Legal tech made simple

In our latest podcast, Dom talks to Christophe Frèrebeau, the co-founder and CEO of Della, a European tech company based in Paris and London whose mission is to democratise the use of AI. Della's typical customers are legal departments who want more consistency in the way they manage their contracts, particularly as teams increasingly work remotely; and European law firms who are accelerating the adoption of tech.  Della makes AI solutions that lawyers want to use, that are easy to use and that fit in with the way they work. Christophe explains that AI is there to help and support the lawyer but the lawyer remains firmly in the driving seat.  Recently, people have been working with more tools, and integration with other technology platforms and tools is key.  The adoption of tech by lawyers and the tech itself will keep evolving which is super exciting but also means that the legal function will change and studying how to use AI is important for lawyers today.Tune in to find out more.

This week I had the pleasure of speaking to two of SYKE's brightest sparks, Laura and Becca. Both of whom started out as junior engineers, but since joining the company have had the opportunity to work on some high profile projects.They tell me what it is like being given responsibility, access to customers, and the trust to try things out and learn by making mistakes.Becca joined from the University of Manchester where she studied law and politics, having flipped a coin.Both Laura and Becca have had the courage to say yes, whenever an opportunity to learn has presented itself, and would encourage others in their old shoes at Uni or studying A levels to do the same.As an old fogie it's inspiring to hear their stories. 

This week I had the pleasure of speaking to Chris Kitchener of HighQ fame.A driven product leader with over 15 years of product strategy and product management expertise in large organisations.  Chris is now in charge of helping HighQ fit elegantly into the full suite of Thomson Reuters products, be that document automation and Contract Express, or Legal Tracker.He has a pilot's licence, is a techy from his uni days, and has a passion for the customer - who doesn't really care about the clever tech under the bonnet - they just want it to work smoothly.  Chris is focussed on delivering  great products, delighting customers and creating business value through operational and strategic excellence. He has a great CV, and a track record of delivering results across multiple industries, organisations, functions and teams. Tune in to hear what he has to say.

Olga V. Mack, CEO & Chairwoman of Parley Pro, a modern, (and truly!) collaborative, and intuitive contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform that has pioneered online negotiation technology. Olga loves legal innovation and has dedicated her career to improving and shaping the future of law. She's convinced the legal profession will emerge even stronger, more resilient, and more inclusive than before by embracing technology.She is an award-winning general counsel, operations professional, startup advisor, public speaker, adjunct professor, and entrepreneur. She co-founded SunLaw, an organization dedicated to preparing female in-house attorneys to become general counsels and legal leaders, and WISE to help female law firm partners become rainmakers.Now CEO and Chairwoman at Parley Pro, Olga and her team are using smart collaboration,  speeding up contract cycles by seamlessly bringing together people and data in one transparent workspace. This is a short interview, but Olga being Olga, she packs a lot in. Enjoy!

In this episode I caught up with Agiloft's new (ish) CEO Eric Laughlin. He tells me all about the  company's recent $45m investment. Bootstrapped since its inception in 1990 and profitable, Agiloft's this is the company's first round of external funding and will be used to accelerate its product development and expand its vertical and geographic market presence.Eric most recently served as global leader of legal managed services at EY, where he managed the Pangea3 and Riverview Law teams. Prior to EY he was managing director of the corporate segment within Thomson Reuters and used to run Serengeti, which went on to become Legal Tracker. Like me, he's not a lawyer, but unlike me, he's a super smart guy who is at the forefront of legal engineering and enterprise transformation.He see contracts as the DNA in an organisation - and thinks companies should care about what is deep coded within them so they understand their risks, but also can benefit more fully from what is contained with in them.He also is passionate about culture and the relationships his teams build with customers.  Eric says being relationship driven and being very transparent, are cornerstones of any good culture and definitely Agiloft's.

Pieter van der Hoeven and Bram Fokke founded Clocktimizer together in 2014. Since then they've grown the team to 19 employees.Pieter set the groundwork for Clocktimizer at university in Utrecht where he studied law. Upon completing his Masters in Law Pieter went to work for international law firm DLA Piper. It was during his time at DLA, and a secondment to KPN, that Pieter thought up the idea for Clocktimizer. He'd spent one too many evenings pouring over spreadsheets trying to provide clients with transparency, prompting the need for automation. Instead of manually transferring data from timesheets to Excel, Pieter looked to Natural Language Processing. After discussing the idea over 2012's Christmas Dinner, Pieter and his co-founder Bram shook hands and agreed to start a business together. They began building the MVP in 2013, while Pieter was doing an MBA in Rotterdam and Madrid.He now feels data is coming of age. Window dressing is not going to cut it anymore. Law firms are going to have to back up what they say with numbers. He truly believes the pandemic was the last push that in-house teams needed to stop accepting a situation where someone said, this is going to cost you X and turned out to be 5X . Those days are gone.Tune in to hear more of what Pieter had to say.

