CLM solutions are the hottest legal tech in town… but digitally transforming your entire contract process can seem daunting. After all, 77% of CLM projects result in failed technology implementation.
If you’re asking yourself “where do I start?”, we have the webinar for you! In this exciting session, we’ll uncover what it means to be tech-ready, for the best possible chance of success in CLM implementation or expansion.
Tom Dunlop (CEO & Founder @ Summize) and Roisin Noonan (COO @ TLB) provide practical advice on how to really leverage the benefits of technology. They’ll cover everything from where to start with process mapping, template remediation, playbook creation and rollout planning – so you can build a plan for internally resourcing your CLM requirements.
Our experts have collated the most frequently asked questions and learnings from hundreds of CLM implementations to pass that knowledge onto you, so you’re in the best possible position to implement (and benefit from) legal technology.
Tom Dunlop
All right. I think we will get going. I see a few more people come in. If anyone joins, we're only going through the intros. So welcome everyone. So the purpose of today's webinar is to discuss about getting your business tech ready. In particular, focus on success of implementing a CLM across various departments. So very pleased to be joined by Roisin from TLB as well. So we will do some intros to us shortly, but to cover off the really key purpose or what we're looking to cover in today's webinar, the first section is some kind of handy tips really about how you can prepare for a tech implementation. So some really practical tips that Roisin run through. We'll then go to some practical applications of how Summize can be used. So maybe different use cases that have been thought about and give a bit more context about the sort of use cases that Summize can be used.
We will touch on a couple of areas where TLB and Summize have actually collaborated before. So we'll touch on what we call the premium playbook, just to explain that really useful combination of the kind of legal upside plus the tech and then finally wrap up with some questions and Q and A at the end. So to start with, and just to make sure everyone understands who we are, so I'll go first then over to Roisin, but a very dodgy looking photo there with a blue filter. But I am Tom, I am the founder and CEO at Summize. I am a previous kind of GC, worked in tech businesses. I think really the let's say challenge with working with contracts and with these certainly working with a number of different teams in-house was what kind of Summize was created from that initial problem.
So Summize is a product started off very much looking at summarizing sign contracts. That was the kind of first iteration of the product. And then since then we've really widened out to cover the full contract life cycle. So in terms of specific problems, the top problem here is definitely more around sign contracts and really what we're trying to do is really extract that really useful information, whether that's commercial terms, whether that's risks or liabilities out of sign contracts, make them very visible, apply analytics so you can actually start to understand averages across all sign contracts, pull out key dates, but really allow you to apply whatever view that you want on those sign contracts within the Summize system. Second side of it, definitely second problem here is more about pre-signature. So in addition to kind of extracting useful information from sign contracts, we very much see the problem about every interaction with a contract as being something that we're keen to solve.
So that revolves around the process, whether that's the creation of the contract, the request for a review, the actual review itself. And what we're really trying to do is automate all of those slower processes around that pre-signature process to allow the legal team in particular to focus on the actual advisory element and also trying to enable that business user to be a bit more self-sufficient so they don't have to rely on legal all the time.
Another kind of side of what you'll find with Summize, and we'll reference this a lot, but I think the other problem we've noticed is there's a lot of all in one platform's being created and we'll talk through a few different use cases about Summize as a system and the different functionality. But I think the big difference is we're very focused on being integrated into those day-to-day tools, making sure that the relevant user who's interacting with the contract is getting the Summize intelligence but within the tool that they already use. So we talk about Teams and Slack and Microsoft Word and it's all about trying to meet the user where they already work. So there's a bit of intro about myself and also about Summize, where it came from. I will hand over to Roisin, there's a much better picture, allow you to do an instruction of yourself.
Roisin Noonan
Looks better than I do now. Hi, everyone, my name's Roisin Noonan, I'm the COO at TLB and also the co-founder at oneNDA and also Claustack. For those of who don't know TLB, so we are a legal optimization company and we work primarily with in-house legal teams to optimize the way in which they work through a combination of legal design, legal operations and legal transformation, tech implementation support. So we work really closely with Summize on a lot of their implementations to make those implementations as successful as possible. And on that note, obviously today we're talking about tech readiness and if you wouldn't mind just moving to the next slide, Tom. Sorry, next slide please.
Why do we need to talk about tech readiness? So presumably if you've joined this webinar you are sort of thinking about CLM when you're or you are in the process of speaking to vendors about implementing CLM. But a key thing that we see in our experience of working with lots of different teams is that it's very, very important to be tech ready. A lot of people just run into legal tech implementations and things don't necessarily go to plan and that all comes from not necessarily having the right things in place to implement that technology. So in terms of the issues that we come up against, a lot of them are listed here, but number one is that legal tech isn't necessarily plug and play.
