Contract negotiation is a vital part of commercial legal activity, yet the traditional approaches remain inefficient and depend on clunky technology.
At the same time more legal tech solutions than ever before are coming to market to try and help lawyers get over the inefficiencies and speed bumps in the contracting process.
Meanwhile, some suggest the answer is just to move to Google Docs, although that has its own challenges.
What is the answer to improving contract negotiation? How should lawyers tackle this challenge?
AL TV spoke to legal tech and contracts expert, Catherine Bamford, of BamLegal, about the challenges that persist in the contracting process; what tech approaches can make things better; and what advice she would give to anyone seeking to tackle these challenges.
( Press play to watch or listen – 13 mins approx.)
In this AL TV video interview we cover:
- The challenges of Word, red lines, version control, and email.
- How 99.9% of law firms are still using old methods for contracting.
- The difference between contract work inside corporates vs law firms.
- Why lawyers don’t seek to be collaborative on contract negotiation.
- Why Google Docs isn’t necessarily the answer.
- And much, much more…..
Thanks to Catherine for the insights.
Thanks, an interesting interview (of course it was, it’s CB). And a key point (at around 11.38) about process mapping being the first step in improvement. As Catherine said, it’s not cool and no-one is talking about it any more. But it’s hard to get tech selection and implementation right if you don’t have a coherent technology architecture, and you can’t have one of those if you don’t have coherent process (work) and data architectures, and they require mapping and modelling. Definitely not cool, certainly more perspiration than inspiration, but demonstrably essential.