A selection of legal tools that are providing free/generous offers to in-house legal teams during the Coronavirus crisis.
The Future of Contracting with Juro's Richard Mabey
Step into the future with this wide-ranging conversation with Juro CEO, Richard Mabey about his company's take on the future of contracting as detailed in their recent White Paper – Machine-readable contracts: A new paradigm for legal documentation.
Doing law different with L'Oreal's Anna Lozynski
L’Oreal’s Executive General Counsel, Anna Lozynski is not only one of the rare examples of GCs who’ve synthesised their learnings (and passion) into a book, but she has done so in a way that has won her an admirable readership both within and outside of the legal profession.
I caught up with Anna near her Melbourne HQ and couldn’t resist some follow-up questions and the opportunity to share some of her journey with you.
A slam dunk argument for cloud
Here’s a podcast worth listening to if you’d like to learn more about the benefits of cloud technology.
Alvin Tedjamulia cofounded NetDocuments in 1998 as the first cloud-based platform for document and email management. In 1998, the ‘cloud’ wasn’t even a thing. But he knew then (and bet big) that software needed to be delivered via the internet.
Security is at the core of NetDocuments, which has been described as a security company that happens to do document management. And it has grown to be one of the leading DMS systems in legal.
But what struck me most was Alvin’s slam-dunk argument for adopting the cloud…
The Agile GC: Sarah Gaidzkar at PageUp
I first met Sarah Gaidzkar when she was Acting General Counsel at Envato, and she described working hand-in-glove with their tech team using ‘project circles’ and lean, agile methodologies for their legals.
Now as General Counsel at PageUp, I caught up with Sarah to get another taste of what running an agile in-house legal team looks like at her new home, and the tech tools they use day-to-day.
Talking Legal Ops Software With Jodie Baker, CEO of Xakia
In what started as a research project in 2015, Jodie Baker was asking in-house legal teams one question: what irks you the most in your job?
And the answer was pretty consistent: "I have to do manual reporting, but I don't really know what my team is working on. That when somebody leaves, I don't know how I capture all of that IP."
Fast forward to 2017, Jodie and her team at Xakia now client over 30 in-house legal teams as clients, across Australia, Singapore and the US including some big names like Virgin Australia, Boral and Transurban.
We sat down to talk about her journey so far...
Chart of The Week: Global LegalTech Aggregate Funding (Q3'17)
LegalTech startups have now raised $1.079 billion in global aggregate funding since 2011.
Here's a chart that combines the latest CB Insights data from 2013 to date, plus their figures from 2011 and 2012.
#hackingcharts
Using JIRA to Manage Your In-house Legal Matters
A couple of weeks ago, I found out that Megaport's legal team were using a project management tool, called JIRA, to manage their workload.
This is a tool that's super popular with software developers and associated with agile methodology. So when I heard about a legal team using this software, it immediately piqued my interest so I thought I'd get them share their experience using the software with you.
Here's how it went down:
GC Launches Bootstrap Legal
Amy Wan is the former General Counsel of a real estate crowdfunding platform, Patch of Land, and a real estate securities attorney.
Her clients faced two common problems: #1 they needed their legal documents quickly and #2 the legal fees couldn’t be justified for smaller deals.
Her solution: use automation to help draft legal documents for small real estate projects up to $2 million.
Clients can now complete a form and receive a private placement memorandum (PPM) and other legal documents within 48 hours, signed off (for now I suspect) by Amy.
In her words:
“I didn’t understand why no one was automating the creation of PPMs… I felt like we could do it cheaper, faster and better.”
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Analytics for Your Legal Bills
Anyone who has pored over legal bills striking out time entries might appreciate this piece of kit.
After 2 years beta testing with banks and insurance companies, IBM Watson has released it’s Outside Counsel Insights engine into the wild (although I’m yet to actually find this elusive creature on the web).
So according to the PR folks, here’s what it does:
it reads “every single word of text in every single line item of every single legal bill” to “see very quickly where a firm had deviated from the spirit and letter of the [company’s billing] guidelines… no more hiding inefficiency in a dense mass of billing data.”
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