So unlike a lot of the tools that we use at the moment, Slack, Teams, whatever, you just turn them on and you start using them, legal tech isn't really like that because legal occupies a really unique position in the business and it touches lots of different teams. And so you have to get a lot of people on board with what you are doing and think about the processes before you implement them. So you can't just turn it on and use it. Some people don't necessarily have clear implementation objectives for why they're implementing a tool. You might not have put in place a clear project team or a project plan to implement this. You might not have stakeholder buy-in to be able to actually implement the tool. You may have too many requirements so you might want to slim those down before you think about implementing. You may not have mapped your processes, or you might be digitizing processes or documents that are too complex. So tech as we know is not just a silver bullet. You need to think about these things before going ahead and implementing.
You might not have a comms plan, which is something that we're going to talk about this morning, this afternoon, sorry, and you may not have enough time. So this is a big issue I think from which we see in implementations is that legal teams are obviously really busy, you're all really, really busy, a lot of the time that people don't have enough time to properly implement these things. But essentially what all of these things have in common is that people are not necessarily going into a tech implementation being completely tech ready. So in terms of the things that you can be doing to get yourself in a position to do that, thank you. So helping yourself get ready for tech, number one is thinking about your project resources. Now I don't want this to sound like some really scary massive thing. It's not.
By project resources we just mean identifying somebody who's going to actually lead this up internally, someone who's going to be liaising with Summize or whoever the other CLM partner is and people on the ground to be able to help you implement this thing. As we talked about earlier, this thing isn't just going to be plug and play. So if it's not going to be you internally as a legal person heading up this as a project, think about what you're going to need to implement this and you might want to look externally as well for support in that implementation. The second thing is getting your templates in order. So teams create is an amazing thing and we've seen it implemented so successfully, particularly in sales organizations where people are just populating information into a form and they get a document and off they go and it doesn't even touch legal.
However, sometimes your templates are incredibly long and you'll have lots of different optionality in them. If you embed that into a tool like Summize and you have to create all of these different questions to be able to fill and populate this template, people are going to get bored filling that out. So you really want to get your templates as optimized as you possibly can before you overlay tech on top of them, because otherwise people will just effectively blame the tool for the way that the template is underlying it and your adoption isn't going to be as successful as it might otherwise be. Playbooks is another key one. So Summize an amazing review feature. So you can see your playbook side by side.
Just for those of who don't know what a playbook is actually, so a playbook is a tool for negotiating contracts. So it sets out what your standard position is in relation to each of your clauses. It sets out whether or not that position is negotiable. It sets out your fallback position if it is negotiable and also a canned response that you can just send to the other side to explain the rationale for why you've made a change so that the other side isn't thinking, "Well why have you deleted that?" Within Summize you can just have that on the right hand side as you are negotiating reviewing a contract. That massively speeds up the whole review process. So if you haven't got playbooks in place, it's something to start thinking about after you've optimized your templates to really be able to leverage the power of these legal tech tools. And finally, communications. So legal tech implementations live and die by the quality of your communications and you can start that as early as you possibly can. So even much before you've even implemented tech and start getting people on board.
And in terms of how to do that, Tom, if you wouldn't mind, yes, thank you. So in terms of how you do that, so first of all think about all of the people that you need to be communicating with about this change that you are thinking about bringing about. So that's who's going to be impacted by the tool. So it might be finance, they might not have to use it but they might be impacted by it being implemented. You need to think about who's actually going to have to use it. So that might be sales, it might be legal. And think about also who you're going to need to help you roll this thing out, so it might be a comms team. And once you've identified all these people, you want to think about what you are talking to them about and how you're going to do that. So you want to be communicating the benefits of a tool to them.
So you know being illegal, how much this is going to bring you in terms of efficiencies, but you need to communicate that and tailor that to all of these different groups as to why it's going to benefit them because then I'll think there's something in it for me that means that I need to get on board with this. And in terms of how you communicate that you want to meet these people where they are, which is similar to what Summize does. But if your sales team is very sort of Slack native and hangs out there, think about communicating it on Slack or Teams. If you've got a older team who would prefer an in-person workshop, think about communicating in that kind of forum.
And finally, keeping it simple, to keep all of your communications to the point. So keep one sort of message into each of your communications rather than confusing it with lots of different messages and keep them really, really simple and to the point so that people can follow them. So when you're thinking about legal tech implementation, comms is incredibly important. Top tips are to start early and if you can follow these steps you're much more likely to have a successful implementation.
