The Exari Blog

Breaking the "Groundhog Day" Curse

2009-11-05T10:42:00.003-05:00

In this month’s Global Broker and Underwriter Magazine, Lloyd’s CEO Richard Ward, talks about the market’s need to “get it’s act together” to provide better service to its clients, or risk them going elsewhere. He emphasises the need for the market to embrace the Lloyd’s Exchange initiative and says that, “To some respects the market is like a Groundhog Day as nothing has materially changed.”

The challenge of the Exchange is to get more information flowing between broker and underwriter. This initiative is at the exact same point where others have failed and we have heard the same rallying cry from previous advocates of change. But how can you break through to the next level and actually get meaningful volumes of information being transmitted between trading partners?

The answer is certainly not to ask the brokers to work harder or spend more money to make it happen. They will merely smile sweetly (again) and carry on with their own priorities.

So, how do you break the cycle of failure? - Change the path of least resistance.

Today, brokers often use Word to generate the documents they need to negotiate a client’s risk. In doing so, they trust their support staff to be on top of the latest market reform initiatives and their company’s rules. And then, most of the really useful information ends up locked inside these Word documents.

There is a growing recognition, however, that by using specialist document automation technology such as Exari, brokers can improve turn-around times (documents produced in 80% less time) while ensuring greater accuracy and built-in compliance. Our broker clients tell us that it’s easier to use a structured mechanism for building their documents than relying upon the free form use of word processing.

Using Exari, documents are “assembled” from the relevant sections, clauses, paragraphs and words that are applicable to the risk class. During that process, data is automatically being gathered in the background. It is that data that can be transformed into a message and sent to underwriters via the Exchange.

Everyone wins - Brokers get better documents faster; Underwriters have to do less checking since there are fewer elements that can go wrong; Clients get better service and the Exchange builds up its message traffic.

If you use a document assembly solution like Exari to structure the creation of your documents at the beginning of the placement process you can break the Groundhog Day curse.

This post was guest authored by Martin Kett, Exari's VP of Insurance Client Development.

Too Much Sales Time Spent on Contracts

2009-10-30T06:41:00.007-04:00

“In many organizations, up to 25% of sales time is spent on contract-related issues,” states Tim Cummins on his blog Commitment Matters. Tim is president of the IACCM, a non-profit organization that’s become the global forum for innovation in trading relationships and practices.

This is astounding. As we emerge from a very deep recession (knock on wood as GDP came out positive this week), organizations around the world are struggling to do more with less and to close sales more quickly. How do you do this when 25% less time is spent selling or prospecting?

An alternative to the manual, slow and risky process of creating contracts and sales documents such as NDAs and proposals, is to use document assembly/contract automation software. These solutions allow sales reps to create structured, approved sales documents on the fly by answering questions in a browser. These systems can integrate into the CRM system so the sales rep doesn’t have to re-enter data and all contract data can go back into the system. This allows the company to also manage, analyze and report on these contracts.

Another interesting subject touched on by Cummins comes from a report by CSO Insights on Sales Compensation and Performance Management. It talks about how the recession has caused many sales reps to miss their quotas and to begin to push the boundaries of what is ethical. The report goes on to say that sales reps state that the biggest cause for losing business is the “competitor’s price and terms.”

And this brings us full circle back to contract automation. If you automate your sales contracts and capture the data, you can control what the rep can do with the Ts & Cs and give them some controlled flexibility to negotiate on their own as well. You can also risk- rank your contracts and start to compensate your reps not only on revenue but on the value of the underlying contract to your company.

Dow Jones & DLA Piper joined us for a webinar on this topic: "How sales teams can reduce the time and expense of closing deals by 50%" Download the recording now.

Document Assembly Software Explained & Reviewed

2009-10-22T09:21:00.016-04:00

Noted document assembly expert, Seth Rowland, has written a beginner's guide to Document Assembly that does a good job of explaining how document assembly software works.

Document Assembly goes by many different names, depending on the related job function and industry. It can be called document automation, document generation, contract automation, policy configuration, loan documentation, document creation and many more. For simplicity, we'll stick with document assembly here.

