Unlocking The Full Potential of Your Contract Data With Brendan Raybuck

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. Hello everybody, and welcome back to another episode of Contract Heroes. Today on the show, joining us from ClearLaw, Brendan Raybuck. Brendan, thanks so much for being here. Really excited to, to be chatting with you. We were hoping, before we flip things over to Pepe, you could give us kind of a little bit more information on your background, on ClearLaw's background, and then Pepe will give us a better understanding of what we're gonna be chatting about today. Yeah. Thanks for having me. I'm, I'm really excited to be here. So I'm Brendan Raybuck, I'm the chief revenue officer over at ClearLaw. I oversee, uh, sales, marketing, and partnerships, so I'm a little bit of the chief revenue officer, a little bit of the CMO, a little bit of VP of partners. And in ClearLaw, what we are is we're an AI tool in the contract space, but really different than what a lot of CLMs are developing around generative AI. We incorporate generative AI into our tool.

1:01We use a bunch of, uh, traditional and proprietary techniques and combine that with generative AI, and really to a large extent focusing on, uh, turning contracts into structured data, often for things like obligations, rights restrictions, really the post-signature process. And we have some capabilities in the pre-signature process as well, but really focusing on enabling corporate departments, uh, both legal but even organizations outside of legal, and empowering them with the data within their contracts. So that's kind of what we do. It's a little bit unique, but really fits a gap that we feel like exists within the marketplace. Big gap there, right? Because, well, we work with CLMs, that's our bread and butter, and one of the big pain points is how much... Well, not, not a big point. Let me give you like a, a little bit of, of background. It is a pain point, but usually the conversation starts with, uh, "So we have 10,000 co- active contracts in our organizations, and we want to put it inside the CLM. Can you... Can we do it?" And of course we can do it.

2:04Do you have the data, the data points that you want to import so we can start doing the reporting? And they're like, "No, we are thinking about you to do that work." Yeah. And that's when the conversation and the... that's where the discussion starts because that's like a very heavy lifting on the, on the implementation. Usually what we do on the timeline of the implementation is like you gotta start on week two, and usually it finishes like around two weeks before going live, when they have the whole legacy documents on the, on the spreadsheet. So Brendan, like maybe this was something that you were trying to solve. Maybe ma- maybe not specifically for CLMs, but have you seen this in, in the past with your customers? Oh, absolutely. With all of our customers, it's the primary- ... pain point in a lot of ways.

2:54It's either we're moving into a CLM and we need the data, or the things went into a CLM and we still don't have the data and now we need to go look and find it. So yeah, that's a definitely a primary pain point for, for all of our customers in a lot. And tell us like, like how it works. Like well, not maybe because we, we already started a partnership, but like for the people that would like to know a, a, a little bit like around the software, because usually like people looking for legal tech, they think about the implementation is gonna take forever, take, take, takes a lot of time, takes a lot of effort. But using this type of software is pretty awesome, right? Because like- Yeah... you can start testing like just right away. Yeah. So, so how our software works is it really combines a couple of different layers, and this is kind of what makes our approach a little unique. The, the first step is something that a lot of AI tools do, which is- Mm-hmm... looking for identifying contact con- uh, content within contracts. This looks like a limitation of liability clause.

3:55This looks like an exception to limitation of liability. This looks like indemnification. So there's, there's that process. And, and we do go very deep within the contracts, so we don't just identify clause sections and subclauses. We actually have an intent-based system that says, what are the rights, restrictions, obligations that exist embedded within that content? So instead of just going, "Hey, this is your clause. Read it to figure out what's going on in it," we can actually turn that into, "Hey, you have these exceptions to limitation of liability. You have these unilateral, you know, non-disclosure obligations," things like that that you can very quickly identify. The second part of that, on top of just going in depth, which is one of our key value props, is at the second layer of our technology, which is that we normalize it into an ontology or kind of a data structure. We sort of take contracts which are unstructured data- Mm-hmm... with legal words, written, written language, and we transition that. And I...

