Uniting Technology and Legal: Driving Organizational Engagement in Legal Tech Initiatives With James Peacock

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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. Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Contract Heroes. Today, joining us from ThoughtRiver is James Peacock. James is the head of key enterprise accounts over at ThoughtRiver. And before we throw things over to Pepe to give us an understanding of what we're gonna be chatting about today, James, uh, first off, thanks for joining us. And, uh, second off, would love to just get a little bit more on your background and, uh, how you ended up in this space. Yeah. So, uh, thanks for that, both of you. Pleasure to be here. We- you know, kind of excited to see what comes out of this in terms of, uh, kind of conversation. Um, so I've been with ThoughtRiver just over a kind of a year and a half. And a previous background is in mostly financial services and, uh, what we would call ultra-high net worth, so some facilitation around kind of high-value goods and looking at things like sales strategy and effectively, um, also kind of finance as well, kind of all baked into that.

1:06Um, so quite a broad, I guess, um, a broad resume, but I've definitely taken, you know, some of those skills from those previous roles into legal technology, and it's a very consultative business. Um, everyone's some- sometimes a little bit confused about, you know, what is, what is real and what isn't, and what is fiction and, and what isn't. So I think that has really kind of armed me quite well to, to talk to these people about, you know, con- some of the problems, but also what realistic solutions are. Um, I think that's very important, um, particularly in a kind of a, a world of kind of GenAI buzz and the art of the possible, et cetera. Right. There's a lot of improvement now that we have a lot of tools with generative AI and, and this been, I think, a buzzword since, well, since November '22- Yeah... since, oh, since, uh, ChatGPT just came out to, to the public. Um, well, the main topic of this chat is, like, how we can innovate the in-house team, right? Yeah. And we know the...

2:11I'm a lawyer too, so I can say this, like, lawyers don't wanna change. They're, like, very comfortable as working as they are, but there's always, like, this type of, uh, misunderstanding with the commercial team because commercial team always want to move, like, things fast, and the lawyers always want to, you know, are way more risk adverse. So, uh, James, I'm very curious about your comments on, like, what does the biz want versus what do the employees want when you're looking to innovate the in-house team? Yeah, I think that, that's, that's a great question. And I, I think w- when you go and look at, look to technology to potentially provide some solutions, or even, actually, if you're not looking technology, but there is a need in the business to change something, um, you have to kind of consider both of those pretty, pretty well, I think. I think business-wise for me, and this is obviously from my kind of learned experience, you know, that we talk about things like, you know, revenue risk aversion.

3:10You know, how do we make sure that revenue is maybe slightly more secure from the way we contract? Um, how do we actually look at things like quicker revenue recognition? I mean, that comes down to kind of things, um, surrounding kind of the negotiation time, you know, time cycle and, and how long that would take. Can we facilitate kind of faster turnarounds of contracting by, you know, looking at things like, um, standardization and response? Um, so I think the business is, is fairly key on actually what they want out of kind of innovation within a legal department. Um, they want something that maybe is slightly easier for them to understand actually, but also maybe try and increase that, you know, that revenue recognition, definitely from a commercial team's point of view. Um, I think kind of employee-wise, um, in some ways I think about kind of lawyers when we're talking about this, is lawyers are, you know, traditionally, and I'm sure you'll agree with me, Pepe, here, that they're fairly risk adverse. Um, you know, they want to do a good job. They want to make sure that don't get anything wrong effectively.

4:10Um, and a transactional lawyer's goals, and as we're talking about contracting, that kind of makes a bit more sense, are generally to sign high-quality contracts in a reasonable amount of time. Um, I'm sure they would always like it to be slightly quicker. Um, but they're looking for kind of risk aversion within acceptable risk parameters that exist in that business. But they also are humans. Um, so they're looking for some efficiency gains potentially in that, you know, that contract review or that contract life cycle progress. I mean, when I talk to lawyers about... And there's obviously a, a difference between kind of lawyers and, and CLOs, and GCs, and what they want. But sometimes you'll, you'll speak to a lawyer and they say, "Well, I often get things la- land on my desk really late in the day, and I'm asked by the commercial team, how do I, you know, respond to the client? Can I tell them how long it's gonna take?" Well, actually, without technology, you have to do a review. That's the only way you're gonna know what contain, you know, what the contents of that contract.