This week I had the pleasure of speaking to Stephen Ball, CEO at Boost Legal. Stephen is a General Counsel by trade, with 25 years 'hands-on' in-house experience for companies across US, EU, Middle East, Russia and Africa. He has a strong track record of international leadership, designing, managing and coaching high performing legal, risk & compliance and corporate development functions.He has a passion for leading initiatives to transform and modernize legal functions to realize more value, improve strategic integration and develop legal as a competitive differentiator.He combines what he learned at Motorola, Six Sigma principles, with an aptitude for creative thinking, white boarding concepts with high performance professionals in the fields of sports and military special forces. Tune in to hear what he's got to say.

This week I had the pleasure of catching up with Olga Gezha, who leads the SYKE presence in Russia.Olga was a customer of SYKE's when she led a team at Pizza Hut UK, having previously worked within the Yum! Brands in Russia at KFC before relocating to London.She has since returned to Russia and is now a leading figure in the legal tech scene there, having recently appeared at Pravo Tech in Moscow.Olga has a masters degree in legal tech and has been involved with contract lifecycle management since 2013.She is passionate about the role technology can play in making lawyer's lives easier - but understands the importance of bringing them with you, and making the case for why they should adopt new systems.Tune in to hear more.

This week I spoke to Giles Thompson, Head of Growth at Avvoka.A lawyer by trade (formerly Kirkland & Ellis and Herbert Smith Freehills) he is a tech investor and entrepreneur. He has a degree in political science and as the son of a farmer, also thinks of himself as an agriculturalist and foodie.Giles is excited by the future of legal tech and document automation. This month the company is launching its partnership with the Loan Market Association, giving those in the banking and finance sector the opportunity to use pre-automated agreements when striking a deal.Avvoka already has experience of multiple banks involved in a dynamic contract negotiation, with 18 parties successfully collaborating on the platform.Tune in to hear more. 

Claire is a Principal and National Teaching Fellow of the HEA and a highly innovative lecturer. Claire is a Principal and National Teaching Fellow of the HEA and a highly innovative lecturer. She is the Director of External Relations in the School of Social Sciences and the Faculty of Humanities Leadership in Education Awards Programme (LEAP) Champion. Prior to that, she was the Director of Learning and Teaching at the School of Law (2017-2019). Claire has a passion for modernisation, developing new skills, new initiatives, and new ways of engaging students academically and professionally. Her efforts are recognised at all levels-regionally, nationally and internationally. She runs the Miscarriages of Justice Review Centre-The Manchester Innocence Project, and is currently developing the skills of students in legal tech as part of the Manchester Legal Tech Initiative. Claire encourages her students to show initiative, volunteer, and follow legal tech innovators on social media, and offers further advice to students who are considering alternative legal career paths. Tune in to learn more. 

Stephane is a Senior Manager in the Contract Management team at Amadeus, and has a background in engineering.He's been with the company more than ten years, and leads the Contract Management team worldwide, and is responsible for strategic vision, helping the company drive efficiencies in contract management, including how to build and manage contracts.He is a regular speaker at international conferences on automation and contract management (IACCM, DocuSign), and in his role at Amadeus has helped put in place automation and electronic signature for all business units (HR, Procurement, Sales, Finance).He has some sage advice for other people in roles like his - namely, don't try to build solutions from scratch. Talk to expert partners or organisations that have gone through similar transformations and analyse your current tech stack to see what it is you really need. He has some clear visions for what the next six to 12 months will bring, and thinks that, though it may be difficult, companies should still be aiming to invest in legal tech in 2021. Tune in to find out more. 

Nick Cranfield is the Global Director Legal Operations at Dyson.Since joining Dyson in June 2017 he's been responsible for building out a global Compliance and Ethics function. Amongst other things, this involved the development and launch of a new Code of Conduct. Nick was also responsible for preparing Dyson for GDPR and took management responsibility for the Privacy Team.And in November 2019 he moved into a new role of Global Director Legal Operations to support Dyson's Chief Legal Officer in managing the Dyson Legal department and leading a transformation programme across Dyson's Legal Teams.Globally Dyson has about a hundred legal IP and compliance professionals working across its legal teams in 12 jurisdictions,  servicing their internal clients in around 36 different jurisdictions.Nick's first challenge was setting about trying to improve the experience for the people working within Dyson's legal function. As an in-house function, unlike an external law firm, the services they provide to the business are free at the point of delivery, a bit like the NHS. Effectively demand is completely unconstrained. That creates a lot of pressure for the people that work in legal. So Nick wanted to try and improve that experience. His second key objective was to make sure his teams continued to deliver excellent legal services to the business.One of the things Nick learned along the way was to align his legal operations strategy with the wider IT strategy. Using Microsoft 365 became a really fundamental part of that. By building within that native platform, it meant his development was already supported, and they were seen as 'good corporate citizens' because they were utilizing the IT tools which the enterprise was asking them to use.His advice to other inhouse legal operations directors is to have the courage to start. Make the changes that you want. Start to do something you need. Every journey starts with that single step and don't be afraid to take it. "We're not constructing a nuclear reactor. So if the portal goes wrong, if someone ends up at the wrong place or they don't quite get the guidance they wanted, as long as you provide feedback loops that are working. As long as you've got a non-defensive approach to feedback and you can fix things quickly."Nick says that's the big advantage of using Microsoft 365. It's not difficult. It's not technically complicated. So you can fail fast and move on. Tune in to hear more of what Nick had to say.

