The Future of Contract Management with Nicole Shaver

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. Hi, Nikki. Well, first off, thanks so much for being here. And before we flip things over to Pepe to give us an understanding of what we're gonna be chatting about today, uh, we'd love to get a more of an understanding of your background and how you came to, uh, to be the CEO over at Legal Tech Hub. Yeah. Thank you both so much for having me. Um, it's a great pleasure. I was a lawyer for about 10 years in Sydney, Australia, actually. Uh, I worked in private practice, but I then moved in-house. And so I, I worked in-house for about two and a half years total, and really got to know a fair bit about the challenges around contract management when I was working in-house. For most of the past 10 years, however, I was then working in law firms in legal innovation.

0:59And one of the challenges that I found working in legal innovation, which for those listening who have not had that experience at law firms, is not dissimilar in some ways to a kind of legal ops role on the in-house side, um, was that it was difficult to find the legal technology solutions that would address problems or use cases internally. Um, Google is just imperfect for that kind of thing, and it seemed silly that there wasn't one place you could go to find information in one, one place about the solutions on the market. And so my husband, Chris Forde, and I, who is also in legal tech, built Legal Tech Hub and launched it in October 2020. And my co-founder and business partner, Jeroen Plint, came on board in 2021. And from early last year, I've been in the fortunate position of being able to forge out on my own as an entrepreneur with Jeroen building Legal Tech Hub to be an insights and analysis platform for the legal industry around legal technology, kind of like Gartner and Practical Law, but for legal tech. That's awesome, Nikki. And I'm so happy to have you here on the podcast because we met a couple months ago, uh, the CLM Academy event. We had a chat about the CLMs, you know.

2:10It's still one of the hottest softwares right now, that as you say, it's not the same kind of, uh, pain points that a law firm had that an in-house, uh, team has. But I think, like, right now most of the, or, or a lot of the companies are looking for a CLM because everybody has a problem with their, with their contracts, right? And the CEO and, and co-founder of Legal Tech Hub, you're at the forefront of advances in, in legal tech. Like, can you describe some of the most notable changes that you've seen in this area over the past few years, and how have they impacted enterprise legal teams? Yeah, absolutely. And I, I agree with you. It has been such a hot area. One of the things that I've, I've seen over the last few years in the way that this particular area of legal technology is evolving is we're, we're really moving from the very large systems that do absolutely everything across the, the contract life cycle and need to be implemented across all phases of the contract life cycle, to more modular, nimble solutions that are available for teams where, for example, you might want to address one aspect of the contract life cycle initially, and then move into others. Or you might want to deploy to a smaller group first and then gradually broaden that out and address more pain points across the business. And also seeing a lot of AI driven solutions.

3:41I know we'll, we'll talk about that a little bit later. Solutions that do something quite niche. So for example, focusing in on, uh, harvesting data from historical contracts in order to put it into another contracts tool, or that are able to go very, very deeply into the analytics around an organization's contracts, and really tools that focus in on something specific like that. And then the, the other thing I'm, I've been seeing is just a s- significant advance in terms of the, uh, intuitiveness and elegance of the graphics that are available. So much more data visualization, um, to kind of bolster the, the data analytics that a lot of these platforms come with. 'Cause seen, uh, a few days ago with Ella Valente on the Forrester Wave, that you got to understand that CLM, uh, a CLM implementation is just, is not a, an standard one, that it's going to be like a plug and play for every type of, for organization, right?

4:47Maybe for a specific, uh, verticals like biotech, the intake form, the contract request is a little bit more important because there's a lot of compliance regulations involved. While when you want to manage the contract, th- this is like more post-signature, there are other types of features that you need in order to track, you know, tasks, obligations, you know, and, uh, and, and the more common ones, you know, like expiration dates. When do you need to renew? Because, you know, one of the main problems that we've seen, uh, especially when it, these, these types of implementations are lead by procurement, like they wanna know where are the renewal dates. Because if they don't wanna work with some of their vendors, like they want to terminate that earlier. Right. Otherwise, they will be paying another year again to a vendor that they don't wanna work anymore, right? Right. Exa- exactly. It's not one size fits all. I worked in media organizations, and many, many of the agreements are around talent.