5:12And I think what technology has enabled legal teams to do now, or more so than ever really, is actually be able to take a look at a first pass of an agreement and quite quickly understand, you know, what volume of work is there to do in this agreement to get it into a place where, you know, we could at least send it back to the, you know, the counterparty. Or alternatively, where we could actually just, you know, say, "Look, providing these changes are acceptable to you, you know, we'll sign it." And technology has definitely given lawyers and actually businesses the ability to do that much quicker than, you know, it has previously been possible. Right. I think that technology can help you a lot with the manual work. And- Mm. But one of the first things that people inside big or medium companies or corporations need to know is, like, you gotta have clear processes, right? Because- Yeah... I think, like, if you see the whole contract life cycle management You don't need lawyer for most of the stages, like for the contract request or the intake form, for the drafting of the contract, you can use tools for that.

6:13Uh, signature repository and tracking the obligations w- this is more like post-signature, you know? Yeah. So but one of the things that is really difficult to improve using technology as it is, is the negotiation part, right? Mm. Because if you have a bad contract design, like, you know, clauses such as unlimited liability, nobody's going to- Yeah... agree with that. You, you're gonna get some pushbacks on that. Or, you know, it's very hard for the business team to understand the some clauses or the commercial part of their contracts. If you don't have those in place, and it's not easy for your team or for the third party to understand your contract, that this part of the negotiation process is gonna take forever, right? So I think companies need also to put a lot of attention into what are you sending, like your contract templates, and so you can reduce this part, which is the one that takes most of the complete contract life cycle management phases.

7:18Yeah. And I think that's, that's, that's a great point, and it, it comes around to, I guess, the rise of kind of, I mean, it's not a new thing, but legal design definitely for, you know, how do we look at kind of just talking actually from a client point of view. You know, we have, you know, 27 different master services agreements. You know, why do we have 27 different master services agreements? How can we actually make that kind of four or five agreements? Um, but also, you know, going back to the technology angle, y- it's now not outside of the realms of possibility where you can look at everything you've signed in the last year and work out exactly where you moved on your position in those agreements. And by doing that, you can actually create actually a much easily or a more agreeable agreement. You know, something that's easier to sign, there is less negotiation potentially. Um, I see that as a fantastic way forward for, particularly for organizations that are signing the majority of the agreements on their own draft, you know, th- where they've written that paper. Yeah.

8:13And I, and I think, you know, something that we're, we're kind of talking about right now is making sure that you do the, the pre-work, um- Mm... to, to make sure that these implementations go smoothly. And, you know, I th- I think something else that we wanted to talk about, which, you know, we're touching on right now is, is why do these implementations sometimes fail? But, I mean, is there, is there any, you know, beyond the, the contract templates and the, you know, h- trying to harmonize the, the clauses and, and minimize, uh, the number of, uh, of templates you're bringing in right off the bat? I- is there any other areas that, uh, that you see where, where companies should focus on during the, the pre-implementation stage to make sure that they get it right once they start to actually, uh, get the tool and, and start configuring it? I'm not gonna talk about Thought River too much because that's kind of not why I'm here to a certain extent. But when we look at things like playbooks, so contract playbooks that maybe an organization has in place, there will typically be three scenarios. There will be, it's in someone's head. You know, there is a senior person in that department that kind of has an idea of what they want to see in agreements.

9:13Um, the second option is that there is an Excel document with kind of, you know, what are we looking for? If it's in that agreement, what happens? And actually, what's our external comment? What maybe is our remediation language we choose to use in that agreement? So and the last one, um, which is always a bit of a kind of a panacea for us is if they've digitalized it in some way, which is where there's kind of more than maybe two or three different fallbacks. Maybe there's some additional internal guidance that helps that legal team in general actually kind of turn around those agreements quicker. Um, in terms of, I guess, why maybe it kind of falls into, I guess, why does this tech sometimes fail, um, obviously, you're, you're both involved in the CLM world and, and that has its problems sometimes when it comes to implementation. I, I think that's fairly widely known now.

10:07But I think asking the business what they want, but also asking, you know, kind of the legal team effectively what they want is always a, is always quite a good way to kind of get that insight into what actual work is required to make it successful. Um, because you can lead from the front. You know, you can be a buyer of technology. But actually, unless you've got buy-in from your own team, it's quite difficult to do that. And it kind of goes around to the other question that we were talking about, you know, how do you get other people in the organization involved? Well, and, uh, you know, this is always one of those things that people are quite surprised at, I say, when we talk about implementing this technology. I often say, you know, pick someone that has, you know, 100% view in their mind that this will be successful, that they have no problem with it at all, you know? They're, they're convinced it's the right technology. And then pick someone that absolutely hates it. And by the time of, by the end of an implementation, if you've managed to turn that person that really didn't like the idea of it into saying, "I can see this. I get this.

