Summary

We chat about the Digital Transformation challenges faced by Corporate Legal Departments, in-house legal counsels, and law firms.

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Our guests are Jim Tate, Co-founder and CEO, MyLegal, and Andy Baldocchi, Co-founder and CRO of MyLegal, a Low-Code/No-Code platform for corporate legal departments.

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MyLegal partnered with AgilePoint to build its platform. Jim talks about why the team chose AgilePoint instead of other Low-Code/No-Code and BPM platforms.

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Both Jim and Andy share about the strategic shift in the corporate legal departments, the challenges In-house Legal Counsels and LegalOps personnel face, and why MyLegal fits their bill and needs from a solution standpoint.

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You’ll find answers to critical questions, including:

• What’s the strategic shift taking place in the Corporate Legal Departments?
• What approach does MyLegal recommend to its customers for legal automation?
• How should Corporate Legal Offices envision their tech roadmap?
• Why don’t generic workflow automation tools scale well for enterprise use cases? Crazy problems they create for legal execs/users
• Why MyLegal chose AgilePoint as its underlying BPM platform to build MyLegal?
• AI/ML Application in Legal Ops Automation
• What’s MyLegal doing at the CLOC 2023 Conference?

Key Takeaways
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00:00—18:45 MyLegal’s backstory, Jim & Andy’s background, and the strategic shift in corporate legal departments

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• The backstory of Jim and Andy co-founding MyLegal
• MyLegal and AgilePoint partnership; why MyLegal chose AgilePoint as its underlying platform?
• Corporate Legal Departments have historically been beholden to IT; now they’re switching to LC/NC platforms, and the strategic shift is taking place.
• The concept of a Legal front door

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18:47—37:51 Workflow automation vs. Enterprise Low Code/No Code, Scalability issues, what does it all mean for corporate legal operations?

• Differences between Workflow automation vs. Enterprise Low Code/No Code
• What are the scalability issues in generic workflow automation tools?
• Envisioning legal ops tech stack in an integrated manner instead of a piecemeal approach
• MyLegal’s approach to corporate legal ops automation

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37:52—56:49 CLOC’s State of the Industry Report, the Maturity level of tech adoption in legal departments, and AI/ML applications in legal ops

• Five priority areas of the legal department’s digital transformation by CLOC Consortium
• The level of tech adoption in corporate legal departments depends on the maturity level
• AI/ML applications and how MyLegal enables those within the platform
• MyLegal showcases at the CLOC 2023 Conference.

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Transcript

Sharjeel (00:00):

Welcome to our latest podcast, demystifying Enterprise Innovation. Today we have the topic, “Corporate Legal Ops, Automation Vision for the Enterprise” and two very special guests with me.

I'm very excited to welcome our guests for today's podcast, Jim Tate and Andy Baldocchi from Legal Automation Group. Andy is the co-founder and managing partner at Legal Automation Group. Jim Tate is a co-founder and LCEO of My Legal.

MyLegal is a startup in the legal automation space. Let's start by asking our guests about this startup and where did it come from and what's the story behind My Legal?

So, Andy, maybe you could begin and tell me about My Legal and how it came to be?

Andy (00:57):

Absolutely. Thank you for having me, Sharjeel. Our story starts about four and a half years ago. Jim and I were hired by a European company to build an enterprise sales team for their company. They wanted us to go out and sell an ELM software solution or an enterprise legal management software solution, as we call it, to law firms and corporate legal departments. It wasn't soon thereafter that the company decided to exit the US market, and Jim and I were kind of left hanging.

At that point, we decided that maybe we can leverage the existing opportunity funnel and start our own company. We sell this software that we've been going after and pushing out to the marketplace for about a year.

Andy (01:58):

So, we did do that. And unfortunately, about that time, which was kind of in the early 2019, the pandemic hit. That really served as an opportunity for us to pivot and to reinvent ourselves. So, at this point in time, we had three or four customers and had hundreds of conversations with legal ops leaders throughout the industry.

One thing that kept coming up during those conversations is that they had the same problems. They were expressing a need for things like process automation, improved collaboration, or a more integrated technology stack. So, that really became the jumping off point for the idea that became My Legal. Interestingly, during these conversations, there was a common set of problems that they were consistently sharing with us.

Andy (03:00):

Things like their legal staff was being overwhelmed increasingly by manual tasks. They were still using email and spreadsheets to do most of their work in the instances where they were deploying technology to automate certain activities like an ELM solution.