This week I had the opportunity to speak to Jim Delkousis, CEO and founder at Persuit.After graduating with his law degree, Jim began working at one of Australia's leading law firms, Mallesons Stephen Jaques. He quickly made his way up the ranks, getting promoted to Senior Associate in 1995, and Partner in 1999. For the next six years, he oversaw their construction team, eventually helping the firm start a construction dispute practice in Perth.Looking for a change of pace, Jim left his firm in 2007 and joined DLA Piper in Dubai to lead their dispute practice in the Middle East. Here Jim helped his practice group become one of the most profitable in the firm.As he approached the tender age of 50, Jim started to rethink his career path. He left DLA Piper and founded Persuit to give companies an easier way to source and compare proposals for external legal services.Fast forward to 2020 and Jim is working with the world's leading organizations including Walmart, Shell, Novartis, Johnson & Johnson, Exelon, Target, Citi, Facebook, Twilio and Square.And saving them, on average, 37 per cent on quoted law firm fees for a particular assignment, which translates into tens of millions of dollars in savings. Tune in to find out more.

In this episode I was delighted to speak to a legal tech superstar Jim Wagner, who has been innovating in the sector for 20 years.  Having trained in law, Jim practiced as a lawyer for ten years before transitioning to the business side of things. Jim tells us about his journey into Seal (now part of DocuSign Agreement Cloud), and how AI and machine learning are really beginning to transform aspects of the inhouse lawyer's ability to do their roles particularly in relation to analysing corporate contracts.When Jim became aware of Seal, it was focused exclusively on the corporate market - so Jim and his team created accelerators - collections of AI models that solve for things like procurement and compliance,  or ISDA or NDAs. Even though companies like Seal have been doing this now for 10 years, the reality is, Artificial Intelligence is still on a maturity curve and there's a lot of room left on that maturity curve. Jim describes certain aspects of AI, take mergers and acquisitions, where there are mature AI models out there for identifying change and control or identifying assignment rights and those sorts of things. But once you getting into larger, more complex agreements, master service agreements, master hosting agreements, licensing agreements, data processing adenda, et cetera, delivering AI value across those complex agreements is going to be a journey.Jim encourages his clients to think of AI as 'a tremendous assist'. He argues why on earth would you undertake the analysis or review of an agreement without having that assist? "Because we're going to read so many critical parts of the document, and candidly, we're going to unearth a lot more with AI than, than might meet the human eye. And so, so there's a huge, huge assist that's available." Jim teaches a class where he went to law school. He still stays involved in that community. And a big part of what he talks about with his students is ethics. Ten years ago they'd probably have considered what are the ethical implications if you use AI? And now they turn the debate on its head and say, "what are the ethical implications from not using AI?". He goes on to say: "We know you use spellcheck . We know you use red line. We know you want to have searchable text , right? You're going to want to use AI?".Jim feels it no longer makes any sense to undertake the process without the AI, but you do need to recognize that it's an assist. It's not full automation, certainly not full replacement for human review, at least for reviewing an entire agreement end-to-end, word for word on, on every single comma and period that's there.Tune in to hear more.

HSBC is one of the most complex matrix organizations globally, it is many different businesses rolled into one and inherent in that is of course there is no one size fits all solution. There are different legacy systems being used for different processes. Over recent months SYKE has managed the bank's HighQ implementation, including end to end design and configuration of the platform and integration to other systems.Richard warns against using legal tech in the wrong way. The tech is very powerful. But you should never automate a broken process. In his time at HSBC he's seen just how important that is.HighQ's no code, user friendly interface and web design makes it a dynamic and easy to deploy solution that sits comfortably alongside HSBC's other internal systems. The clever infrastructure behind the scenes means it can generate powerful insights, with intuitive workflow and elegant UI.Richard is a big big fan of the ‘5 whys' way of looking at things and reducing the problem down into certain common denominators:Look at what potential solutions are out there that might help solve the problemStart small, keep adding on, fitting in with your plansBe prepared to change as you realize your limitations or discover new opportunities Be prepared to keep on reinventing or redefining the problem Accept there's no magic bullets out there HSBC's managed legal services and how it handles third-party supply contracts, is a showcase across the legal function. Seven years into the legal tech journey, they have implemented a workflow solution, simple to manage overall process. They focused on third party supply contracts, realizing that there is inherently less operational legal risk in those contracts.They have implemented a triage of high risk, middle and low. Richard believes, and that colleagues can be wowed by tiny noticeable things that you do. His top tips include:Simplicity is the key Be prepared to failSmall successes build trustThese wins help you build a stronger foundation for future success.Tune in to find out more.

