing cabinets and all that good stuff. Look, I, I think my view is, and I say this to all my clients, they, the conversation usually goes something like this: "We've got 200,000 contracts in, you know, 15 countries. Can you import them all?" And my, we, I say, "Do you really need to do all of that? Is that actually gonna achieve your objective here? And by the way, how do you know you've got 200,000 contracts? How have you, how have you decided that? Because presumably, if you knew, if you had good, quality data about your contracts, you wouldn't be asking me to implement a CLM. But fine, so we'll go away and prepare a quote."

13:56And, you know, we're exceptionally good value, as you'd expect, but they look at the quote and they're like, "Maybe, maybe we didn't need to really go and do all of that," right? "And actually, maybe the idea of asking everyone in our organization to find that expired contract from five years ago isn't a great use of their time or our energy." And so I think for me, the strategies are, are as follows: Be really focused on what, what is the data and contracts that you actually need to capture, right? If your typical contracts last for a year, is there any value in importing and going through a whole exercise and trying to capture the data and OCR it and do all that kind of good stuff with contracts that are gonna expire in three months' time? Or can you do just as good a job in capturing that data almost in a BAU way when it comes to renewal, right? Will that achieve the same objective in a, in a more cost-effective and better quality way probably? Um, and also focusing, I think, then when thinking about the contracts themselves, what are the core metadata points that you want to capture, meta- sorry, meta and substantive data points that you wanna capture that will then allow you to slice your corpus of contracts, um, when you need to answer another question about that.

15:07And let me just explain what I mean by that. If you, y- you, the, the challenge often for organizations is they've got some M&A activity or divestment, something like that, and they need to answer a question about their corpus of contracts, and the only way they can do it is by sorting through everything. They've gotta read everything. If you can get to a point where you can at least know that, um, I, I've got some data around the value of my contracts and the regions and the time, the expiry date, all of a sudden you can reduce that exercise to just looking at the contracts you need to look at. You know, you can go from your 100,000 to 10,000 because actually you know really, I only, I'm only worried about contracts which are gonna last longer than a year in EMEA that are valued at over, you know, $100,000 or whatever it is. Uh, and, and that then allows you to do further processing on those contracts, either, you know, human or, or AI, um, in a much more cost-effective and efficient way.

16:06Um, that's w- because you've got that core metadata that, that, you know, the opposite end of the spectrum is saying we want 100 metadata points to, to worry about. Everything we might possibly worry about, our view is like- You don't need it. S- yeah, I w- I don't ever say that to my clients. I say, I say it under my breath. Exactly. Then Lewis, how do you, how do you get your customers to make that, switch that, that thinking process in their head to, "We need all this data," to, "You know what? This is actually the data we need to be focused on"? Yeah, don't ask them. Uh, so, so I'm, I'm joking a little bit. Look, I'm, I'm really open with project teams, right? You know, this is a conversation we have. And I'll say, I'll have the, I'll explain to you what I just explained to you to, to just let, what I've just explained to the project team, and they'll say, "Look, um, you know, okay, great, right? We're gonna go and we're gonna do a survey, and we're gonna ask everyone in the business what data do they need to capture." And I, I usually say, "Don't do that because, don't do that.

17:03Come up with, you know, the 15 data points that you think you're gonna want, and get them to justify why that isn't enough." Um, and so honestly, there's, that's, that's the answer. You know, that's, there's, there's a lot of change management involved in that process. Mm-hmm. But, um, yeah, that's kind of the short, short answer to it, I think. No, that, that's pretty good. It's just like, I mean, trying to reducing instead of going for 30 data points, just like- Yeah... oh, to 50, and then for 10, and then just ask like three times, "Well, why you need this?" Yeah. Uh, b- because remember, you can capture, you know, we're talking about legacy contracts here. Right. So, so you're gonna, if, with the, with the contracts that you create within a new platform, you're gonna have 100 data points that you've captured as part of the process seamlessly, right? Because it's all, it's all captured as part of the system. We're only worrying here about the legacy contracts, you know, that, like, that, you know, have a limited shelf life, right? Um, and, and my view is, yeah, like you need to recognize that that's, that's the reality of it. Right.

18:02Um, it's, it's complicated 'cause there's, you know, you gotta worry about reporting consistency and all that good stuff. But at a high level, that's my, my theory anyway. All right, Lewis, so this has been great. So, uh, I mean, we, we learned a lot. Uh, we- th- this is our first time that, that we're doing in, in, in-person podcast, so it's been great talking with you to having all your, your experience on the show. So, uh, if folks would like to connect with you, what would be the best way? Uh, on LinkedIn, look me up. Lewis Brettts, L-E-W-I-S B-R-E-T-T-S, uh, and let me know, uh, what we can chat about. Always, I love chatting about this stuff, so, um, yeah, always happy to reach o- happy to be reached out to. Awesome. Awesome. Thanks, Lewis. Thanks so much. Thanks.