4:56Our CTO kind of hates it when I say this, but this is how me as not a technologist thinks about it. It's like we turn the contract into something that could be usable in Excel. Excel's one of our data point, and where we push data, we can push it a lot of other places, but that's how I like to think about it. And so what that allows you to do is really get through this problem of like first and third party contracts. So for, uh, for contracts, they can be written, you know, 100 different ways and mean the same thing. Mm-hmm. And then you can have a single word added to a contract like no, and it completely changes the meaning- Oh, yeah... of, of a clause. So by taking the extraction and then we normalize that data, we say, "Hey, look. These data points that we're looking for, whether it's that unilateral, you know, confidential information or that exception to limitation of liability, we turn that into sort of this universal data point. Is it or is it not in the contract, and what are the associated data points around that?" And that what allows you is to easily compare first and third-party contracts across that universal data structure.

5:56And so if you have 10,000 contracts, it allows you to look at that data, scale, search it, sort it- Push that data externally outside of your legal department. So if you wanna push, like, renewal information to your customer support team, you can do that because we've turned that, all the, all those contracts first and third party into that universal structure so that companies can look at it at scale. Um- Go ahead. Go ahead, Marc. Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna switch gears a little bit. So do you have a question about what Brendan just, just touched on? Yeah, because I- Okay, go ahead... like, one of the things that we always see, like, on the contracts and especially because we as lawyers, we don't think about contracts and how we can structure it well so a software can read them. Usually, like, nobody reads a contract that is not a lawyer because, like, always the legal terms.

6:49But one of the things about unstructured data inside the contract is like usually some obligations, some, some triggers inside the contracts are not always in just one clause. For example, like termination or liabilities. You can see a contract and you can see, like, liabilities or limitation of liabilities, or you can see, like, early termination of the contracts. And when you see the whole thing, you will see, like, you have also, like, other clauses of early termination in different clauses, right? Mm-hmm. And, and that makes it, like, even, like, harder to understand. If, if you're a lawyer, you are used to it. Like, you just, uh- Mm-hmm... like start putting that together and trying to make it, like, a little bit some tricks there inside the contract. Yeah. But, but usually, like, when, when these type of things happens, and especially when you wanna path to the post-signature, which is actually the actual management of the contracts, and you wanna see all the obligations or what are you, uh, bound with, with the contracts, you, you gotta have all of those terms, like, very clear, right? Because otherwise you can do something that might cost you a fine or might be, I don't know, cause any kind of liability.

8:03So I'm wondering, Brendan, like, like how, like the s- how the system can, like, see when there's, like, different kind of terminology and different clauses and spread it all together inside the same document. Yeah. It happens a lot, and it's when you can break that contract down into this really granular data, what you could do is sort of reassemble those data points back up. So we see that with, like, someone red lines an acceptance clause and says, "Hey, look, if you haven't met our acceptance criteria, we have the right to terminate." Well, then you have termination language. And so by saying, "Hey, look, this is both your acceptance clause, but you have embedded termination language, and you have the other termination language," you have the ability to compare, contrast, see if there's conflicts. And we see the same thing with limitation of liability exception for indemnification. So you'll have an exception clause for indemnification, and then you'll have to go and reference your indemnification. So, and we actually even see this with hierarchical documents. Hey, a statement of work that's being governed by an MSA, and so the specific MSA is called out.

9:03We can identify the governing document because that is a, something that we can identify within the contract, and then we can logically tie that back up where, hey, let's look at the data in the MSA. Let's look at the requirements within the SOW. Does anything conflict? And if so, is there any sort of data point within those that says, "Hey, this one is the governing document," or, "Hey, look, the SOW is written afterward, but, and it says it's the exception to the MSA." All those are granular little data points, and that's actually one of the cool things about the way that you can manage structured data is because if you can turn it into something that can be kind of read by Excel, you can apply essentially formulas or logical reasoning to that and kind of build that back up to go, hey, look, if I see that there's an exception for indemnification of limitation of liability, I can't just look at the limitation of liability clause to make sure that works. I also need to look at indemnification and, and do that in an automated way.