This episode I caught up with Sheila Gormley Co-founder and Exec VP Legal Division at Repstor. Repstor says it transforms and simplifies Microsoft 365 Information Management, and specialises in optimising Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams productivity and information control for businesses worldwide.  It aims to harness the investment companies have already made in these platforms, and offers them substantial efficiency gains.But Sheila recalls being at a conference about three years ago, where there was incredible reticence among law firms present to move to the cloud. She came away from that session feeling very deflated, that the transition to the cloud it was happening so slowly.Fast forward three years, and OMG! what a difference. It is now a top priority for firms, accelerated by the pandemic. Shelia says that notwithstanding some of the challenges you get around client consent within a law firm environment, she is seeing a huge shift from where people are looking to transition from their legacy platforms onto cloud tech and recognizing the benefits of that.The other key trend Repstor see is consolidation. More and more firms are looking to see how they can leverage the Microsoft platform to deliver that. She describes the Microsoft platform, M365 as having the capability, the security, the scalability, and the functionality, but what it doesn't have out of the box is matter centricity, and the legal know-how, the legal ways of working. And that's what Repstor tries to bring on top of the platform.She feels the pandemic has been biggest accelerator for change. Affordable cloud technology presents a huge opportunity in the market. People are realigning budgets that may have been allocated to property or real estate into their IT budget. Recognizing that they need to adopt cloud technology.The ability to deliver services remotely, to deliver software remotely, without having to be physically on premises with clients has worked incredibly well for Repstor. And they see that trend continuing. Sheila thinks we're at the inflection point where themselves, other companies, clients, everybody has seen that it can work and it can work effectively and efficiently. And while there's always going to be that place for human interaction, it's part of our DNA, it's part of who we are, that we long for that. But, from a technology point of view, we can do a huge amount over the web.Tune in to hear more of what Sheila had to say.

Springer Nature has been on a fascinating legal tech journey over the past 12 months. A relatively small team of four lawyers are now able to focus on doing high value work, as business users self-serve 95% of contracts. Huge savings in time, the equivalent of 50 days saved in the first half of the year alone. Next year Rachel thinks the Contract Express system they've installed will handle more than 300,000 agreements, as more and more of the business move to digital.Her approach was to start small, working with inhouse teams and business users that were ready to make the switch, focusing on quick wins, and capturing the data that helped tell the story of the positive impact the tech was making.She says: "I think that the most important thing is not trying to bite off more than you can chew and just starting with one small thing and choose something that's really relevant for your business, do it in a small way, test it, get feedback, iterate it, and then allow it to grow a little bit and get its own advocates in the business that then help you roll it out rather than trying to come up with an enormous strategy from the very first day. "Rachel chose to start with contracting, with two or three contracts. Contracts that were easily automated, easy to standardize, but would have quite a big impact because they were heavily used. As a result they've significantly reduced the drafting time, for example, for an NDA it is now down to less than 10 minutes.Her advice to other GCs is simple: identify one key pain point and work really hard to understand that. She would also advise engaging a partner to help you. There is so much knowledge on legal tech. You don't have to do it all yourself. Use the benefit of other people's learnings to bring you up up the curve.Rachel started with a survey of her own legal team in terms of looking at pain points. What is it that stops you from going home on time? What are the things that are the most difficult for you to get through during the day? And she also did some testing with the business, with their internal customers as to what their pain points were.She says legal tech has liberated the team. It's enabled Springer's small legal function to do more of the work they enjoy. It's improved service to the business. It's given the legal function real credibility in the business because it now approaches technology and innovation in the same way that other areas of the business do. And it's a really enriching experience, learning a new skill.Tune in to find out more.

In this episode I speak to Don Keller, CEO and founder at Joinder.Don is a partner in the Silicon Valley office of Orrick, and a member of the Technology Companies Group. He advises high growth technology companies, public companies, venture capital firms and investment banks. He has advised clients on more than 60 public offerings, 75 acquisition transactions and several hundred venture financings.In recent months he's been helping launch Joinder, which uses machine learning trained by hundreds of Orrick professionals to automatically organize a company's records and files. It is completely free for Orrick projects, with no limit on the number of users or workrooms. But is now being opened up to other companies and users.As a lawyer, Don has worked on transactions for Google (Nasdaq GS: GOOG), Oracle (Nasdaq GS: ORCL), Tibco (Nasdaq GS: TIBX), Adaptec (Nasdaq GS: ADPT), Shutterfly (Nasdaq GS: SFLY), Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (NYSE:MSO), Sum Total Systems (Nasdaq GS: SUMT) and Rambus (Nasdaq GS: RMBS).Hear what Don has to say on the joys of building a start-up company himself as he nears the end of this career in Silicon Valley having spent his working life advising those on the other side!