Those activities were part of a larger global workflow stream. This caused really kind of a proliferation of manual work activities surrounding those technology implementations. So, workflow just wasn't possible and that was a pain point for them. And then of course, they consistently complained about a lack of timely support from IT.

Then finally, I think, one of the other big challenges that they faced is that data just wasn't available to develop actionable KPIs with which to manage the business. So, with each conversation that we have with these Legal Ops leaders, clarity was brought forth and we realized the solution was needed that could address all these problem areas that I talked about.

I think it was at that point in time, our resident expert in automation, Jim, stepped in and brought forth his long-standing relationship with AgilePoint to fully develop the idea that is now My Legal. I think Jim could probably elaborate a little bit more on the relationship that he had with AgilePoint and how this evolved into the My Legal product.

MyLegal & AgilePoint Partnership

Sharjeel (04:39):

Yeah. So, that’s a good overview, Andy. So, Jim, can you please share the background about My Legal and AgilePoint partnership?

Jim (04:50):

Yeah. So, Andy mentioned, I have a long-standing relationship with AgilePoint. I actually worked for AgilePoint for a period of time. I've been in partnership in a number of capacities over the years and, this date back to 2006.

During that time I’ve actually had the opportunity to research all of the other competing solutions there. And, in some cases in these partner scenarios, we actually offer more than one automation platform. Appian being one, IBM being another one, Nintex and K2 being a couple of others that I'm deeply familiar with. And, there were a couple of things that emerged clearly when Andy and I figured out that My Legal needed to be developed.

Jim (05:50):

The go-to was to AgilePoint and knowing its capabilities and the familiarity, but mostly, just the depth of the product that they have. Maybe undermarketed in some ways, but they've done extremely well over the years by building all the necessary features to be extremely flexible and competitive with the most cost-effective products that are out in the market.

So, we chose that direction. Then the other thing about AgilePoint is their willingness to participate in this endeavor for the legal community. It has to be structured in a way that the legal industry in legal operations groups within a corporation can make it affordable and flexible in sort of this growth path that they need to go through versus an enterprise-wide platform that we need to apply here.

Being able to structure the arrangement in the way that we go to market in a collaborative fashion was important to us and, we knew we could get that when we went there.

Out-of-the-Box Legal Tech Software vs. MyLegal

Sharjeel (07:05):

Yeah. That’s a good overview. Before, I kind of jump off to the strategic changes taking place in the corporate legal departments, Jim, can you as a layman, tell me that don't people prefer out of the box solutions these days? Like, since the rapid adoption of cloud, they want something out of the box? But, the route that other sort of BPM solutions take, isn’t it to customize the solution according to their needs? So, why don't they look for an out of the box solution?

Jim (07:50):

Going back to what Andy mentioned before is that there is this niche in the corporate legal department market and law firms fall into the category to an extent too. We do serve that market and primarily the focus is on corporate legal. What Andy mentioned before is kind of the tipping point. The idea here is that they've been traditionally underserved by IT. They have been trying to get large solutions that get certain aspects of departmental function deployed and it's been cumbersome, long, lengthy and costly to put in an enterprise legal management system.

That’s what they basically manage their matters in and spends management aspect of contract lifecycle management project or something like in the IP realm.

Jim (08:45):

Well, they've stood up a bunch of silos when in fact they could actually get some resources from IT allocated to them. But these things have been long and coming in large projects, and they really hadn't gotten to the core of trying to really help themselves from an operational perspective.

And, then the second thing, how do we tie all of those different products together? So, if we could stitch them together in a way that's more end-to-end, there's data coming from one that we are connecting through an integration to another, helping support the process.

What you're able to do is tie everything together and get a much better unified tech stack. So, getting to your point though, they really can't do that without a very flexible platform with numerous integration capabilities. Again, one of the reasons why AgilePoint fits the bill, is because of an extremely open service layer architecture in integrations helps to tie all together in a way that people get a more unified product.

Strategic shift in corporate legal departments

Sharjeel (10:07):

I get your point. I see the value there. So, can we take a step back, and Andy, if you could tell me what's the strategic shift that's taking place in the corporate legal departments?

Andy (10:27):

Yeah, there's definitely a shift going on. In the past, like Jim said, corporate legal departments have really been holding to IT. They're really kind of the last part of the enterprise to be serviced by IT. And, it is a well-known fact within legal that if you're trying to get a process automated through IT, it takes at least 12 to 18 months to make that happen.