9:56So that, that is one of the significant advantages to the way that we structure the contractual data, the review processes, or if you are trying to do something on that post-execution side and getting into granular data, you can identify all those data points and build that back up. Yeah. And, and when we look at that, I, I mean, that data, right, and the way that it's being used, a lot of times we're speaking with folks that are at the beginning of this journey to better contract management, and there's a lot of steps along, along the way to that. But I, I think when we work with folks, there's a lot of unknowns. There's a lot of things that they just don't know and don't understand, right? And, and they're kind of jumping into the deep end with, maybe without even knowing it. There's folks that are out there and they say, "Hey, we're, we've got everything in sh- shared files right now. We're using SharePoint. Some people have access to it, some people don't. We don't even know where all of our contracts are, but we know we wanna get them into whatever CLM tool we, we end up choosing." What suggestions would you have for folks that are at this phase? They're trying to, to pull out... Maybe they don't even know what to pull out of their contracts, right? Yeah.

10:58They, they just want, "Hey, we, we want some key pieces of information." But where do you suggest folks start when they're, they're looking to start actually really tracking this data and, and being able to, to run reports on it and have it in a central location? Yeah. I, I think actually the one thing that really resonated with you is they don't know what they don't know. Yeah. And I think people, when you actually get comprehensive contractual data, people get really surprised at what actually they've agreed to or how often they've agreed to it. You know, someone's like, "Well, yeah, we, we do that exception every once in a while, but it's only on like two or three contracts," and then you find out, like, it's across 20% of your contractual repository 'cause you got in that. Someone found out that, that you could do that. You could do, you could accept that red line, right? And then, and then people just started agreeing to it. And I think that's a, that's a struggle for people. So that's actually one of the things about ClearLaw is when a, I think a lot of oth- other technologies, when they say they apply their AI, they're really focused on answering a specific question.

11:56And, and you can think of this as gen AI, like prompt management. What are the contracting parties of my contract? And then the system will get it back. What we do by turning the contracts into structured data is turn the entire contract into essentially all of the data that we- Fund. So we get really granular. And then the question is, okay, what are the type of challenges that you are having as a business? And I really recommend that legal departments not only look at that internally, but also engage with their business partners to figure out what are the challenges they're having. And from there, you can identify a lot of low-hanging fruit that can help you drive a lot of ROI by having detailed contract data. There's a report that we often cite here at ClearLaw, the IACCM report on contract lifecycle management, that organizations lose 9% of revenue, or there's like a 9% revenue bleed, I forget the specific terminology they used, for poor contracting management. And a lot of that focuses on the post-execution side. So there's an aspect of, you know, streamlining your negotiation processes and putting e-signature in, you get contracts closed faster.

12:59There's value there, but then what do you do with all that data afterward? And we see examples of organizations like a software as a service software company, and they're not properly ran- managing their renewals. So they're bleeding customers on the renewal process. They're not properly enforcing price escalation notification processes. Most three-year software licenses require something like a six-month notification on a price increase, and we find that a lot of organizations are just automatically renewing customers without enforcing that price increase because they're not meeting the notification requirement. If you think about a three-year contract, it means you're renewing about a third of your clients every year, and yeah, you're talking 3%, and that, that slowly turns into something like a $10, $15 million problem for a large software company. Um, and we see the same thing on like SLAs. Um, I've been doing software sales for a long time, and I know... And, and Marc, before we got on the call, we were talking about end of quarters and end of years, and when you're that sales executive at a SA- software company, and you've got, you know, 24 hours left in the quarter and the client comes back to you with that last request, "Hey, lower my SLAs just a little bit without adding cost," you agree to that, and you, you get...

14:06push that contract through, and you get it signed, and you're super happy. But two years down the line, if you didn't record and get customer support to know that change in the SLA, if you've taken that four-hour SLA down to three and that customer service rep thought they had four hours, they might respond at three hours 30 minutes because they handled higher priority problems first, and then you're writing a check back to the customer. I, I actually know an organization that we've done some work with that the size of that problem is over $20 million a year. So I think that's where if business, if, if legal... And I, I think that's actually one of the things that's going on within legal departments. I think when you can turn things into data, when you're in that digital transformation process, you're sort of elevating, you're leveraging that data to elevate the role of the chief legal officer. I actually like to relate... I, I historically come out of marketing tech, so one of the things I say is I, I saw mark- chief marketing officers, and they were sort of look like as an expense for a long time.