In this episode I catch up with Horace Wu, Managing Director at Syntheia. Syntheia's mission is to make life easy for lawyers and to help them do their best work.  In practice that means Syntheia has designed its software to fit existing workflows. Horace and his team talk to law firms, understand: how are they working today? What is their pain point? And then adapt their software for the law firms in such a way that their lawyers don't have to change how they work in order to take advantage of it. Horace says he is very conscious law firms and corporates already have a technology stack. They already use existing software. So his goal was not to displace and change all of that technology that's in place. But instead to fill the gaps that are left by existing technology, give them the way as access to these useful little tidbits, which they otherwise wouldn't be able to get to, or is really difficult to get to.Tune in to find out more. 

In this episode, I interview Matt Peacock from OMC Partners. Matt specializes in improving legal operations, and has designed legal strategies and implemented a range of legal delivery models, leveraging his deep experience in legal process redesign, resourcing technology, risk management, and project management.  Matt explains the "eye-opening" value doing an MBA has brought to his understanding of change management and explains his reasoning for why we should drop the "legal" in legal tech.He emphasises the importance of (a safe amount of) risk, emphasising that the best lawyers will mitigate risk in new opportunities but will not be afraid to embrace those opportunities because of the risk that accompanies them. We discuss our shared links to Leeds, and how "North shoring" brings big opportunities for innovation. Lastly, he speaks about his wish for more firms to pivot towards fixed-fee pricing for legal tech services, and the importance of letting people work in whichever manner works for them. Tune in to hear more. 

In this episode I speak to Roman Koch from Bridgestone who is helping lead a global legal tech programme for the company.His initial local idea quickly became a global project with regions including the US, Japan, Singapore, Brazil as well as his own in Europe.He is currently focused on contract review software and e-signature tools. But in the next 6-12 months, Bridgestone, like many companies, believe what is extremely important is a having single contract management system. The Covid crisis has proved that having a single source of truth of legacy contracts is really essential to the business.In Roman's view CLM is not enough though - contract review powered by AI will also be hugely beneficial.Navigating all the options on the market is tricky, so inhouse teams should map out what they have and what they need. He uses LinkedIn to find out what is out there, particularly tools being created by startups in the market. Tune in to hear more.

Casey Kuhlman is the CEO of Monax, a leader in digital legal infrastructure. A respected blockchain-native Software-as-a-Service company, Monax builds decentralized systems and growing ecosystem applications. They describe themselves as dog-lovers and do gooders, ex-marines and mindfullness-advocates, photographers and music-lovers, artists and craftsmen, gamers and cooks, athletes and tinkerers. "We are some of the brightest minds in the open-source community, mavericks in blockchain technology, certified lawyers, software engineers, legal technologists and designers."Prior to co-founding Monax, Kuhlman was the head of legal information systems at the U.S. Open Data Institute. He is also an ex Marine, having worked in West and East Africa. We bumped into one another on Twitter a month or so ago when he said:Dear #legaltech . Dear #blockchain . Can we please. For the love of all that is holy. Just stop. And completely erase the parts of our brain that contemplates #smartcontracts ... Except for those that are deep futurists.I thought this is a guy I need to speak to!In this podcast Casey makes the point that there is a long way to go in advance of assuming systems can make contracting smarter. Not least the digtisation of contracts in the first place.He also foresees a time in the relatively near future that the Balkanisation of the tech scene is storing up problems for customers as they seek to do business with others who operate alternative systems. This is a theme I'm hearing more of - not least in the forums of World Commerce & Contracting (formerly IACCM). The free flow of data is going to become the next major talking point in #legaltech.

In this episode Tom Dunlop, CEO at Summize tells us why he founded his own legal tech software company.As a practising lawyer himself, he found a lot of products were obviously very technologically advanced, but they required a lot of implementation time. But secondly, cost was quite prohibitive for smaller in house legal teams. And also it required them to change the way they were currently working. In response, Summize's ethos as a product is ease of use. He feels during the Covid 19 pandemic there's definitely been a change in attitude, because you can't work the same way you did in the new world, whatever that looks like. Despite the economic challenges, he thinks people will start spending again..And for him as the leader of a legal tech company that is an enabler to change, there's an appetite from lawyers to do that now, whereas previously, even when he was in his old roles, there was resistance.Tune in to hear more of what he had to say.