And then to compound the problem, once you're actually delivered an application to solve your issue and any problems arise, you just get right back into the priority queue of IT. So, it’s pretty easy to see that when these companies embark on automation projects, ROI and time-to-value measures are extremely poor.

Andy (11:27):

But, we're able to overcome that by utilizing the AgilePoint platform. There's a shift going on as corporate legal departments are looking to take ownership and control of their business outcomes. AgilePoint citizen development capabilities allow our clients to compose and build much needed workflows and, they don't have to rely on IT to make that happen. And, the speed at which they can accomplish this really allows them to quickly scale their automation efforts, which ultimately improves their efficiency and productivity.

And so, it's unquestionable that the AgilePoint layer really enables the set of capabilities that play a direct role in MyLegal's best in class ROI and time to value measures. This is important for corporate legal departments, especially as they try to get funding on these projects, which they're trying to leverage to ultimately improve their legal operations.

Sharjeel (12:43):

Yeah. That’s great. So, if I don't know My Legal and, I'm from the CLO, Corporate Legal Office, what's MyLegal's approach to solving my problems?

Andy (13:01):

What's interesting is that automation means something different to every person you talk to. And, when we first go in and approach these people within legal operations, they might have a certain understanding.

Often automation isn't tangible enough. So, what we like to do is break it down. We focus on critical use cases that they're looking to automate and walk them through to help quickly implement an application that might solve that particular issue. When they see that, it engages them and starts to immerse their organization in the idea of automation.

Once involved as part of that process, you start to build champions throughout the organization. That kind of approach is what gets buy-in and starts to create this momentum within the legal department to scale their automation efforts so that we think we've been effective doing it. Jim, you got any comments you might want to add there?

Jim (14:19):

Yes, I think that you summed up pretty well. I think there is a transformation going on here and they want to be more autonomous. They want to be able to drive more innovation, and they want to be able to show up in the boardroom with some meaningful analytics data to state what their value is. It's about the corporate legal department becoming a valued resource instead of a cost center.

Legal Front Door for Automation Projects

Sharjeel (15:04):

That's good. Autonomy is a pretty pervasive term I see across functions and industries. One catch line of My Legal that really caught my attention, and that's addressed to both of you, was legal front door. That really summarized it for me. There's a front door and my legal serves as a front door. You may enter through that front door and you'll have a host for all sort of services and manual items to pick from. So, am I understanding it correctly?

Jim (15:44):

Yeah, that's the idea. Going back to what Andy was saying before, is that they have all these disparate systems they’ve been standing over the last several years. But, how do you seamlessly get to those and how do you have those interact with one another?

To my point before, if you can provide a whole lot of self-service kind of capabilities in a centralized point. That's the idea behind My Legal and it's supported by AgilePoint. But the concept is not really an AgilePoint concept. It's more of a portal kind of approach where I've got a central place to go, and then from there, I can branch off into any kind of thing that I might want to do. If its intellectual property related, or if its immigration related, or some other aspect of litigation. I can branch from this legal as soon as I enter the door.

Sharjeel (16:50):

But, Jim, could you explain like how much of a self-service it is? Do they leave the corporate legal offices on their own and sort of figure it out? It's all self-service, or you meet them halfway and help them out?

Jim (17:07):

No, I don't mean it from the development side or the kind of the introduction of this. This is a standard place where if you can give a single URL and within that URL, they have the ability to make requests of the legal department. They can see any kind of activities that they need to perform in order to be able to move the work process along from one stage to another.

And then a historical view of everything that they've created within My Legal environment, what we call instances. In these cases, having those three capabilities ready to hand in one place enables them to do things. And, back to your point about self-service, in those cases, can we not involve the legal department at all with the activities?

Jim (17:58):

Can this be an automated end-to-end process that AgilePoint takes care of all the way through? So the idea is basically setting it up so that somebody goes to the legal front door, they select an app, and maybe it's a non-disclosure agreement. It might be pre-signed already. So, all they got to do is fill in the counterparty information and submit. Then it goes through e-signature to that counterparty.

Documents are all generated as part of the work process. Nobody has seen anything, there's no review, there's no action steps. In that case, it's purely self-service. We've just completed one for a Salesforce scenario where you're working right within salesforce.com doing some activities.