5:51Um, and, and similarly, you need to know when a renewal is coming up and, uh, y- you know, there are different things that matter depending on the industry that you're in. And- I think a, a CLM platform has to be nimble enough in order to be able to accommodate the different feature configurations or customizations for the particular industry into which it's being implemented. I think those are some, some great touch points there around the, some of the functionalities that, that we're seeing that are evolving in the space recently. And, and I know that you said, "Hey, we're gonna get into AI later." So I, uh, that's kinda gonna be my, my follow-up question here is, you know, how are you seeing, um, the use cases evolve for these customers and, and how vendors are, are leveraging the ever-changing AI landscape to push them ahead of, of their competitors? You know, I know that we talked about the ingestion, uh, of legacy documents, right?

6:44Using AI to, to scan those documents and bring them into the system a little, hopefully a little bit faster than, than you could manually. But are you seeing any other advancements, uh, you know, in the past, uh, let's say this year, uh, as far as, uh, what AI is capable of? Yeah. Something that we've seen notably i- in the last few months really is that since the advent of ChatGPT and advanced generative AI and large language models, contracting has been one of the spaces where there's been just an enormous amount of activity. So we track the market in terms of which solutions, which vendors are implementing this technology as, as part of their back end tech stack, and the contracting companies have been some of the first movers in that regard. And the way that we're seeing it play into existing solutions is, for example, um, often around negotiation and pre-execution review of contracts. So redlining, in particular, though redlining against, for example, a, a playbook. So being able to highlight differences in an incoming contract against an existing playbook for the business.

7:51Also, in terms of being able to suggest similar clauses from past contracts, and then being able to generate additional contract or clause language upon request. Because obviously this advanced AI works at a conceptual level, whereas previously the AI that we generally used in legal was much more clunky and had to be trained up on particular concepts and was not great at dealing with variability in language or in meaning. This AI is, is really good at that. So as you are drafting, it's able to actually provide recommendations of past language that might fit really well in this particular contract. We're also seeing that on the contract management side and the post-execution review. So using AI to be able to extract clauses with great precision from the contracts within your database. Um, so if you are looking for all of the renewal contract, uh, clauses or all of the data around a particular issue, you'll be able to extract that much more easily now.

8:58And then we've seen a number of the CLM companies also build out kind of like mini AI legal assistance. Um, many people listening might be familiar with Casetext CoCounsel and some of the other very, um, significant launches around generative AI fueled products. But on the contracting side, we've seen ContractPod AI, for example, come out with Leah, which was initially something built in to the ContractPod AI platform in some of the ways I've just stated, and is now available as well as a standalone AI legal assistant that provides general assistance around contracts and can actually be used outside of the CLM, uh, solution that ContractPod AI, uh, offers. Which I think is really interesting because it does give that ability for users to leverage their technology in a much more nimble kind of chat interface fashion. And then you look at something like Robin AI as well.

10:00Uh, Robin is building in its kind of co-pilot AI driven functionality into each of its different modules. So they've broken down their CLM software and instead of being now end-to-end CLM, they have three different modules that can be bought separately around drafting and querying and so on, and their AI co-pilot is built into each of those to support users within the platform. So it's a really interesting space, and I think for people in-house who are working with contracts, this is an area to watch because it is the most significant advancement from a technological perspective that we've seen in the last years, and contracting is one of the places where it really will increase efficiency and productivity. Yeah, and it's interesting that, you know, you say at, at the beginning of our conversation, we talked about how, how these systems are becoming more modular and allowing folks to focus on maybe different portions of, of the contracting process that they have issues on.

11:00And, and not, you know, what we talk about a lot in the past is working from department to department and, and continuing your evolution of, uh, of change management and bringing more folks on board to, to continue, continue to use these tools in different ways. But I think something that we haven't tou- touched on too much is maybe focusing on different parts of the contracting process, uh, that you see you have issues with, you know, right out of the gate and, and allowing maybe multiple departments to focus on that post-execution or focus on that pre-execution part of the contracts. And I think having a, a system that is modular and, and allows it to be, um, priced accordingly, uh, definitely helps those organizations that are, are, are looking to, uh, to focus and, and scale in, in that direction. E- exactly. It, it allows organizations to address, well, especially the legal department, to address the pain points that a- affect the department most severely, even in circumstances where it's difficult to bring all of the stakeholders across business together around a much larger project. So that, I think is a, a really great development for, for in-house teams.