Robert Johnson is the Managing Director of Onit in Europe, which, at its core, is a leading provider of enterprise legal management solutions.Robert's mission since his start at Onit has been to facilitate workflow and collaboration in legal, freeing up time to let legal teams focus on the work they truly love, and leaving the "boring stuff" to the tech, saving time and money.As well as matter management and e-billing, Onit also provides contract lifecycle management solutions, helping clients manage everything around the lifecycle and workflow of their contracts.Robert has been a consulting in the legal practice for the last 10 years, and joined Onit after proposing their European expansion to the CEO two years ago. In this interview Robert describes the importance of maintaining a human side to the law practice, and how technology can increase legal's value, supporting the work they do. He emphasises the importance of keeping legal tech simple (an idea we wholly agree with!) and ensuring its accessibility and usability while maintaining its value as an ROI.He also discusses the positive shift in legal teams that has recently taken place - how we are beginning to see different job positions emerge within legal, to reflect the value of operational processes.Their Lean into Legal Ops Europe is Onit's virtual program to keep customer and other members of the legal community connected, a particularly useful endeavour in these uncertain times.Tune in to find out more...

Vasilis Tsolis is the CEO and Co-Founder of Cognitiv+, a leading AI solution that helps professionals review and extract information from their documents and ensure regulatory compliance.He is on a mission to take the “boring” out of “law” by helping law firms and companies understand their legal documents and review them with artificial intelligence. Thereby enabling them to focus on more fulfilling tasks.Cognitiv+ helps turn words into data, making it easy to understand the law and create actionable knowledge out of long, lifeless documents.Vasilis has a dual background in law and engineering - before joining the legal tech scene he worked in dispute resolution, contract, commercial, and procurement management across a variety of industries including energy, infrastructure and IT for more than 12 years.In 2016 he co-founded the company, which is now a recognised expert in natural language processing (NLP), vision AI, and deep learning for document analysis. Cognitiv+ built the first end-to-end document NLP  platform, and keeps pushing the limits of artificial intelligence for document review.In this interview Vasilis describes their relentless focus on the technology, rather than providing services. With developments of natural language processing and vision AI leapfrogging every six months - just to keep up and stay ahead you need to focus on one thing, making it unique, giving your customers real value.He also discusses the inevitable decentralisation of work in the future and how tools like his are helping legal teams do that, regardless of where they are based that day. Making things better, faster and more streamlined.Tune in to find out more...

This week I caught up with chief legal counsel at Clif Bar, Marjorie Goux, and her colleague Shannon Pedroni who is senior contracts manager.They discussed how legal tech has helped their business leaders focus on running the business, and doing the stuff they really enjoy.They trumpet the use of Contract Express which they've configured in innovative ways to streamline their contract cycle. They've used templates to enable business users (known as CLIFsters) to submit the most frequent queries for the legal team via an automated questionnaire, all key info is collected instantly so no emails back and forth between legal and business users are required. Marjorie makes the point that implementing legal tech fundamentally is about change management, and therefore winning hearts and minds is key. They took the time to engage key stakeholders at every step of the way, understanding their needs, and ensuring the solution was not only fit for purpose, but also better than the status quo.Tune in to find out more.

In this episode I caught up with Jos Lloyd from The AA to understand how in-house teams are harnessing legal tech to drive efficiencies. NDAs being a classic example of legal automation, a really good starting point for that journey, freeing up lawyers from doing tedious low level work, and then move up to basic T&Cs, and supplier services.Jos says there's still an historic view that some inhouse legal teams are viewed as a blocker. He also describes how the AA had to address GDPR, understand which contracts were impacted, remediate them, and renegotiate with the third party.A relatively small team meant it had became too much for the inhouse team to do that work and do the day job, but the clock was ticking.Two options emerged, go to an external law firm and put paralegals on it, or recruit those internally. Or get tech to do the heavy lifting, supported by a small inhouse team.The automation of the review of the process and identifying the contract terms meant it made a cumbersome task a lot more efficient and crisper. Time was of the essence, the clock was ticking and the GDPR deadline fast approaching. The AA teamed up with SYKE and Thomson Reuters to address the problem on its behalf. It was a great example of how tech can support an inhouse legal team, in a manner that was just as accurate, if not more so, than doing it manually.Tune in to hear more.