11:10I can see the proof point of this technology," you've done it. You know? That, I think that's one piece of advice I'd always give to anyone looking at something like this. But also, you know, explain why the juice effectively is worth the squeeze. You know, why are we having to kind of go through this period of, um, kind of implementation that is not always, you know, smooth. There will be occasional road bumps. You know, that's the reality of doing anything new. Um, but why are we doing this, and actually how will it make it easier for us as an organization to, you know, contract efficiently but also kind of manage our risk efficiently? Um, so yeah, I think there's probably three things there. There's, you know, asking the business what they want. Um, now that can be a double-edged sword because obviously the business sometimes will want things that maybe legal doesn't want. But at the same time, you'll get at least a holistic view of, of, of where people see it. Um, explaining why you're doing this Um, but also I think, you know, and, and partly, you know, kind of round to what you guys kind of do, making sure that people are in the best possible place they can be before, you know, looking at implementing CLM is a little bit different to some other tools because it is very intensive, you know, it is a big change, um, and that needs to be managed, and there is a ch- uh, quite a lot of change management associated with that.

12:31Um, but making sure that business is in the best place to be successful. And I think CLM maybe sometimes gets a bit of a hard time because actually the, the, the product is not always the problem, it's actually the business's willingness to kind of adapt to that product. There are things you can do to help with that, and obviously, you know, we can talk a little bit further on that. But th- that would be what I would say on that, I think. I really like what you said, right? Because it's very common that legal and the business department, they don't have the same goals, you know? Or, or not the goals, but, you know, like, they usually have different kind of perspectives, especially when you're thinking about, like, a new type of processes, when you implement the CLM. So James, like, in your experience, like, how can you align those goals between, like, the chief legal officer with the, with the chief of procurement or with the chief of sales? Because I think this is important part because usually, well, at least in our experience, uh, the main owner of the CLM implementation project is the legal team.

13:40And then you try to bring the other buy-ins, like procurement or, like, sales. But, like, how can you align those goals in order for them so that adoption part or the change management part can go smoothly, you know? Yeah. And that's, uh, that is a big question. Um, I mean, I think from a, you know, from a sales point of view, it's always around, and, you know, I experienced this myself, you know, we sign quite a lot of contracts. Um, on that basis I have a great relationship with Alice, our general counsel, um, and we have a great understanding between the two of us of actually, you know, why Alice pushes back, I guess, on some of the things that, that I'm looking to do. Um, but we always come, come to an agreement, and that's from shared understanding of, you know, the end commercial goal. Um, so with sales and legal, it's not always the same in every organization. You know, sometimes I'll speak to a sales team, and really they've got, let's say, a high volume of very, very kind of, not heavily negotiated, but low risk, low value contracts that they send out, and that's often without legal oversight.

14:46Now, the pain point in some ways is when that agreement comes back and someone's marked it up quite heavily, and they have to, you know, obviously get someone legal involved. And I think it's communication on those two. It's, it, it, it's very much communication about, you know, and explaining, I guess, to the business from a legal point of view why we have to do these things. You know, why do we have to push back on... I mean, I'll use a silly example here, like uncapped liability. You know, why do we have to push back on it? Well, actually, it's a massive legal risk. Um, in order for there to be a business, you know, in the future, you have to mitigate these risks. And I think providing there's that understanding between sales and legal, I think that's a really... It's not an easy bridge to build, um, but I think it's understanding. Uh, that would be the one word I would put on there. Um, procurement and things like that, I think, you know, procurement processes, and it depends very much on the company. I mean, people have procured ThoughtRiver in three weeks, um, and that's end to end.

15:45Um, I've been... I can think of a couple of examples at the moment where we've been in procurement for a while. Um, and that's because maybe they're not as joined up as they need to be. You know, you have certain things that have to happen in a certain cycle, you know? So there will be, let's say there's, um, uh, an onboarding platform or procurement platform, that actually doesn't link into legal at all. So you've got kind of them all operating on, on slightly different systems. And it would be a lovely thing if they could all operate on the same system, but the reality of that is it's not particularly high. So procurement and legal, I think again it is about communication. It's about making sure that, you know, legal have given procurement at least some guidelines as to how they like, you know, any sort of procurement of technology, whatever it might be, to look like. Um, and that can be more increasingly, we see that in kind of almost like a plain, a plain English kind of guide as to how you would, you know, procure something and, and what contractual terms sometimes mean.

