ServiceNow, the $5.9 billion revenue digital workflow company, is reinforcing its focus on legal needs with an expanded product offering aimed at corporates.
The expansion has three main strands:
- New Legal Executive Dashboard – This leverages a Performance Analytics engine to give practice area-specific metrics and KPIs over any time window. This they say will provide ‘the quick identification of legal service trends that can help show legal’s value to the business’ and show ‘specific areas where the team can improve their service and potentially streamline service further’.
- Simple Contracts Enhancements – the contract building application already exists, but they have sought to improve the workflow. As they explain: ‘In some cases, the difference from one contract to another can be a single line that’s required for a given location, region, or industry. We now provide the ability to identify unique copy blocks that can be inserted dynamically into a contract for a given situation, making it easier to create a single template for the majority of the contract.’ I.e. they want to help you standardise frequently used contracts, but also allow for some variation. In relation to the contracts, they have also extended the e-signature capabilities to provide multiple options based on defined rules, such as a customer requiring a specific e-signature vendor. You can also define the cloud storage location of the contract to the preferred vendor.
And the third part of this expansion is:
- Legal Counsel Center Enhancements – The initial goal of this centralised workspace is to provide ‘a true legal home base’. The new version provides: the ability to assign delegates to current and future work if the lawyer or practitioner is not available, and a simple email acknowledgement feature that may be required for privacy guidelines with a full audit trail.
Is this a big deal? As declared by Nagib Tharani in the Artificial Lawyer interview with ServiceNow back in September last year, the huge company has its sights set on legal, and believes it can do here what it has done in other parts of the enterprise workflow market.
At the time of the interview, Tharani highlighted that ServiceNow ‘approaches legal matter management in terms of it being part of the whole business‘. He stressed that what lawyers may see as a legal matter will often originate in HR, or sales, or procurement.
Tharani also argued then that workflow management is one of the great enterprise technology pillars that all large companies should have.
‘The average (large) company has five or six strategic platforms, such as email, a database, CRM, and ERP, and systems like this. And then there is workflow, and we are that enterprise system,’ he explained last year.
Of course, there are plenty of competitors around, from the no-code companies that want a share of the inhouse workflow pie, to CLM and ELM providers that also offer workflow applications as part of their broader platforms.
That said, ServiceNow is a giant, and it looks like with these product expansions that they are serious about making a lasting impact here.