12:04And do you think that, you know, when it comes to the AI, right, some of the, the, um, talking points that we've hit thus far and, and some of the functionalities that you've spoken about, do you think in the next six months or so we're going to see... Obviously, there's gonna be new advance- there's newer advancements, right? And, and how these things like, like what, what ContractPod has built and, and Agiloft has built and Robin AI, where they have these things inside of their systems where that, you know, you can actually talk to them and, and maybe it'll help you track down a contract. But the, the other items that we talked about as far as what AI has been capable of, do you think that all, let's say, you know, let's say the top 10, 15 vendors out there, that everybody's going to have that functionality built out, uh, in the next six months or so, and it's really gonna level the playing field? Because a lot of, a lot of these vendors, what we saw, you know, in years past, was they really hung their hat on their strength being their AI. And I think something that we're seeing is that that's not really anybody's strength anymore.

12:57You need to be able to show that you are different in other ways because the evolution of AI is here and, and everybody's adding that functionality so rapidly. Uh, that's a really interesting question. I'm gonna break it down in a couple of ways. I think, yes, it is inevitable that this technology will be built into most of the products a- around contracting on the market. It's fairly easy to implement in certain, um, ways, right? Especially if it's kind of a standalone thing rather than being fully integrated into your tech stack. So that is inevitable. As for whether it levels the playing field, it may in some ways. As you said, there are some companies that, um, have been able to say, "We have AI in our contracting cycle," and others don't, and, and maybe that's been something that sets them apart, and they won't be able to say that in the same way anymore. But AI is not necessarily helpful at all stages of the contract life cycle. It doesn't necessarily lend huge efficiency at all stages of the contract life cycle.

14:10It's a nice-to-have in a lot of areas, right, rather than a must-have. It can be, I think, hugely useful, but there, like with any other type of technology, you have to do your homework as a developer around what do users actually need, where does this type of technology serve to benefit users the most, how can we implement it and integrate it in a way where those benefits are highlighted so that they are accessible to users? So that kind of customer discovery and an interface that is really intuitive and that prioritizes the user experience, I think that's where we're still going to see great variation between products. It's not enough to just say, "I'm leveraging the OpenAI API and pulling in this technology, and now it's available to people." Great. What does that do for you? What use case does that serve?

15:16There's more work involved than just we now have AI. So I don't think it will level the playing field, but it might upset the apple cart of the current hierarchy and allow different players to shine. Right, because if one of the first tasks or homeworks for the people in charge of the CLM implementation is to understand what are the pain points, what are the bottlenecks of your organization that is not helping to streamline the contracting processes, right? Maybe you can see, uh, again, with example, with procurement teams. They're spending too much time waiting for legal team to release an NDA to a new vendor. And when you think about that, it's like you don't need AI for that.

16:04Maybe the only thing you need is just, like, okay, how can we help procurement team to become more self-service contracting for those specific contracts, right? Maybe not the high-risk one, but especially NDAs. Like, I mean, you have the template of an NDA. You will need to fill couple of fields, and that's it. And there, maybe you can sa- save couple of weeks of the work during the contract life cycle, right? So there are some other processes that can be way more efficient when you understand those pain points. And now you can know that, okay, maybe it's not AI what I'm, what I'm looking at right now. Maybe we can start by looking at the workflows building. And if there's a workflow that can help me to solve this specific problem, maybe that would- that's gonna help you with the, with the contract, uh, li- life cycle. Or also, by post-execution. Okay, you have a huge construction company. The claim management is very important, so you, you, you gotta have all the information. Or maybe a supplier management.

17:07You wanna have all the information. Or maybe integration with other softwares. Like, okay, we already have the, the s- the sales team. We already have Salesforce implemented. They already know how to do it. Okay, now how we can integrate it, that into the CLM? And then once you have those, m- I don't wanna call it, like, basic features solved, but you know, like, if you understand the whole process, then you can think about, okay, so how can we start using AI on this? Because I think that a couple years ago, people thought about AI because they were thinking about IBM Watson, you know? Like, you can ask questions, and they, they can give you a legal opinion. It doesn't work like that. But now that everybody's using ChatGPT and you can see how it works, then you can think about specific solution that will help you in that specific process, right? Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, there are, there, and there are some things that can be made easier, but you're right.