16:45Um, but there's also, I guess, a slight difference in power, um, in terms of, you know, from a legal point of view, and this comes back to the same thing as sales actually. That, um, there are certain things that really lawyers have to do in a, in any negotiation, whether you're buying or selling anything. Um, providing there's, you know, some remediation happening in the agreement, um, there will always be a level of legal touch on some of these things. So I think it's, you know, most... I think most good sales people do really respect their legal teams because they... And, and I think legal teams have done a lot actually to move themselves as enablers as opposed to being barriers. You know, I can't think of that many teams now I speak to, and sometimes I speak to these teams in isolation, so they're not, they're not kind of listening to each other. And there is a level of, there's a high level of respect for the work that lawyers from a sales point of view. Now, that hasn't always been the case, I think.

17:37Um, you know, there's lots of memes and things like that on the internet about it. But, um, I think trying to join up the organization through all those, you know, all those three, you know, it's, it's about communication, it's about understanding actually the roles and how important those roles are for the future viability of the business, you know? Without sales, there's no revenue, you could argue. You know, without legal, there's no business because, you know, if you signed everything that came through your legal front door, there's a chance you'd be in, you know, some hot water Yeah, and I, you know, I think something else that we didn't touch on, when, when you're having these conversations with the entire team, right? I mean, you want people to work in the systems that they're comfortable with. So I think- Mm... understanding how, uh, you know, your CLM will integrate with your ERP or your CRM. I think that those are- Mm... are easy ways to start conversations with these other, you know, with the, the sales department, with the procurement department, because those are kind of jumping off points. And, and then from there you really get to dig on, okay, well, what type of data do we need to, to push back to these other systems? What types of processes?

18:35Where are p- people gonna be involved in these workflows, you know, in these other departments? Uh, and I think that that's how that collaboration starts and, and you can start to build out those process maps. Uh, and, and it's an easy way to, to, uh, you know, having, start having organic conversations instead of forcing everybody into a room and saying, "Hey, we're gonna buy this piece of technology. Uh, you guys need to look at it." Yeah. I, I think that takes, like I say, understanding is super important. You know, why do, why do we, why are we doing this? You know, what do other, other departments have to do in order for this to be facilitated? Um, there's a level of, I guess, meeting, and I, I think we'll probably come onto this, but meeting people where they are as well. 'Cause like you say, implementation of any technology relies on, you know, buy-in. You know, you have to have buy-in. You cannot force people to use things. Um, you can try, it probably won't work. Um, and that sometimes is meeting people where they are and, you know, I can think of, you know, clients that we have that are still using kind of quite old versions of SharePoint, but the business uses it.

19:34Um, now that may not be sustainable for 10, 15 years, um, but actually at the moment they've got something that's got a high adoption and is being used. Um, and that's really what everyone wants. You know, if you were to buy CLM, that's what you'd want, you know, something with high adoption that people use and see value from. Um, so yeah, I mean integration's super important for many reasons. Not, not just the adoption, but definitely, you know, to, to tie everything up. More so, as I say, in law firms, you know, we see a lot of law firms have just got really, really big tech stacks that are full of all sorts of different tools. Um, in-house, you know, you can have anything from no contract repository, no real contracting process, all the way through to, you know, someone running a procurement system, a CLM, um, an ERP, you know, multiple different platforms that all need to work together. Yeah. And I, I think, you know, that's, that's that maturity scale that, that we always try to talk about. And, and you need to, um, walk before you run and, you know, sometimes you need to crawl before you can walk.

20:40And I, I think that, you know, like you said, right, you really need to understand what the maturity level of your organization is before you go out there and start to evaluate technology, um, so that you are looking at the right types of tools for where you are, you know, in your journey as an organization. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Hey. Well, James, this has been a, a fantastic conversation. We really appreciate you coming on. If, if folks wanna connect with you, uh, or learn more about Thought River, where's the, uh, the best place to do that? So, I mean, they can find out all about Thought River on thoughtriver.com. Um, and I'm just James Peacock on LinkedIn. You know, always happy to talk to people about these types of things. Amazing. Uh, it's been a real pleasure. Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on, and thanks everybody for listening to another episode of Contract Heroes. Thank you. 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.

21:35Whether 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.com.