Contracting, the central aspect of many commercial lawyers’ lives, remains full of challenges and inefficiencies. One legal tech startup hoping to have a positive impact is Contract One, which seeks to make this vital process as smooth and collaborative as possible. It’s also heavily informed by legal design principles and has a clean interface with a strong focus on providing an easy user experience.
One feature this site especially liked was the ‘time machine’ capability that operates as a draggable slider at the bottom of the screen and allows you to see the previous versions of a contract. That’s just one example of some of the handy tools the platform has built in.
AL TV spoke to founder Anton Vashkevich about the platform, which is now fully going to market.
(Please see the Product Walk Through below. 11 mins approx.)
Contract One was founded by Vashkevich in 2018 and is formally based in the US. By background he is a transactional lawyer, previously working at law firms such as Berwin Leighton Paisner (now BCLP), and also as a General Counsel. He also started Simplawyer, a legal tech and legal design consultancy.
Vashkevich told this site: ‘[At Simplawyer] we helped clients to optimise and automate their contract work. When choosing a system from what’s on the market, many times we saw that standard contract management systems don’t perform as clients expect in terms of collaboration and negotiations. We talked to quite a few legal departments and law firms to see what the actual pain points were and decided to build the tool ourselves.’
‘One of the most important things that we chose to focus on was the user experience. We keep the user interface simple and clean. We got rid of as many buttons as possible and show only those that would really be needed depending on the context. We also made a lot of things much more visual and structured, like document changes, communication and versioning. This all brings clarity and efficiency to contracting,’ he added.
All in all, this looks like a substantial effort to make the contracting process better for all involved and focuses on solving the core problems in a very practical and cleanly designed way. Good luck to the team.