15:05Marketing, you couldn't really attribute what you would drive in revenue. And then Google Analytics came out and Adobe Analytics, and you had this ability to record and measure performance, and now CMOs are able to go, "Hey, look, I need another $5 million 'cause I can look at this data, and it's gonna make us $25 million." And it's really elevated the role of the chief marketing officer in companies. They're a lot... They actually have a lot more power in organizations than they did probably 30, 40 years ago. And I think the same process is undergo- happening in legal tech, where if the chief legal officer has this data and can engage with the head of sales to improve sales conversions, the head of marketing and the head of customer support to keep more customers and drive more retention and lower the costs associated with working with part- with customers, they can work with human resources to make sure that they're... an- and compliance officials, so they're not getting fined, and they're doing data security correctly, and they're very consistent about this type of stuff.

15:58You'll be able to find the sort of $5 million problem here, $20 million problem here, $15 million problem here, and leverage that data, and I think that's part of this transformational process that's undergoing in legal tech right now, is it's empowering your chief legal officers, your senior general counsels to kind of elevate their position in a way that other business unit leaders have done historically. And I think that's what really excites me about working in legal tech, is this transition is gonna really change the way that legal, in-house legal counsels really work and operate today. That's a very interesting approach that I've never thought about it, like how you compare like the marketing team with, with the legal team, and that's, and that's true because usually business see the legal department as a cost center because they don't bring money to the company. And it's re- and one of the main challenges of general counsels, especially the ones that are still like very green into the legal operations and they don't have that, like how to use data and how you can prove, because usually general counsels, they need to report to, to the CFO.

17:00Like, how can I show him numbers? Because if I tell him, "So we, now we can close contracts in less, two days less than we used to last quarter," and the CFO is like, "Okay, good," but that's it, right? But now if you have that type, that type of data, and you can see some revenue leaked, like this 9% from the IACCM, they changed the name. Now it's World Commerce and Contracting. And, and, and these guys, they can say like, "Okay, so where can we find this leakage in the, inside their contract management process?" That would make like way better, right? Because now instead of being just me legal department, I can go with procurement, and we can tell you like, "Hey, you've been, you've been paying more money over your budget in this deals, right? That you weren't able to, to know." That example about the SLAs, it's a really good one. Think it's a really bad idea to have like different C- S- SLAs with different customers.

18:04And but also, like even for sales, like if you can track that data and- And use it in order to start, or at least using smarter KPIs, that's gonna be a game changer. Yeah. And it will be easier for them, like, "Hey, CFO, we need..." Like you say, like one more... I don't, I don't think they, they, they can get like five more million dollars like that easy. Maybe one or two. Yeah. But now that the CFO will know, "Okay, now you give me an ROI, and I can see why you're asking me for money," right? It will make way more sense, and now, okay, now you can show me that if we invest in this type of softwares, we can save more money or, or, or make more money, and that's gonna be a game changer. Yeah. And actually, I, I think this is where I think CLM is gonna involve, uh, evolve, is I think a lot of the focus on CLM is, is speeding up that pre-execution process.

18:59And yeah, it helps you get contracts signed faster, and you can negotiate- Yeah... them faster, and they're, and they're, your contracts are better quality with assistance from AI. But to a lot of CFOs, what's, what's the value prop? Where I've hired like one less attorney and one less paralegal, and I've saved $300,000, and that's great, and you probably have less risk in your contracts 'cause you've got AI double-checking them. But yeah, that's, that's nice, but like, yeah, but I've helped our SLA management solve a $25 million problem. And, or, and I've, I've been, so I've been a sales rep for quite a bit of my career, and one of the things that happened repeatedly to me is like the company's redesigning the website, and they wanna put new logos and case studies up on it. And we used to give, at a lot of companies, you give a discount to customers- Sure... for agreeing to use their logo for publicity rights. Which of course are in the contract, the statement of work or the software license agreement. So they're carved out there.