And, within those activities it's actually creating documents. Employment agreements or master services agreements might be generated as a result of the activities that you're doing right within salesforce.com. So, that's a little bit different from the topic of legal front door. But the point is that we're giving a very agile way for people to interact with automation. Complete end-to-end kind of process with as little involvement as much as possible for the legal department.

Workflow Automation Tools vs. Enterprise Low-Code/No-Code

Sharjeel (19:23):

Yeah. I get your point. That's great. So, this makes me clear. I want to deep dive into another topic that I've been hearing a lot, not only from you, but others as well, including people from AgilePoint, PMI and others. So, how do you differentiate workflow versus the enterprise Low-code, no-code?

Sharjeel (19:54):

I was saying that I understand that low-code, no-code is a thing in fashion. And, we have a whole lot of endless form covering that niche. And, we have a lot of startups coming in low-code and no-code. We know that they’re essentially taking part of the workflow and automating that without having people to quote something on that. So, how do you differentiate workflow versus enterprise low-code?

Jim (20:22):

Yeah, so going back to a little bit to the history again. I mentioned what my background was in looking at all these different platforms. Then we've emerged into the legal space and we're becoming a pretty significant player. I mean, most people are recognizing My Legal as a platform they should be considering.

Mostly we're competing against workflow technologies. There’s about four, five, or six workflow platforms. I actually worked for one of those companies that offers a workflow tool. But, there's a very large distinction between a workflow tool and what's called an enterprise grade low-code, no-code. What that means is difficult to describe for somebody in a very short period of time. So, they are basically faced with looking at screen captures and somebody building a very rudimentary sequential workflow and how pretty are the forms that they've developed.

Jim (21:27):

And, does it have a nice little interface for people to add details and work their work process? That's sort of been the selection criteria until we've emerged and we actually have kind of turned it on end where we're forcing our potential customers to do a much more rigorous assessment of the platform architecture not only from a citizen developer standpoint.

Since, if you think about citizen developer, it can be very simple things done by all different types of tools, right? But it's how long is the runway needed before you need to involve an IT or develop a resource. So, if you structure something in power abstinent, you can cobble something together very quickly, right? But, then all of a sudden you hit a brick wall.

Jim (22:22):

Because it's a multi loop parallel process with some other type of automated system engagement at this point in time. And it's like, I can't do that and now I need to call IT. Now we're back on the phone with them and they're saying, I can get to that in six or seven months from now. So, how does your automation initiative go forward? So, that's what we combat constantly.

Our approach is to understand this legal front door concept that we just talked about a minute ago. Then we get into this citizen developer capability, which is extremely good inside of AgilePoint. It gives you a far longer runway before you need to involve IT. Most of our applications that we're deploying are built as part of My Legal and that grows every day.

Jim (23:13):

I don't think there's one of them that has any kind of code built to it. Maybe some JavaScript display here and there, but, we're able to do everything by drag, drop and configure. That's what I'm saying about this length of the runway before we need to get IT or a developer involved. We're challenging customers to go deeper and to think about application governance.

You have to think about how that could potentially put your company at risk if somebody stands up some workflow tool somewhere, it may actually expose the company to some personal information being sent out that shouldn't be. So now all of a sudden, your SOC compliance certification's no longer good. You have all sorts of different scenarios that come along and how you govern all of the apps that are being built in a meaningful and structured manner.

Jim (24:13):

It's not centralized. These are all stood up in as various tiny silos when you do these workflows. And, the next area we challenge them to look is, we ask them to look at the runtime management capabilities because workflow tools and their architecture isn't built the same way that AgilePoint is.

AgilePoint has a very sophisticated runtime management set of capabilities for doing things that people don't even think about doing when they're building and managing an application.

So, we see this trend where people will kind of dabble in automation trying to do this with this. Then we can bring them back to say, hey, listen, now you need to understand if I start an instance, I need in some cases, to roll those instances back to rework that particular process. Well, that's not possible in most of the tools that are out there, at least the ones that we compete with. We don't typically see the competitors that I used to when we were focusing more on general automation. Typically, legal departments are served by about half dozen workflow tools.

Andy (25:27):

What's interesting about this Sharjeel is that within our space there's been this need for automation. They've moved, at least initially, towards these workflow tools thinking they could solve these problems. But in reality, what ends up happening is that as they scale their automation initiative using these workflow tools, they run into all the problems that Jim's talking about. There isn't this governance layer and this runtime management layer.