Tom Dunlop
Perfect. Thank you very much, Roisin. I think to continue on the kind of theme of comms, I thought I just put this up as a sort of example launch plan that Summize can help run. So I think what we usually do around a launch plan is that there's a sort of comms plan that will go between these stages. And I will say that this can either be done, we can provide templates, but ultimately again another sort of way that we work with TLB is that TLB can manage this process on behalf of yourself or the company, which just means that it's very effectively project managed, very tailored kind of communications, but it's very structured in terms of how it's delivered. So this is kind of how we do it, which is ideally within about 12 weeks you can have the use case confirmed, you prioritize which use case, you try and pick a quick win.
And I think that's really important that we generally see on implementation is to really focus on getting immediate value, get the business buy-in early. And then we look at the kind of legal training, the business training, we have this kind of big deal about the launch. Comms around the launch is absolutely imperative, particularly the training videos, the support documentation is absolutely essential to the success of whether that'll be adopted. Q and A, CSATs, follow ups, again, really important you don't just roll out this tech and then just leave them with it and then just hope that it sticks. It's really kind of hands-on process, particularly in the early days. So a lot of this is all part of the implementation discussions or the support services that TLB can provide. I thought what we'd do next is give you a few sort of examples of how Summize has been rolled out, probably different use cases that maybe you haven't thought of and it kind of will hopefully get you thinking about the rollout plan, the implementation plan and how you can service the business.
So one of the case studies we've had relatively recently is one from AppLearn who is customer. And the reason we picked this one is not necessarily a traditional legal team efficiency as a benefit. So actually the objectives here were to extract key information, very operational clauses from contracts. So we're we're talking things like SLAs, security provisions, obligations to be done by a certain time, less about risk profile of a contract. And the idea of that was to actually start to improve visibility across a multitude of teams really, but to help them actually manage the customer relationship. So that was a big focus and that was achieve by getting the Summize product in there. It wasn't just a very traditional legal use case. And what we found with that, sorry, I'll keep on the slide, is the results were really good in the fact that it not only improved visibility, but it actually started to really help the client relationship.
I think there's a lot more control on the relationship from a risk perspective, but also from a very operational perspective with the client in this instance was always ahead of the game, always knew what was coming from a contract perspective, was never left to be very reactive to certain deadlines that might be met. So it was a great kind of selling point for the business really finding value from a tool rather than legal trying to push it as just an efficiency tool for them. So that was quite a unique use case. The second one that we thought we'd just discuss, and some people may be in this position where you already may have a provider, although may be something that you're already using, maybe it's not quite got the adoption that you maybe thought. So we've done this a number of times and I think the launch plan actually was born from this sort of scenario where communication about the why was absolutely imperative to this being successful.
In this instance we took someone from essentially an all in one platform that hadn't really been adopted to the team's kind of chatbot approach, which I'll show you very briefly in a second. So the use cases here, it was probably rolled out to the wholesale team. It was actually one of these where it was kind of being switched off on the Friday night and essentially rolled out on the Monday. So you can imagine the sort of change management behavior in that scenario is probably a high chance it will fail if it's not managed properly. So we had a lot of comms actually in advance of that, going back to Roisin's point earlier, there's a lot of education about why, about the importance really focusing on the use cases for sales in particular. But then there was other departments like CS and marketing and understanding the benefits to them and educating them before they even saw the tool.
So they really got the context around why this was being done and then when it came to the sort of switchover from one system to the next, they didn't need to buy into the kind of reason, they were already bought in. They were actually really excited to get going because they saw the benefits for them personally. And then it came down to just how we actually trained them on the products. And we have product videos, we have workshops, we have webinars, we have a number of different ways that we can educate the person on how to use it. But just to illustrate and provide an example of how easy it is to use, we thought just put a little video of the team's chatbot. So some of you may have already seen this, this is more about the legal front door. So this is more about how in this instance we were able to get quite a number of a few hundred sales people being able to use the system to submit requests to legal.
So in this scenario there is a team's chat bot installed here on the kind of left hand side along with the other menu items so they always know where it is. You can create contracts from here, you can request a review from here and it's as simple as essentially uploading a document, in this instance if there's a contract to review and the press review contracts, upload the contract they receive from the other side. And then what you can do is automate that triage step, which is essentially the questions that you would ask the salesperson if you have the chance. So a lot of the time they may submit it by email and just say FYI and expect a review done instantly. In this case you can get a bit more context around the particular review that they're requesting. They can all be personalized by you as well. So in this instance for the particular client, they wanted to know things like deadlines, they wanted to know if there was any changes to the standard terms from what the particular customer used and also some of the commercial information like duration and price.