19:51And then when marketing wants to know whose logo they're allowed to use, or did they, the logos they were using, does any of that expire? Are they still customers? Do we have people on the website that we can't use, and we're out of compliance? And they start sending emails to the sales team. "Okay," like, "give me a list of everyone you agreed to." And having been a salesperson, I don't want to badmouth sales guys, but none, I've never met a sales guy who's like, "Yeah, I'm willing to stop what I'm doing closing deals to go help marketing with my historical contracts." Like, that is never gonna happen. So, but that's data that is embedded within the contract, and instead of having marketing just spend all this time going through and, and looking at this, if they could just simply have that question answered to them within a couple of seconds, that's real time savings- Yeah... from contractual data that's helping marketing, that's helping your... So it's really all, all of the corporate functions are dependent on what goes on in a contract. I mean, even I mentioned human resources. We had a conversation with a staffing company in the healthcare space, and they staff things like traveling nurses at hospitals.

20:52And so they have an, a master services agreement with a hospital or healthcare center that dictates costs and other stuff, but one of the things they do is background checks. Like, if you're gonna put a nurse on site, that person has to be properly background checked and, and in particular, those often require drug tests because nurses handle narcotics, and they deliver them, and they inject people and, and those types of things. And if you can turn... But each hospital in every MSA is essentially unique. Is it gonna be tested every three months? Is it just three months before they start? Is it different per role? So if you could turn all that into data across thousands of MSAs you'd have with various hospitals and groups and healthcare centers or things like nursing home staffing, adult, senior living facilities, what type of background checks you had to have, you could turn that into data that then you could then structure and put into a staffing system to go, "Hey, look, I'm gonna staff so and so at this site." "Oh, well, they don't meet the requirement. They don't have the right credentials. They haven't been drug tested recently. They're not certified, and that date." Whatever those requirements happen to be.

21:51And that can both save a lot of time and money, but it also helps the compliance side, where something then goes wrong, you may have a good limitation of liability clause in there, but the exception to that might be you didn't properly background check. You put an unqualified person in this role, and as a result, we can sue you for damages. That can save a company a lot of money. So it's really every corporate function. And then you mentioned the structured data. It, it's one of the things I really like about the comparison to marketing and CMOs, is I, I actually really like the TV show Mad Men. I think that thing is great. Mm-hmm. And it's about '60s marketing, mad men marketing teams. And, and you do get a little bit of this hint that marketing was an expense. Like, 'cause you could say in the '60s, like, "I would love to put a commercial on," or, "We want two good billboards." Well, there was no data to say this really worked or not. And so corporations did view marketing expense. That, your comment about like that legal is viewed as an expense today, kind of a necessary expense, marketing kind of went through the same thing.

22:48And so they were viewed as a necessary expense. And then when they transitioned into being data-driven, they were able to sort of elevate their position. And one of the funny things about it is I recognize that the culture, it's not just that the CMO is elevated, but I, I recognize that the culture changed. Those Mad Men style pitches, all those famous, you can go YouTube. I've never been in one of those. I spent 15 years in marketing and marketing technology sales and services. I've never been in a Don Draper high-end pitch. I have literally opened Google Analytics in front of a CMO and go, "Look, this data shows that you need to spend five more million dollars on ads because we're, it will make you 25 million." Like, it, so the culture of marketing changed when you could be data-driven, the way they operate changed. And I think you also see that in other corporate functions. The first kind of sales manager I ever had was this big, bombastic... He was a great sales leader. Drove the team hard, but we, we closed a lot of deals.