And so ultimately, the problem they were trying to solve where that particular use case needs to be automated, kind of shifts their work effort from actually automating something to now having to manage it. Because, they start running into user error, start needing changes because of certain laws to their work processes. All of that creates problems that a workflow tool doesn't have the backend capability that’s necessary to address those issues.

Sharjeel (26:44):

Yeah, that's a very good point you brought up. The concept that Jim gave, they give a much longer runway before they need IT. That's a pretty simple concept to understand. But, what does it mean for the corporate legal departments? You say runtime management and mentioned other aspects of an enterprise agency. So, what does it mean and how does a corporate legal officer see runtime management? Why is it their problem?

Jim (27:38):

Yeah. Let me give you a use case. We have a client of ours that mentioned using a competitive solution. A workflow tool that's prevalent in the market, probably might even have the most market share available right now. They stood up seven applications using this tool. It took them a while to get it done.

But there was an immediate complaint as they got that far along. One is that it became too complex for anybody other than one person to build these kinds of things. But the bigger challenge was that they were having all sorts of challenges when it came to people making mistakes in the work process.

Jim (28:26):

And, there just wasn't the agility to correct the mistakes. When you say, how does runtime management apply to this, it's mainly the accessibility to address these things on an ongoing basis. So, you have this notion of a person entering in something. And, they wanted it to go a different direction potentially. A new piece of compliance is entered into the equation, and we need to take advantage of that new regulation. Therefore, we need to roll back these instances to be able to branch them in a different direction, without getting too technical. These tools just don't have that kind of capability. And, back to the other point you mentioned, it's this governance layer is what IT likes.

Jim (29:21):

They the ones that basically think that it's better to understand that there's a central place for all this that exists. I'm getting up there now in age and I've been around for a few decades in this whole automation world from the Lotus Notes days. And, what's happening out there right now is without these governance and runtime management capabilities that somebody can from the backend sort of help things along as need be, we're now repeating all the ills that Lotus Notes created. Literally billions of dollars have been spent trying to correct the problems Lotus Notes created.

Although it sounded like a great tool and was one of the main tools that we did use. But then it becomes, what are we building here? And, we're building all of these siloed non-integrated solutions. When we want to try to tie all this together or bring it into something that's manageable, it becomes unyielding. And, millions and millions of dollars are being spent by each company trying to get out from underneath that.

Andy (30:46):

Without the capabilities that AgilePoint brings to bear it becomes, what we've heard from our customers that have gone through this, inefficiency and a lack of productivity as a result of their automation efforts. Whereas, it should be the inverse of that and there should be efficiency gain and productivity improvements because of their automation efforts.

Jim (31:15):

And, that's what we are seeing with most of those workload tools. It's not taking care of the bigger problems that these little things can create.

Legal Tech Roadmap by CLOC Institute

Sharjeel (31:31):

Yeah. That makes much more sense. So, Andy, I was just going through a roadmap given by a CLOC Institute. Say that, here's a roadmap that maybe you want to have a look at. And, that Roadmap by CLOC Institute, showed a bundle of technologies from e-billing matter management to contract management, e-discovery case management.

There's a whole stack of technologies that a corporate legal department can adopt over a period of time and that's what they call a technology roadmap. But, how do you see that? Especially given there's MyLegal now and you bring in the enterprise lens over there. So, how should corporate legal offices envision their tech roadmap?

Andy (32:35):

Well, it's interesting. I think the document you're referring to kind of lists out all these kind of areas within corporate legal departments. Things like you said, e-billing, contract management, IP management, knowledge management, board management. I mean, there's tons of these things that they look at.

One of the problems that have occurred in this space is that their approach to addressing their technology needs is that each of these areas within the legal department is asking for own software. So, they're looking to get a piece of software that they think can resolve their issue. So, what you end up having is a tech stack that’s comprised of disparate pieces of software.

Andy (33:35):

None of them are talking to each other. All of them have different user experiences. And then if something isn't already implemented in the tech stack, they're looking to add to that complexity, right? So, a number of things occur when you do that, your drive-up costs.

Think about all the different implementations we're talking about here. If each area within the corporate legal department had its own software, you're talking about tons of implementations and resource sync. What's the impact to the legal department’s productivity and efficiency?

They're kind of causing these problems. And what we like to tell them is look, we think you can take a better approach. And some of the things that we do as kind of our consultative sales approach, is that we either come in or we bring in one of our consulting partners to conduct something like a high point study.

