LinkSquares, the NLP-powered contract management and analysis tool, has today announced the launch of ‘Finalize’, a new pre-signature contract generation system that widens its offering and shows that the ‘platformization’ trend is not abating in the legal tech market. It could also make it easier for staff to generate contracts without needing to involve heavy input from a company’s legal team.
In a nutshell what LinkSquares Finalize does is provide three new capabilities, as explained by the company here:
- ‘Drafting: Legal teams and sales, HR, procurement, marketing, and other internal departments can easily create documents with pre-approved language based on contract templates (using a self-serve system), which helps them improve deal velocity and mitigate risks through standardizing the contracting process.
- Contract review and versioning: Contract management teams can receive notifications from the self-service platform throughout the entire process and work autonomously on redlining and negotiations, and at the same time, engage other departments who may need to contribute. The LinkSquares chat interface lets users easily collaborate and bring others into the conversation.
- Approval: LinkSquares Finalize provides final approval notification, which serves as a clear snapshot for the general counsel, chief legal officer or other department heads that need to provide sign-off on the final contract if they had limited involvement in the redlining and negotiation stages.’
LinkSquares mostly focuses on the corporate market, providing NLP-driven analysis of provisions in commercial contracts and then offers on-going contract management capabilities. The new move adds the first step of the contract process to its platform, i.e. drafting, in this case via self-serve templates, review and revising, and then approval, all into one workflow.
The company recently received major funding with a $14.5m investment and is now growing not just in size and clients, but as seen here it is widening the platform.
Vishal Sunak, CEO and co-founder of LinkSquares, said: ‘In the race to accelerate contract generation and approvals while using a lean bank of tools and resources, legal teams demanded a solution that could handle both pre-signature activity and post-signature analysis.
‘The new pre-signature capabilities give legal teams one, end-to-end tool that can handle contracts at their inception through execution, which removes silos and improves transparency for a streamlined contracting process across the organization.’
Is this a big deal? It’s an important step in building out the platform that now provides more of an all-in-one solution. It’s ambitious and puts the company into competition with other legal tech providers that are also going down the ‘platformization’ route.
One big advantage here is that if clients are already using the software for contract management and analysis, then moving to create contracts inside the same system is not a huge leap. It has every chance of catching on.