23:46But he was this old school sales executive who would, if you asked for a discount, like you were past your discount percentage, you needed his discount percentage, he'd yell at you, and he'd tell you you can't sell, and you're terrible at your job, and blah, blah, blah. Kind of that old school sales mentality. And then Salesforce comes around, right? Everyone's got... And people now make decisions on how they close business and what levers they'll pull based on data at scale. And I, I used to work at Adobe, and I don't think I've ever, uh, since my first sales manager, I don't think I've ever been yelled at again in a sales role. But I have been told over and over again, "Is your data in Salesforce? Have you updated Salesforce? Are all your close dates updated in Salesforce? Are your dollar amounts right in Salesforce? Are all the SKUs right in Salesforce?" And so you look at the way that- Even sales teams operated, they're now data-driven and operating at scale on data, and I think that's what I think really excites me is legal's now just at the cusp of that happening, and I think we here at Clear Law, because we have the data at scale in a way that other companies don't provide, we're part essential to that kind of transformational moment here in, in legal tech. Yeah, and I totally agree w- with you that I think that, like, the most important s- space of the contract is, like, post-signature because that's the real deal.

24:57That's when you're bound to the contract, so you need to per- per- perform some task and obligations there. And you gave an, an examples, uh, about the hospitals, and they need to get these tests running, and maybe for the li- our listeners, it would... doesn't sound like, well, yeah, but I mean, e- everybody does it, and nothing can happen. But if you just, like, Google some cases, like that's not just for hospitals. Like a couple years ago, like two years ago, one big four company was fined $100 million by the SEC because they were failing some ethics exam, and that's huge. Like, with that amount of money, you can just run this, this type of data and avoid that, those kind of fines. And usually when, when, with, like in companies in different verticals such as, let's say, construction, right? Like the pre-signature is like, okay, that's fine.

25:48We just wanna settle what's going to be, like, the fix for the construction plan or whatever, but when you're doing, like, construction work for massive facilities, like you gotta have a way on how to track every single detail, every single expense, complaint management, because you also need to subcontract with other companies. And if you don't have that type of control, it's very likely that you will be either paying fines or you will, I don't know, like, like there's a lot of bunch of things that can happen there. Yeah. I think you really pointed out something that reminds me of, of a recent client of ours, actually. I think one of those challenges that I think legal teams is dealing with is an increasingly complex compliance and regulatory environment. And we have a client who's a large scale manufacturer in the EU, and so not only do they have, they do manufacturing themselves, but they have thousands of subcontractors building all the little components of the products that they sell.

26:51So you've got something like 25,000 supplier or subcontractors and whatnot. And the EU made some minor regulatory changes recently and, and they're not the type of thing that necessarily gets, like, any press, but this large scale organization realized, "Well, I got 25,000 supplier contracts, and I know, like, maybe 100 of them are out of compliance, and now there's a new reporting requirement by the EU. So not only do I need to know that I could be fined for being out of compliance with these new regulations, but I also could be fined for not reporting that I am or am not in compliance on these." And then the question is, do you wanna read 25,000 contracts? And this is an organization where the products are complex, everything's kind of custom negotiated. You have a lot of, like, either third-party paper or even the first-party paper's been red lined to a point where it is functionally third-party paper. So there's a lot of complexity. So how do you... You should be able to get the data, be able to report on it, be able to identify the organizations that you need to renegotiate your contracts with, and then report at scale what's in compliance, without compliance, what your process is for renegotiation to a regulatory board.

27:55And if you don't, yeah, you could be fined. For 100 clients, maybe the fine is only half a million dollars per client. At 100 clients, though, that ends up being $10 million. And so- Broke. Exactly, and I think that's the thing that I like to point out is when you can turn those contracts or structured data, one of... It seems like you, if you have one problem, you're more than paying for your entire legal tech setup by fixing one of these post-execution problems. Well, you probably have 10 or 20 of them sitting within your organization depending on where, who you are. And so I think to your question back, original question is, like, where do you start? I think it's first getting the data, and then really working with your business partners on, okay, where are the challenges that we potentially have data that would give you the insights necessary to solve them, and then let's work on doing that. And that, and that's actually something that we see a lot.