Andy (34:34):

Where we actually assess their tech stack. We look at all the software that they have currently used within the department. We say, can this piece of software be displaced with an automation solution?

So, as an example, Jim gave you, what we've talked about a lot is the contract legal management software. That's typically one of the highest priorities for legal departments. But once they kind of undertake that project, they quickly realize that this is a 24-to-36-month implementation. That’s draining my resources and not a lot's being accomplished while this is occurring. It's costing the company a lot of money, then ultimately, it's delivered. Then they quickly realized, wow, we're only really using 20% of that software's capability. Do we really need this comprehensive, expensive solution?

Andy (35:36):

Whereas you could look at something like My Legal, which is an automation platform that has a sophisticated CLM component layered into it. They could utilize our tool to maybe displace that and do it quickly. Honestly, you can get this up and running within 60 to 90 days and that's going to effectively address those CLM needs that you might have. So, those are critical things that every corporate legal department needs to do when considering how they want to evolve their technology roadmap.

Sharjeel (36:25):

Yeah, that's awesome. Cause what I picked from that is instead of having dozens of implementations, why don't have a neater approach to the implementation. Have fewer baseline technologies and then build different solutions on top of that.

Andy (36:45):

Yeah. What they're trying to accomplish is they're trying to automate certain sets of activities, right? IP has these IP related activities; they want to automate them. So, the natural inclinations say that I need to get that IP software to do that, or the contract manager say, I need the contract management piece of software to do that.

Whereas, we're saying, you can take a holistic view of automation because all of these are activities, our platform can address. We can automate those activities, unless it gets specialized. For the most part, we can address those issues. So, we're bringing forth a platform that really gets across a lot of their needs that they have within and across the department. And, that really impacts what their software roadmap's going to look like.

Jim (37:47):

We can wrap them and make it a complimentary kind of thing. This is the other thing that we see a lot of times is that it may make sense to have an IP management system and a CLM. But, it's very difficult to customize those if in fact you have a special work process that exists and you want to automate more thoroughly in a sort of ancillary fashion. It doesn't necessarily need to happen within the actual application tool itself. It can be sent out externally and all the work processes can happen over here and then brought back in to kind of complete the overall step that might be managed within that other application. So, we call that a system wrapper and it's a very common request for our clients.

CLOC Core 12 Technologies for Legal Ops

Sharjeel (38:40):

Yep. That's great system wrapper. That sounds cool, And, this takes me to my next item as I know you are going to the clock event as well. I understand that you get to see a lot of integrated and hyper integrated concepts given by publisher’s analysts. One of which was CLOC Core 12. It tells you 12 functional areas in Legal Ops. And, when I was looking at it, it was a pretty comprehensive. 12 core functions within the Legal Ops, bi financial management, firm and vendor management, service delivery models, and practice operations. Where does My Legal help the most?

Jim (39:41):

Yeah. So first of all, that framework is extremely valuable for the audience that it targets. These are corporate, legal operations people. They're not necessarily the attorneys per se, although they can be, but, in some cases they're not.

So, what they're trying to do is that they're trying to build the context of what should we focus on? And if we can break it down to something like that then we can start to better organize and put together a roadmap for each one of those elements that make up the Core 12.

So, how that applies to us is that we're the shortest path for automating wherever applicable within that 12. So, if you can think about Andy's point around the high point study, right? If you compliment the high point study with the CLOC 12, you quickly get through a process of saying, where are our pain points?

Jim (40:39):

And what's a low hanging fruit? What can we implement very quickly? What will have the biggest impact on the organization? How can that drive automation, the traction for automation and the appetite for automation?

So, trying to answer your question again, for most of those elements, there could be an automation initiative associated with that, derived from somebody defining what they wanted to try to accomplish in the near term within those 12.

There’s no one tool from a market perspective capable of solving that. I mean, you do still have all these silos, but if you look at it more from a pain point study and how this is addressing where the critical need is? You're going to get a lot further along, much more quickly. In fact, you have the My Legal platform.

Sharjeel (41:43):

Yeah, that's great. So, another item I was going through the state of the industry report by Clark and I was surprised to sort of read and go through that. They list five priorities identified by Legal Ops executives and the first one was of implementing diversity and inclusion program. And we have others like, automate legal processes, implement new technology. But, what do you see the most? Do you second this, sort of finding that it's the top of their mind implementing the diversity inclusion program?