18:05You have to have- Thought out the user journey and have an established interface in order to make it easy to integrate AI and for the user to see the benefit of that. So I completely agree. I do think that, you know, there are areas where you can see that it would be useful, right? Like self-service workflows probably can be enhanced because now we have sort of chatbot technology that is effective, whereas previously, often they, they haven't been that effective. That ability to redline against playbooks is something that really was not feasible previously. The ability to pull and identify data without having to first train the system is, is really useful. But the, the ways that you can also see that it's being built in sometimes to do things like translate a clause. That's great. Does that save me a ton of time every ti- every time I need, you know, to deliver a contract or to... No, it d- it's nice. It's like a, a feature, but it's not... It doesn't really change the underlying value of the platform tremendously.

19:14Yeah, I, I think that definitely something that we need to keep an eye out for. And I think, Nikki, our final question here is we talked a lot about, about AI and, and how that's going to mold the future of the space, but what other advancements, are there any other advancements that you have an understanding of that you think is going to be other things that, that organizations that are looking to invest in this, this type of technology need to keep an eye out for, uh, as we look into the future? One of the things that a kind of trend that I think we're seeing is, uh, CLM companies or companies that have traditionally targeted contracting exclusively starting to build into other areas of legal ops as well, so offering more enterprise legal management. I think that's an interesting space to watch, for sure. A trend I'm seeing in the market on the legal op side is a real interest from law departments around work management, um, not in a project management space, but being able to manage intake and requests, not just around contracting, but around all kinds of work coming into the legal department.

20:22So though I think that would be an interesting area for people to look out for. Again, obviously, if you are a user and your exclusive concern right now is around a contracting pain point, that won't, that won't be interesting, but it is nice to think about some companies starting to expand their functionality, um, ideally still in a modular way so that a legal department is able to leverage the same provider for multiple different use cases. That I think is quite an interesting development. Yeah, I think right now, I mean, doing more with less, right, is, is something that a, a lot of organizations are, are focused on, so I, I think that's great. And, and I think there are some applications out there that do a really good job of allowing you to have that flexibility, uh, to go beyond just, you know, what we see in the, in the contract management space. Well, Nikki, thank you for chatting with us. This has been a wonderful conversation.

21:15Is there any, any, uh, final tips or tricks you wanna throw out there, or, or any, uh, thing, any events that Legal Tech, Tech Hub might be my hosting in the next couple of months that you wanna let people know about? Oh. Well, thank you so much ... Marc, for asking me about that. First, shoot out a tip, for those of you who are looking at solutions that have imported already generative AI in formats like a, an internal chatbot or a chat interface, be somewhat wary, not of the technology or the solution itself, but just be aware that there are additional questions you need to ask around data and, and security and privacy and confidentiality with this technology. So think a little bit more about that and be aware that there are additional things that you need to know about and ask about. We've, we've actually written some content about the types of questions you need to ask. The...

22:11In terms of conferences, yes, uh, Legal Tech Hub does offer events where we bring together different parts of the verticals of the legal ecosystem, um, often to chat about issues of concern to legal departments as well as law firms. We have another CLM event that is in the works for November, so watch this space. I'll certainly let you guys know about it, and perhaps you can let your audience know when I have a few more details around date and location, but there is another CLM conference coming up. And in September, late September, we're having a conference on innovation and tech-enabled lawyering, which brings lawyers on the law firm side into the discussion around tech-enabled legal practice. They've been left out for too long, so this conference is bringing them back into the mix. Well, that's fantastic, Nikki.

23:02Uh, you know, we speak from experience when we say that the events that your team has put on have been impactful, and I think we got a lot out of them, and I hope others did as well. So we'll, we'll definitely, uh, plan to, to join you in November and, and may- maybe even in September too. Uh, so thanks for letting our listeners know about that, and, uh, thanks for joining us, and thanks everybody for listening to another episode of Contract Heroes. Thanks so much for having me. This episode of the Contract Heroes is sponsored by Koho Consulting. Koho 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 for years to come. If you'd like to learn more about Koho, visit their website at C-O-H-O consulting dot com.