28:44We see a lot of that, you know, we'll extract the data, and we'll push it back to a CLM or other tool, and then the CLM becomes that hub of data and really pushes that data out to something like Salesforce Service Cloud, which the customer support team would use to manage. So they can see the SLAs automatically, and they can see if they're in compliance, or they can look at termination for convenience rules because they're worried that these clients are gonna be able to cancel or accept unique acceptance criteria to keep a customer happy and they can't cancel. So there's a lot of these little data points that then you can just kind of... Yeah, and that can all be done through an automated fashion. I think, you know, that's where the Cohos of the world come in is we only kind of extract the data and provide thought leadership. What you do with this data, I think, is really bound up in organizations, uh, getting good consulting help from, from their solution partners like Koho, where you guys can come in and go, "Okay, yeah, let's evaluate your business problems," and then we can kind of do all the plumbing. So maybe it's not something that legal goes, "Hey, you have a problem."

29:39It's just the data automatically cycles out of the CLM, and every new customer that gets set up in Salesforce Service Cloud, all that data automatically gets sent there via API, and the cust- that just becomes an automated part of the onboarding process, right? And then that customer support rep is empowered with every change, every alteration, every requirement that they need to know about that was already sitting within the contract. Yeah, and I, I think we've talked about a couple of different things here, right? And, and, and doing some education to start, how we use that data, where is that data coming from, and I think one thing before we wrap up that I wanted to kind of touch on was let's say there's folks out there that are listening that are going through an evaluation process to work with, uh, a company like Clear Law, looking at CLM tools, right, to- To see if their, the, the solution is going to meet their needs. I mean, wh- what types of questions should folks be asking these organizations to make sure that it's going to accurately and, and do it well to the point where they're actually gonna be able to leverage this data?

30:38Like, w- I guess, yeah, what, what are the overall kind of questions that they should be asking? I, I think really walking through a business problem with your, the vendors that you are evaluating is a big part of it. And again, I, I made that comment earlier that I think a lot of the CLM vendors are really focused on that pre-execution process. So when you get to... A- and I, and to p- the transformation of AI and legal tech is so new, I think all of the marketing from the CLM vendors and companies like ClearLaw, they kind of get... They all look the same. So I think you really in your evaluation just need to battle test that. And I think that goes through looking at automatic redlining functions in the negotiation process, but also going, "Hey, look, let's walk through a complex scenario of something that we may have to do." Like, we are getting acquired, and we need to look at all the assignment clauses, or we're acquiring someone and we need to look at all the assignment clauses to see if we can assign these contracts to the new entity. Do, if we acquire this company, we wanna make sure they don't have termination for conveniences on all their client contracts. Walk them through a real world scenario and see how quickly that can happen.

31:43'Cause I think the thing I see is a lot of organizations will say, or CLM vendors or, or other legal tech vendors will say something like, "Yeah, we can train for that." And that's one of those things that I always go like, "Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Why would you need to train for that?" Like, assignment clauses are in every contract. You should be trained to be able to extract that data. You should already have this data within your CLM. And I think that's where I'm really skeptical of those, those, "We can train for that," versus, "I should have and own that data." That's where that shift is. So I think when you, when you really try and walk the CLM or other legal tech vendors through a s- that, one of those complex scenarios, and one of the things they look out for is, is that data already available? Is it out of the box? Is it already trained on third party paper? And is it structured in a way that I can look at it at scale? If you get a no to that question, then I think you need to look at a specialized tool for that post-execution process, and that's where someone like ClearLaw comes in. Yeah. I think that's, I think that's great advice. A- and definitely one of the reasons that, that we wanted to partner with you guys.

32:40I, I think that there's a need for deeper and wider applications when it comes to this, this kind of heavy lifting that needs to be done, especially on the, the legacy items, right? And, and getting that, that, those key pieces of information into whatever repository or CLM you're using. So Brendan, thanks so much for, for joining us. I think this has been a great conversation. If folks want to learn more about you, wanna connect with you, or, or learn more about ClearLaw, where's the best place to do that? Yeah. clearlaw.ai, uh, is our website. And we are certainly like any other company, we have a contact form that can be easily fil- filled out, and, uh, we'll certainly reach back out to you. Awesome. All right. Well, thanks everybody for listening to another episode of Contract Heroes. And Brendan, thanks so much for joining us.