Jim (42:22):

I don't remember all of the main things, but I will tell you that diversity is one of the main things that's forthcoming. We're actually building applications that deal with diversity and performance scoring so that we can better analyze the firms out there that are supporting the department. Then based on that, they're culling down the number of firms that they're working with based on their diversity score. I do see that as the main focus. I think there is a shift.

A lot of people have been going through this contract lifecycle management and enterprise legal management. The idea is that the shift is more or less now towards the value that the legal department is actually providing for the organization, in innovation and in just how well it can be automated. How they can be perceived across the organization. Those are the bigger things that we're hearing now.

CLOC Global Institute 2023

Sharjeel (43:48):

Okay. That's great. So, this brings me to another piece of information. I know you guys are sort of attending the CLOC event.

So, I'll hone into CLOC’s findings because I found them a bit relevant. But there was somewhat an anomaly. Maybe you can educate me on that and let me build the context here. The clock survey bill lays out five strategic priorities that corporate legal executives are saying that they're going to focus on. We discussed them a minute ago, automating legal processes, implementing a diversity inclusion program. So, they have their strategic priorities, but then within the survey, they also tell what technologies we are currently using.

Sharjeel (44:41):

And mostly they're using predominant majorities using e-sign and matter management software. What I read, and there was another Deloitte survey where 70% of the survey respondents said that, establishing better processes would help solve current technology short challenges. So, I see a mismatch between the priorities. The technologies they are using are maybe more restrictive in nature. Just the e-sign thing. So, do I read it correctly, or do you also see that there's a mismatch? How do you see it?

Jim (45:22):

I don't know that I would call it a mismatch. It's just the maturity scale. The legal departments have historically been in the infancy and not really a very mature kind of approach with all different practices. And so, as they're heading up the maturity curve. They're tackling these various things. DocuSign or E-sign became very prevalent because they had to get over the notion of these are documents that are no longer physical and wet signed. They've been used to for years and cultural issues come up all the time. It's just how much can we take care of in a way that's new and inventive.

Jim (46:20):

You got to get people over the hump. And, so I'm trying to get to your point. But, the point is, that I think, as I mentioned, the ELM matter management thing has been done pretty much now. I mean that's most everybody has, no matter what size organization, has kind of conquered that, so to speak. They're more comfortable with how they're managing and keeping all of this in a single source of truth. And so that story's kind of played out. Now they are at the next level of maturity. So, idea now is to take the second thing that you mentioned.

That is, as I said, automation is now becoming more of the focus about how can we tie it together? We can then make ourselves even more mature through these different standard practices being automated and refined all the way through that process.

Sharjeel (47:29):

Yeah. That's great. So, one thing that's playing out in a big bang manner is AI and ML. Especially with the advent of ChatGPT, and other language models. So, do you see AI and ML are going to really upend the traditional players in the legal tech market? Or how do you see the AI and ML playing out?

Andy (47:54):

Yeah, it's one of those things where it's gained so much traction so quickly. I think there's something here. Exactly how it played out and where we'll see it emerge? I'm not exactly certain. I can tell you that we already do have requests and we're building in through this legal front door coming all the way full circle.

As people just want to say, type in something and it will magically start some process, right? And, literally we can do that with the platform. But we have to have this natural language component that says it understands what the intake is. There's clearly a lot that's happening in the document management where AI is starting to become prevalent and has been for the last couple of years. And now ChatGPT, that's going to be another thing we'll just see how it emerges.

Obviously, we're watching this closely and wherever our clients are starting to understand where it might be applied, we can support that. We are also operating other Microsoft technologies. In the Azure environments that basically will help us support that so we're sort of aligned in that whole thing as it matures and we see more use cases for it.

Sharjeel (49:24):

That's right. So, I know that my legal is showcasing at the CLOC 2023 event. For the audience CLOC, 2023 is a premier sort of event for the legal ops industry. Clock stands for corporate legal operations consortium. So what makes you excited about focusing at the clock event this year?

Andy (49:48):

Oh, I think for us there's no doubt, it is a perfect storm of opportunity. Legal departments have a tremendous need for automation as they're being asked to do more with less. I mean, let's face it, the economic uncertainty today is probably going to last for a while. As a result, the C-suite or issuing mandates, and most of those are around process improvement, efficiency gain, productivity gain, cost reduction, and we have a solution that addresses just that.