So I'll skip through some of the options, but you can pick a question set and then it'll take you through a series of guidance and questions which will then eventually be sent to the legal team. So again, this can happen in Teams, it can happen by email, but if it happens in Teams you get a notification to let's say a legal channel or a legal team that's already configured. And what that'll do is detail all the information that you've received from that particular business user and it'll also allow you to download the document in Word or go and view it in Summize where we can handle all those requests in one place.
So hopefully you can see from this in terms of the ease of use, it wasn't necessarily a huge change project, it's very much kind of guided the user through every step. It asked them a question, they answered it, took them to the next one and everything was all automated in terms of the workflow. And then obviously then we do the first part of the review of the contract when it comes in. So there's one example of certainly how the products can work, but how actually the product has helped us kind of change that user behaviour in a very, very short space of time because of the sort of planning that went into that particular implementation.
Roisin Noonan
Could I add something to that, Tom? Sorry.
Tom Dunlop
Of course you can.
Roisin Noonan
Sorry. I just think that illustrates it quite well. I think that Summize lends itself quite well to being relatively easy to implement because of the way that the three features, and for those of you who don't know, the three features are split out. So you have the create functionality which we just sort saw. You then have review which allows you to review things within your playbook, which will be within Word, but you can review your playbook in Tandem, which we'll talk about just now. And then you have the managed functionality, which is effectively your contract repository where you can get all the reporting on operational elements within the contract. And because it's split up that, those different elements are also dealing with different parts of the business. So every part of the business is sort of seeing the value of a quick win quite early and therefore is quite inclined to continue to see more of this and deal with more complex documents.
So for example, with create, you can just set the sales team off with an NDA and off they go. With review, legal are happy because they can review with their playbook. With manage, you might have finance or you might have customer success or you might have sales again reporting out of their contracts and being able to manage them quite effectively. So because it's split out that, the implementation can be phased, but also you are hitting lots of different parts of the business and people are seeing the value upfront. So yeah, I just thought it was worth adding that.
Tom Dunlop
Oh hey, if you can compliment the product, it's fine. No, it's a really important point though. I think we tend to roll out use case by use case when we're doing a second implementation, because it's much easier to educate and train within those sort of confined use cases rather than everyone learn a new tool in one go no matter what your use case is. So I think it's a massively important point and definitely helps. Another way that we've collaborated as the kind of TLB Summize option is we talk about the playbook a lot, but we've kind of put forward a premium playbook offering, which is essentially, there's a couple of different ways that this can be released. One is where it's a TLB created sort of content that's maintained by TLB and then there's a managed services that goes on top of that.
Instead of actually going through the text, I like to visualize it here on the screen. But essentially it will sit within Microsoft Word, we have a Microsoft Word add in. There are a few different features within that, but you'll see there's a playbook selected and there's a clause, which is term. Now the way that TLB's structured, and I'm talking on your behalf here, Roisin, but the way that TLB structure their playbooks is a company standup, but then there could be numerous potential issues with a potential clause. And then once you identify what that issue is, there's kind of a sub-layer of information which should be in the, there we go. It's coming along now. So once you actually press potential issue, let's say it's the contract term is significantly longer, that reveals further information, which includes things like escalation provisions, includes things like the canned response, which was alluded to earlier about the comment you would give to the other side as well as things like, is it negotiable? Is it not? And who should I escalate this to?
So it's a great content resource, but I think the really unique offering about how this combination of content expertise and tech really comes together is that every action that you're seeing here, whether it's inserted as a comment, inserted as text, or just viewing a particular issue is recorded by Summize so that we can actually give analytics around the usage. What clauses is everyone in the organization always looking at? Or what particular fallback position are people reverting to? So it's a really important way of not only accessing the information on demand within Word, very high quality information, but it's also the ability to track usage so that you can refine this over time. And this is that combination of the tech providing that functionality but overlaid by TLB's expertise on content and also their managed service where they can help you refine these playbooks over time. So, Roisin, if you want to add any more to the kind of playbook side of it and that service.
Roisin Noonan
No, only just to say that the playbook itself, so the commercial playbook that's in here has been developed. So we offer managed services as well in terms of contract management. So we review a lot of contracts and we've been going for over five years. So this contract has been, sorry, this playbook has been developed by us having reviewed literally hundreds and maybe even thousands of contracts. Well, definitely thousands of contracts. And it's what we've developed to use internally for our own contract review. So it's very much vetted and I don't want to use the term market, but it is what is market typically is what your standard position is and what your format position is. So yeah, just to add that I suppose.