Stephanie Hamon is the Head of Legal Operations Consulting at Norton Rose Fulbright and a former Managing Director, Head of External Engagement, Legal for Barclays.  She has extensive experience of setting and delivering commercial and business management strategies for in-house legal departments. Stéphanie Hamon led the Barclays team that was named "Legal operations team of the year" at the 2019 UK Legal 500 Awards.She also developed new model for Barclays' law firm panel and relationship model. Stephanie brings with her more than 19 years' experience gained working across an extensive range of legal and financial institutions, in markets including the UK, Continental Europe and Asia Pacific. Stephanie has extensive expertise in business development, strategy formulation and execution and client-focused relationship management all of which provides a perfect skill set for leading this new practice, which will offer the following core services:Strategic legal consulting – advising  in-house legal teams on how they can support the  wider objectives of the business, and helping to set priorities and a practical vision for programs and initiatives that would support this.  Legal operations advisory – advising on management of legal operations functions, including best practice legal project management.Legal operations delivery – assisting in the delivery of specific projects or mandates made up of work likely to be delivered with the involvement of, or at the request of, a legal operations team.In this episode hear Stephanie's thoughts on how people, process and technology - in that order - must go hand in hand.

In 2014, Sally faced a big decision when she was invited by IACCM to join as a part-time contractor, leading business development in Western Europe. The work was varied, fascinating and addictive ... a year later she found herself working full-time as Chief Operating Officer, charged with bringing structure and discipline to the fast-growing and entrepreneurial association.The International Association for Contract & Commercial Management (IACCM) enables both public and private sector organizations and professionals to achieve world-class standards in their contracting and relationship management process and skills. With over 70,000 members across 184 countries and 24890 corporations, IACCM is leading the way in responding to the demands of global networked markets.Its membership is drawn from many industries and is made up of contract and commercial managers, negotiators, attorneys and supply chain professionals. Hundreds of organizations have also established Corporate Memberships, gaining enhanced services that support their performance and understanding of market trends.In this episode Sally shares her hopes for the future and highlights how major corporations are adopting technology and best practices in order to focus their time and effort on more strategic matters, rather than wasting time discussing terms and conditions that don't really differ from contract to contract. Increasingly she is seeing GCs adopt standardised contracts, helping streamline their contract negotiations, and technology is playing a key role. Tune in to hear what Sally has to say about the future and her hopes for the sector.

Karl is a director at Kim Technologies. Kim is a Knowledge Automation and Workflow Platform applicable to all sectors and functions. Through its no-code configuration model Kim enables knowledge workers to take control of their critical business processes to improve decision making, speed and effectiveness. Kim does this utilizing its patent pending artificial intelligence, assimilation and data management capabilities.Karl is Strategic Adviser at EY Riverview Law and has a long pedigree in starting, growing and managing successful companies. In 1987 was Money Observer's top-performing UK unit trust fund manager. In 1989 he set up CRT Group plc which grew to a market capitalisation of over £600 million. In 1996 CRT sold 50.1% of its equity for £109 million to Knowledge Universe, a private US-based company.In 1999 Karl left CRT and set up AdviserPlus Business Solutions in 2001. He remained as owner and non-executive until its sale in 2016.Karl Chapman joined Riverview Law, a legal services business, as Chief Executive in 2011 following its creation by AdviserPlus. Riverview Law was acquired by EY in August 2018 and Karl is a Strategic Adviser to the company.In this episode Karl discusses digitisation, how legal has been a relative outlier, how companies are consolidating their IT and tech stack, leading to a rise of the platforms, and no code or low code solutions. He believes there are three no regrets decisions as companies move through the change curve:intake/allocation management to focus efforts on higher value workself serveoutside counsel managementTune in to find out more.

Adam Nguyen is a co-founder of eBrevia, a leading enterprise contract analysis software company that applies machine learning to quickly and accurately extract key information from unstructured data. Prior to eBrevia he was Chief-of-Staff and Legal Officer of Vantage Properties, a 350-person real estate private equity firm. Adam practised law at Paul, Weiss and Shearman & Sterling, where he focused on private equity and hedge fund formation, as well as mergers and acquisitions. Adam holds a B.A. from Columbia and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He also studied at the University College London. He is a thought-leader on artificial intelligence, innovation, and automation in the legal sector.In this episode he discusses how AI is helping tackle some of the big issues in the sector, a sector that is going through economic upheaval not seen since the crash of 2008/09.Using AI tools like eBrevia companies increasingly are able to identify documents - be that for Libor or GDPR or force majeure - look for clauses and terms, amend those terms, and change those documents. A process that previously would have taken a lot of manpower and taken a long time.Since 2011 he's seen a steady rise in the adoption of technology in the legal sector a trend he only thinks will increase. Tune in to find out more.

In this podcast Bernadette draws down from her experiences as an assistant general counsel, law firm partner and legal tech entrepreneur. Bernadette describes the digital transformation of the legal profession and specifically the modern legal department. Giving examples of her expertise which includes the adoption of legal technologies, data and performance metrics for legal departments, and other innovative practices that are transforming the practice of law.One of the reasons she was so attracted to coming into CLM is after speaking to Icertis CEO Samir Bodas. She'd always known this having worked in contracting, but he said: "Do you realize that every dollar in and out of an organization is represented by a contract", and it was this simple phrase that was such an epiphany to her. In Bernadette's view contracting is having its day. If you'd asked her six months ago how many people knew what force majeure was, she would say a very small group of individuals globally. We all now know what force majeure is! Tune in to find out more...