Recently, Seth reviewed Exari Document Assembly Software in the TechnoFeature Newsletter. Below are some excerpts:

In evaluating a document assembly system, one must look at what the user sees when he or she launches the document assembly interview. If the user's experience is "pleasant"; if the user can easily navigate the questions; if the user is guided to make the correct choices; and if the user can easily review and change his or her answers, then you can say that the system succeeds. The Exari interview shines in each of these areas.

At the end of the interview, Exari presents you with several optional outputs including Word and PDF. The most interesting option is a document preview. You can see the document with variables and optional text indicated...Exari adds a further output option that is unique in the document assembly industry. Called the Exari RoundTrip, it produces a Word document that can be negotiated and edited.

Exari has just about every feature you could imagine for a document assembly system. Variables and various other components, just like documents, are stored as XML objects. Exari has variables, conditions, repeats, calculations, conditional expressions, multiple choice questions, and user text questions. To the standard list, Exari adds smart phrases, blocks of text that are reusable in the template and may or may not contain conditions, variables, and logic.

Exari includes several other components that round it out as a robust and powerful programming language.

Clearly, you'll need to conduct a return on investment analysis. Look at the number of users who will use the system, the number of documents they will assemble, the location of the users, and the level of expertise among the users regarding the documents. In the proper setting, Exari will pay for itself in under three months after full production.

You can read the complete review here. And please, let us know what you call Document Assembly below in the comments.

The 4 key challenges of contract management for law departments

2009-10-15T14:53:00.000-04:00

Well known legal department consultant, Rees Morrison, reminds us of the four key challenges contract management poses for in-house lawyers:

Standardizing and simplifying contract drafting.
Setting policies regarding legal department review of contracts.
Streamlining contract negotiation.
Facilitating the company's adherence to its contractual obligations.

Morrison notes the role of document assembly in addressing the drafting issue. Interestingly however, all four issues can actually benefit from a document assembly solution.

1. Contract drafting
Most legal departments try to improve contract drafting by using MS Word templates. However, these create problems for all parts of an organization:

Business users hate Word templates. Their eyes glaze over when they see square brackets and verbose user instructions. Instead, they either ask Legal to do the work, or they cut-and-paste from a previous agreement.

The lawyers are unhappy too. Word templates are too risky. Often, business users can't get the substantive terms right and Legal has no visibility into the deal.

In contrast, document assembly enables drafting to be pushed out to the business as a self-service model, while ensuring the generated agreements are legally compliant. The business users are guided through an intuitive web interview. The lawyers retain control by pre-determining what content is included. Further, PDF output ensures that the business user can't modify the document post-production.

2. Contract review
For legal departments with contract review policies in place, document assembly systems can enforce those policies by embedding them into the system as rules.

When there is non-compliance with a rule (e.g. in answer to an insurance question, a user might respond that the counter-party has insufficient insurance), the system automatically routes the contract to the legal department for review.

3. Contract negotiation
Document assembly can improve negotiation in two ways:

By building commonly negotiated fall-back scenarios into the system (with different answers triggering the inclusion of particular provisions) the negotiation process is made much faster.

Some systems can actually capture all edits made to a document after it has been generated. That ensures any changes made by a counter-party are visible (even if MS Word Track Changes has not been used). Further, these negotiated positions can even be applied to subsequent agreements such as renewals.

4. Contract tracking
Typically, there is both a functional- and system-separation at the point of contract execution. Pre-execution work (drafting, review and negotiation) is controlled by Legal, while post-execution tasks (obligation management) are usually handled by a contracts department or business unit.

For companies that have implemented a contract management system, the right document assembly system can provide huge advantages via integration. They are able to:

Automatically push the execution version of an agreement into the contract management system in electronic form (even if the document has been heavily negotiated).

Flag the extent to which clauses have been modified; which changes are simply approved fallback provisions, and which contain bespoke wording.

Enable analysis and reporting on the risk profile of an organization's entire contract portfolio.

Conclusion
Currently, a few innovative legal departments are realizing the full potential of document assembly. For various reasons, most organizations have not yet analyzed contracting the same ways they have other business processes. However, when they do, they will discover that the contracting process is highly inefficient, and that the potential cost savings from automation are just too great to ignore.