And, what really gets us excited is that we'll be able to get in front of people. When we get in front of people and we actually demonstrate the platform for them, there's an aha moment, right? They realize, wow, this is possible. There's actually a solution that has all the capabilities that are necessary for us to automate and automate at scale. That's what excites us.

MyLegal's Customers

Sharjeel (51:05):

Yeah. That's great. And, let me ask you and anyone can take that. I know you've been working in the space since a few years now. What kind of makes you particularly interested in working with the corporate legal departments and the people out there because there's an inclination to work with a certain sort of customer group. You have chosen legal to be that. I know there's a background to that, that you talked in the beginning, but what is it that you like working with them?

Andy (51:51):

Yeah, so, going back a little to the history, some people think I'm crazy. I've been in this for almost three decades and so there's a lot of beating your head against the wall to try to have people understand what BPM is and how it can help you.

So, I lived that my entire career. What's interesting about legal is that they are several steps behind the rest of the organization when it comes to automation. So, they've been just less supported. They never really thought of it as a strategic play for them to automate that department. Now, that's shifting, but there's a huge opportunity in that. And whether this is corporate legal departments or firms, they are on a less of an uptake. Even though they may have IT staffs, they're just not wanting to absorb this kind of thing for efficiency gain and whatnot.

Jim (52:54):

But when you look at a corporate legal department, IT has been really the roadblock from them basically becoming more like every other department in the organization. So given the tools that we offer, an ability to potentially stand up 25 applications that deal with the circumstances that they're working on every day, you can just see how impactful that is.

And so that's what we're excited about. We wake up every day just delighted with how we're helping our customers and being able to provide that level of support. Just helping them really solve their challenges very quickly. It's what keeps me going. I mean, that's what it's all about.

Andy (53:38):

Yeah, Sharjeel, Jim and I are sales guys. I mean, we get excited when we know we have a solution that brings value to our clients. And clearly, there's nothing like what we offer in the market today. So, we know we're solving a major problem, and we think we can help them transform their legal operations.

Sharjeel (54:05):

Based on your experience working with different clients, I know there might be some of different size and some from different background. Whom have you enjoyed the most working with? Or you are really excited to work with them without naming names. But, of course you might, recall someone from your head? Any client that you are really excited working with or these are the type of companies’ clients really like to work with?

Jim (54:32):

Yeah, there's sort of two parts of that. One is the people that have a vision. They're the ones that can see that we can be different. We can present ourselves completely different. We can address concerns and challenges across the entire company in a different way. If they have that vision, they really want to be perceived as something of far greater value. So that's the one criterion.

The other is that we've been blessed with great customers. I have to say that they do an amazing job of, collaborating with us. Bringing forthright about their challenges and where we can really help with these issues of theirs. So, I think all of our clients fall into that category. I mean, some may be in a more organized fashion than others. But, we're still able to knock it out of the park very quickly.

Jim (55:31):

You know, very short requirements gathering sessions turns into a prototype. It spurs a whole bunch of new innovation as it results of seeing what it was that we put together. It iterates to the point where they have just really the perfect app for them and they're delighted. I mean, we get continuous positive feedback on the way that we're interacting with our clients. Just how the whole process is going and at the speed that it's going. The time to value and where we're able to spin up 7, 10, or 12 applications in a four-month period. And, people are delighted with that. So we're blessed with who we've cultivated as clients so far.

Andy (56:20):

Yeah. And, I think, what is also interesting to me is that it doesn't matter the customer type. We have a solution, powered by AgilePoint, which really can help out someone that's in an early stage in terms of the development of their legal department, right? They have a whole different set of needs than a mature fortune 100 company with hundreds of thousands of employees, right? So, we know our solution can benefit both of those customer types.

So, when we sit down with them and get to understand their business. For example, maybe that person who's got a small department, hey, here's how we can help you out immediately, here's how the platform's going to be able to scale with you as you grow. Being able to have those conversations, I think, really sets us apart because we've got a unique solution here.

Sharjeel (57:24):

Yeah, that's great. I really loved talking to both of you. Got to learn a lot and I'm sure we are going to continue these discussions and really looking forward to your participation in the clock 2023.

Jim (57:40):

Absolutely. Thank you very much for having us.

Andy (57:43):

Thank you.

Jim (57:44):

We enjoyed, this was great. Appreciate you. Thank you

Sharjeel (57:46):

Thank you.

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