In this episode I caught up with Justin Anderson who leads sales for enterprise customers and accounts in Northern Europe on behalf of DocuSign. Prior to joining DocuSign in June 2019, Justin was on the implementation side of tech, where he was general manager for Appirio, a global services company that helps customers innovate and win in the new cloud economy. Justin believes the current Covid-19 pandemic is leading some companies to prepare for the future and get ahead now.He also understands how important it is to have partners like SYKE and others that can help companies embed and configure the technology in the right way first time, so they get the most value out of it. Having run a systems integrator himself (he implemented technology for five years) Justin thinks anyone that works in this industry should actually gain experience implementing, because you realise that although it's important to have great technology such as DocuSign, the way you really drive the best outcome is through the services that implement it. It's all about change. It's all about process. It's all about enablement, making sure that people don't just have the technology, but they know how to use it. So how you manage that process, how you manage the implementation, how you get it adopted and successful, and get the return on investment, that only happens by having an experienced, qualified implementation partner. Tune in to hear what else he had to say.

Tim Pullan is founder and CEO of ThoughtRiver, the intelligent contract pre-screening leader.In 2015 Tim relocated from Singapore to UK to develop ThoughtRiver's technology in Cambridge, one of the world's leading centres for natural language processing and machine learning.Tim is a regular writer and speaker on the role of data and machine learning in transforming legal risk management. In this podcast he tells us about ThoughtRiver and how it is helping lawyers use their time more efficiently rather than constantly reinventing the wheel. In Tim's view once you have a knowledge-tree like structure in place and introduce consistency into the common parts of contract review, you can then start automating things, be that remediation, or reporting and information sharing. But the thing that enables all of that to happen is to have a consistent universal data model on which all of these other use cases and applications can rest on.AI then becomes an enabler for the delivery of expert advice to the user to help them speed through the task of creating and approving a contract. 

We had the pleasure of speaking to Chris Fowler today. Chris is General Counsel Technology at BT Group plc in London. He is accountable for the legal support to Technology which is the unit in BT responsible for the design, delivery and management of BT's fixed and mobile network infrastructure, its research and development activities and its internal IT infrastructure. Chris is responsible for the intellectual property, security & investigatory powers, network deployment & network property legal teams.In this episode we hear his thoughts on how best to implement legal tech in a large complex organisation. He argues you need to have a proper strategy and be aware of your company's IT infrastructure before embarking on bringing software in.His big hope for the legal tech industry is that it lowers the cost of accessing legal services, making it more accessible for people everywhere. 

Andy has 20 years of experience in building innovative legal technology solutions and leads a product management team at Thomson Reuters that build a number of drafting and automation related products such as Contract Express, Drafting Assistant, West km, Legal Search Connect and Case Notebook. Andy joined Thomson Reuters in 2015 with the acquisition of Contract Express, where he was co-founder and Chief Technology Officer. He is passionate about enhancing lawyer productivity through smart and easy-to-use solutions. He is a graduate in Artificial Intelligence and Psychology from the University of Edinburgh, where he also worked as a researcher and lecturer.And he is described as a 'legal tech rock star' by his peers in the industry. But which rock star is he? Tune in to find out.

In episode 2 we catch up with founder of Alacrity Law Christopher Thurn and hear his journey from investment banking to legal tech.Chris founded Alacrity, to help companies get the most out of their legal relationships including reduced costs, better service and improved transparency on important metrics like diversity."Our clients can show their internal stakeholders using Alacrity they're getting the most value from every dollar they're spending on legal. As we enter a period of belt tightening I think that's going to become increasingly important. And we think people who get ahead of the curve are going to be able to demonstrate that in a much more data driven, much more fulsome way."

This is episode 1 of Legal Tech Made Simple with me, Dom Burch, marketing director at SYKE.In this episode I interview Alistair Maiden, CEO & Founder of SYKE. He tells us how he got involved in legal tech, charting the history of his personal story of implementing contract management and automation at Asda, before setting up his consultancy.As chief architect and legal engineer, Alistair has helped large law firms and corporates choose, buy and implement legal tech.At Asda he brought together three inter-connected departments - legal, finance and procurement - to ensure they were working together and not competing with one another, or following different processes.Since its start in 2016 as a one man band, SYKE has grown to become the largest independent legal tech consultancy in the world, with 60 legal engineers operating across the globe.The recent Covid-19 crisis has brought into sharp focus the need to work remotely, and use technology to stay connected and to simplify and speed up analogue processes.SYKE is 100% remote based, with no office. Which means it is perfectly placed to assist companies in this time. Be that analysing contracts looking at force majeure or rights of termination.Alistair believes law will never be the same again.