Summize Talks: The Benefits of CLM for Enterprise Businesses

Transcript

In terms of challenges, I think it's kind of more about what was there before and what we are starting to hear now, as in when CLM first started and everybody was looking for contract management software, it was very kind of repository based. Businesses were looking at the contracts themselves and how they wanted to review them, how they wanted to store them, and it was really looking at the contracts in isolation. Now we find from speaking to businesses, the main problems they're identifying in their process is very much to do with collaboration, with commercial teams, other areas of the business and what we will call internal customers, how long those processes take. So just to give you an example, it might be something like sales gets a contract in on counterparty terms, needs it reviewed and that back and forth communication as to what actually needs to be done and what the context is, is a far bigger kind of waste of time really than what's in the individual contract itself.

Why is it now important? Well, I think if you look at other areas of a business, any corporate, look at sales, look at marketing, you wouldn't be able to imagine a sales team operating without a functioning CRM or sales enablement software nowadays. Like marketing for example, you wouldn't expect them to be working without a lead [inaudible]. Legal's really been left behind, even behind the likes of purchasing procurement in that all they've really had is Microsoft Office or the Google Suite to use for their legal matters. I think a lot of businesses are starting to see the huge kind of return on investment benefits in CLM software, and as kind of the whole global economic situation gets worse, things get tighter, budgets get more constrained, deals need to close and they need to close faster. Everybody's working to a quarterly annual forecast that needs to happen.

So there's a few things you can do there, whether it's a case of speeding up that deal cycle and what you can do throughout the contracting process to speed it up, or whether it's just a case of your commercial team being more enabled in their conversations with legal to work together as better business partners. But the solution isn't getting more lawyers because nobody has enough budget to be able to afford that amount more staff. So we are looking towards software in order to make those kind of changes with automation and build efficiencies and thus drive revenue.

Enterprises are very big. They're very big. They deal with a lot of contracts. It's all about kind of volume really. I mean, we look at enterprise businesses every day and they deal with so many contracts in so many different areas of the business, they're normally multinationals and so they'll be contracting in different ways with maybe even different legal teams in different regions. So if you let everybody work with autonomy, with their own processes, you lose efficiencies, especially when you're doing global business and maybe three regions within the company need to collaborate on the same transaction. What a CLM tool will normally do is pull all of these regions together and give a unified process, normally based around kind of an element of standardization. So you're contracting in the same way no matter which region you are in. And that's vitally important in an enterprise to be efficient.

We, well quite a few years ago, shortly after the pandemic focused very much on the virtual office because we found that customers were saying great contract for review, AI being involved to look through a document is really key, but where we're losing a lot of time is being able to talk to sales and the rest of the business adopting a tool. So we looked at kind of how the world had changed over COVID and that everybody was now living their lives in a Microsoft Teams or a Slack environment. So how could that be utilized really? And we found huge success with customers by going to the place that they already are, which even pre-COVID was one of the codes that we lived by with our Microsoft Word integration. And we found that we can really generate not only incredible return on investment efficiency-wise, but also adoption towards a new tool within commercial just by going to a place where a user already is in Microsoft Teams.

It really depends on where you are. If you are partway through your kind of digitalization journey, then it might be a case of just adding your playbooks into a tool and making them accessible. It might be a case of adding your kind of refined templates into a tool and then giving them over to commercial to generate from. Might just be process that you need. If you're completely manual, then you'll be slightly towards the other side of that bell curve and Summize will kind of help you step by step, get to an area where your goal is, whether it's full standardization, full kind of automated everything within your legal team, or whether it's just kind of organizing your templates and your signed contracts. It really depends.

CLM doesn't have to be a kind of one size fits all tool or one size fits all journey. It really depends where you start, where you're trying to get to, and where you think the efficiencies will be. I mean, Summize is used by legal teams who are 50, 100 people. It's also used by sole GCs, so they have completely different requirements and it really depends where you are looking to get to in your journey.

Before, it was very much about collaboration rather than about the contract. The contract is important of course, but understanding why and what needs to be done around that matter or that task is equally important if not more so. And that's where we specialize.

I'm going to give a politician's answer here and say it's pretty much anything that is going to be most impactful for the user really. I mean, it depends what the challenges you are kind of coming to us trying to face. Whether that's, you've got thousands of kind of template, standardized documents that are going out on a day-to-day basis or you review maybe one or two contracts a month and they're massive and you need help with the AI. Different features lend to different users, but it's whatever has the most business impact.

Okay, product, it's got to be product. We have some really, really cool developments coming and I have personally been very, very excited about some elements that we're building out within the virtual office, like some kind of more non-contract workflows and looking at different ways that legal can help the rest of the business, the kind of ask legal functionality as we are calling it at the moment, being brought to our customers as it's been really popularly requested.

Oh, it's fast-paced. You come in every morning and you never know really, besides your diary, what you're going to be doing that day. We move at the rate of knots. You can have an idea and that idea can kind of come to you at some point, and it might be 24 hours later you are in front of the head of product, HR, marketing, sales, whoever, and suddenly the idea is starting to turn into a plan, and a task, and a goal, and then a few weeks later you'll have something tangible. And it's really amazing being able to work in a business where you can have that level of impact in such a short space of time.

Okay, I would go with innovative, disruptive, and probably passionate. I'd say the reasons why I think they all kind of sum up our approach, you've got lots of people here who really, really care and are really excited to come to work every day and trying to give a kind of disruptive new approach to digital contracting.

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