Tom Dunlop
Yeah, absolutely. I think the other thing to mention is that this can be either the content is already created by TLB for supplier, general Ts and Cs. What we also do is, and we find quite well regularly, is that TLB can actually create a very bespoke version of a playbook, particularly for very commercial agreements like MSAs or SaaS agreements. And then they can also be created in the products in a bespoke way in the same analytic supplies. So there's those sort of two different options. So I think the key takeaway from that really is a couple of things. One is that combination of it isn't just... We always hear it, tech is not the silver bullet, but I think really not only preparing for a tech implementation from following the steps that Roisin announced, but also looking at ways at which there's other services that could overlay on top of the tech.
So really think about the comms plan, think about who you're targeting, think about the audience, think about your playbooks, your precedent templates, are they up to speed? Are they not? Are they complicated documents that could be made simpler? And also if you don't have the resources [inaudible 00:24:23], we hear a lot, having a support where you've got a team such as TLB supporting an implementation, from our side in particular, it's been hugely successful when that happens because everything's sort of already templated, it's already been rolled out a number of times, use cases already known and it really helps you kind of prioritize which ones to go after first. Anything from your side as a summary, Roisin?
Roisin Noonan
No.
Tom Dunlop
Nice. Well, I'm conscious of time because we have three minutes left and I wanted to leave time for any questions. So that is the next bit. I don't know if Zoe is on the line to see if there's any questions that have been asked.
Zoe Peterkin
Yes, just a couple of questions. So first question is, should I look for a CLM tool that integrates with all of my Slack solutions or just a few?
Tom Dunlop
So it's a big question. I think a lot of it depends on use case from my perspective anyway. I think there's always going to be some core applications where an integration is necessary. We do hear a lot that people want things to be integrated just because they're used by the company. So can you integrate with, I don't know, the finance system? There's no real reason why, it's just because the company uses it. So I think it's more of a how will the end user actually interact with the products or legal or the contracts. So the kind of scenarios, so before about the team's chatbot, if a salesperson already interacts with legal via Teams or Slack, automating that in Teams and Slack makes absolute sense to have an integration.
What you don't want to do is introduce a whole new way of working by integrating into a tool you already have that actually would be counter or be different to what they do today. So I think if the integrations make sense to how they already work or is certainly core to how that kind of existing communication line works today, then absolutely. But I don't think it should just be a blanket integrate with any tool that we have. But obviously, Roisin, if you...
Roisin Noonan
Yeah, I agree. I think it all comes down to what your requirements gathering exercise. If you gather your requirements from the business as to what is actually needed from a tool and then you can identify and prioritize where in the priority list do certain integrations hit. If it could integrate with that, but no one really cares, then bin it I would say. Just get your highest priority requirements, if they include integrations, then that should be the type of tool you're looking for.
Tom Dunlop
Yeah.
Zoe Peterkin
Great. Another couple of questions quickly. How long does Summize take to implement on average? I appreciate that there'll be many variables.
Tom Dunlop
Yes, I think that's a fair caveat that was made and I didn't have to make that. So typically we look to certainly implement the priority use case, which is very key for us that we don't look to bite off the whole CLM in one implementation. We always try and stage that and we try to live that within 12 weeks of signing. So we try and make sure that we've got a plan. To understand what that is, really prioritize that initial use case. That might be two or three depending on how it's rolled out, who the target might... Like, for example could be creating review to sales and teams, you could probably do that together as one. So there's obviously a lot of caveats and a lot of dependencies, but typically 12 weeks to get value and get the initial use cases up and running and going is what we see.
Zoe Peterkin
Great. Final question is two are kind of very similar. What's the best way to see the end-to-end platform slash how do I set up a demo with Summize?
Tom Dunlop
Well, good question. I imagine you can book a demo on the website. If you are probably already in contact with one of our salespeople, obviously reach out to them. But I think the easiest way is there's a very big "book a demo" button on the website summize.com that you can book through.
Zoe Peterkin
And that's it.
Tom Dunlop
Great. So we will wrap up there. I think just one quick reminder just before we close off the webinar, which is that we do have a more in-depth CLM masterclass. Roisin will be also there as well, but a kind of full day in London, which is designed to be a number of different workshops, a lot more in-depth conversations and discussions that we are hosting on the 22nd of March. So there's a QR code there as well. Again, it's on the website and our contact details are also here on the slide if you should need them. But thank you very much for your time. It has been a pleasure and I hope you found some useful takeaways from today.