Insurers improve productivity with KM

2009-10-13T11:00:00.004-04:00

It’s one thing for us to say that we can help you improve your business. It’s entirely different for you to hear it from someone who has already succeeded in making their own business more profitable.

Les Doel, a manager at London-based Lloyd’s broker, Croton Stokes Wilson Ltd., recently spoke with KM World Magazine about his experience with document automation.

He said, "We wanted to be able to process more business with the same number of staff. The biggest challenge in becoming more productive was working with all of the different forms generated between Lloyd’s and various U.S. firms.”

After testing different products, Les chose Exari InsuranceAccelerator™.

You can read the full article here.

How to become an Automation Superhero

2009-10-07T12:49:00.001-04:00

Here's Justin's latest post from CIO.com. You can read it here or check it out along with those from other thought leaders over at CIO.

Many business processes have been streamlined through automation but the production of documents and documentation often seems to be neglected.
We’re all aware of the benefits of automation. Our network monitoring, backups, integrity and heath checks, spam filtering, intrusion detection, software builds and unit tests are all largely automated. One area that often seems to be left out in the cold is the automation of documents and documentation.

The document assembly/automation space has come a long way in the last decade particularly with systems that are founded on XML and are architected openly, enabling integration with necessary upstream and downstream systems. Clearly I’m biased; it’s what we at Exari have committed ourselves to for that past 10 years. Imagine what a superhero you could become in your company if you were able to achieve the following:

Sales – a sales enquiry come in from your website. The lead wants more information. By filling in a simple, relevant online interview the prospect can potentially receive a customized business case or quote for your offering. It would be correctly branded, be up to date with the latest product information, pricing and discounts. An ROI analysis could be included based on the gathered information giving them even more compelling reasons to buy. Sample usage and support terms could also be delivered. Tell me that’s not going to excite your sales staff.

Software configuration and documentation – Your lead has been converted and you’ve made the sale. They’ve paid for your software offering and are ready to have it installed and configured. Your product has a myriad of modules, configuration and installation options. An online interview combined with the previous sales information can gather information about the specific environments, required options and configuration parameters. From this you can deliver customized installation, configuration files and operation guides and potentially even the configured software itself.

Legal – Do your product and service contracts still need to be approved by legal? Sure for unique, custom or ad hoc transactions legal needs to be deeply involved. But what about for standard deals – deals that are predictable and have a finite number of controlled variations? We all recognize that there are repeatable patterns around all common transactions. The business rules around these types of documents should be built into the document creation process . There should be a single source for such documents with up to date terms, pricing and conditions. Your business users should be able to generate these documents without legal intervention.

So next time you start thinking about how you’re going to make an impact by improving business processes don’t forget about automating your documents.

Where have you improved your business processes? Please let us know below in the comments.

Dow Jones and DLA Piper webinar recording now available for download

2009-10-02T00:36:00.010-04:00

Do you work in a large company or law firm? If so, be sure to download the webinar recording on how Dow Jones and DLA Piper have benefited (in quite different ways) by automating the sales contracting process.

Mitch Mackler, Assistant General Counsel at Dow Jones, gives a fascinating account of the results achieved by the salespeople and in-house lawyers at this iconic media company.
Dave Jensen, Director of IT at DLA Piper, explains how technology innovation at one of the world's largest law firms won them a highly valuable global client.

Download the webinar recording now

The Perils of MS Word

2009-09-25T16:09:00.010-04:00

Our Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Justin Lipton has begun blogging over at CIO.com. From time to time we’ll share Justin’s posts in this blog as well. Here’s his most recent:

A mistake in a Word document has caused considerable damage and embarrassment to a publicly listed company in New Zealand. I recently read this post about an unfortunate comment that was left in a company’s annual financial statement. It reminded me how careful we need to be when using generic tools such as Word to produce documents. Here are some tips for how to avoid this kind of embarrassment:

Read it before you send it – OK this is really obvious but if you’ve created a document using cut and paste there’s a very good chance it will contain something you don’t want it to. That includes notes and comments too. After you’ve read it, read it again and if it’s important give it to someone else to read and review.

