’Mature CLM Use Means Moving Past Efficiency’ – Agiloft’s New CSO

CLM pioneer Agiloft has hired Prashant Dubey as its new Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) and Research Chair. He was most recently with law company Elevate, where he was VP and GM of CLM.

Before Elevate, Dubey founded and served as president and CEO of Sumati, a contract-focused managed services group, which was acquired by the law company in 2018. His move is the latest among several departures from Elevate in the last 12 months, including Dan Katz, the well-known legal tech expert and law professor, whose AI company LexPredict was also previously bought by Elevate, and who left this summer to pursue other projects.

Dubey (pictured above) has plenty of ideas on how things will change – and should change – in the CLM field. One comment that caught this site’s eye was: ‘With CLM, the best General Counsel [will] make the move from identifying risk to managing risk, enhancing the agility of their business, and driving revenue and shareholder value. This will happen in companies with a mature use of CLM – meaning they have progressed past the efficiency phase of CLM to using the risk management and business acceleration insights available from their contracts to guide strategic decision-making at the highest levels, warranting their Chief Legal Officer’s (CLO) seat at the executive table.’

It’s an interesting perspective, i.e. that although CLM can significantly increase efficiency – as all well-implemented tech needs to do (although that’s perhaps another story) – achieving this efficiency gain isn’t really the long-term goal. Dubey suggests instead that inhouse and legal ops team should be focused on ‘risk management and business acceleration’ which benefits the enterprise as a whole. In turn, this provides the GC / CLO with a well-earned seat at the C-suite table. This, he noted, marks a more mature approach to the use of CLM tools.

Agiloft CEO, Eric Laughlin, commented: ‘The CLM market is white hot, given the revenue-enhancing power of CLM in challenging market and macroeconomic conditions. We sincerely could not be more excited to bring Prashant’s deep CLM, legal, business, and technology expertise onboard to help refine our strategies to capture market demand and also provide thought leadership to our customers and the industry.’

Dubey concluded: ‘I’ve spent decades helping customers create real business impact from their CLM and it’s an honour to join Agiloft to help bring those learnings to one of the largest and most loyal CLM customer bases in the industry.

‘In an industry where churn is pervasive, I am excited to build upon Agiloft’s sterling reputation for successful implementation, industry-leading customer retention, and customers who come back again and again to solve additional business problems with its flexible, no-code platform.’

In his new role, Dubey will lead the advancement of the company’s three-year strategic plan, focused on continuing to capture momentum in the fast-growing CLM space. He will also serve as Research Chair of Agiloft Insights – Agiloft’s in-house data-driven market research programme – ‘to formulate actionable insights, derived from customer needs and industry trends, and share those insights to transform and accelerate the growth of, the CLM market’, the company added.

Agiloft has made a number of notable hires in the last couple of years, including Andy Wishart, now CLM Futurist and Chief Product Officer at the company, and who joined from Thomson Reuters in January 2021.