Word metadata – Metadata is often neglected but it can contain the original author, path, company etc. If you’ve ever based one document on another or used a template that wasn’t created by you this can really bite – particularly if the metadata identifies another client or worse still a competitor. Many companies even have Word macros to strip the metadata out of Word docs when they are opened.

Track changes – "just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there." Tracking changes is great – it allows you to see how a document evolves: who made changes, what changes and when. Do you really want non-trusted people to see this too? Before sending a document always ensure that track changes is turned off and that all changes have been accepted.

Fast saves – you may not realize this but later versions of Word have a history feature. With this enabled you can see different versions of your document as you were editing it. OK for you – not so great for the non-trusted recipient who ends up seeing something potentially embarrassing to both you and your company.

And finally, don’t use Word output unless you have to. Use Word for writing and editing ad hoc documents but PDF is superior as a final format. Sometimes this may be impractical, but use PDFs whenever you can. For common documents utilize document assembly tools to make your life that much easier and safer.

What tips can you share to help others avoid such perils? Please share in the comments.

Contract Automation Impacts the Sales Cycle

2009-09-18T13:29:00.029-04:00

As technology and the economy have created more and more pressure to close deals faster with less cost, innovative sales executives are looking for ways to accelerate their sales cycle without increasing headcount and costs.

Contract automation not only saves time in contract creation but can also eliminate the need to wait for a busy legal department to create and review contracts. Inefficient, manual processes waste time and money throughout the enterprise.

Dow Jones and DLA Piper have both experienced firsthand success with document automation and they are sharing their know-how.

Join us for a webinar on Thursday, September 24 at 1:00 pm (EDT) to learn how:

Dow Jones has reduced the time it takes their salespeople to get a first draft contract to their customer down from several days to one half-hour, regardless of where they are located, or whether the lawyer normally assigned to them is otherwise engaged.
DLA Piper has helped their clients to streamline contracting processes and reduce the time and expense that is required for these types of activities.
To empower sales staff to create their own compliant contracts in minutes and leverage Salesforce.com.

Not available on the 24th? Register here to receive the recording.

Document Assembly for Insurance Policy Generation

2009-09-04T11:27:00.016-04:00

Although document assembly has its origins in the world of law firms and legal contracts, it has more recently been pressed into service as a document automation platform in the document-intensive insurance world. After all, an insurance or reinsurance policy is indeed a contract.

The need for contract certainty along with increased scrutiny from the regulators, and growing pressure for cost savings, makes document assembly an ideal insurance industry solution.

Exari has helped many insurance brokers, underwriters and carriers to automate their documents, most recently, Munich Re. Munich Re’s UK Life Branch has automated their Treaty Contracts. The company believes the efficiencies achieved through this document automation project will help them lower costs and offer even better customer service.

Contact us to learn how we can help you with your insurance document automation needs.

10 technologies that will disrupt traditional legal practice

2009-08-26T19:07:00.024-04:00

At ILTA '09 yesterday, Ron Friedmann 'live blogged' (no, I didn't just invent that term) a panel discussion on Technologies That Will Disrupt Traditional Legal Practice, lead by Richard Susskind. By all accounts, the session was very well received. Below is my take on some of Susskind's key points. (If you're interested in the future of legal practice I urge you to read Ron's full post.)

What is disruptive technology?

In contrast to sustaining technology, disruptive technology seems to come from nowhere and disrupts the market. It's not the technology itself that's interesting, but rather its potential impact on existing business models (such as the billable hour).

Is it a threat or opportunity?

That, of course, depends on who you are. It provides an opportunity for innovators and customers, but is a threat for those that want to maintain the status quo. Susskind notes that law firms tend to be in the latter camp.

What is the role of document assembly?

Susskind's view is that document assembly, along with other technologies, will transform the legal market over the coming years.

However, rather than internal document assembly (which many firms have had 20+ years' experience with), he sees the real opportunity in external (i.e. client-facing) online services. It's here that the economics are stronger as the volume of documents produced can be much higher.

And it's disruptive because 1) it requires an upfront investment of time and money, and 2) when a document is produced by the system its value isn't tied to the time required to generate it. [As noted by another attendee, David Hobbie, "it takes the lawyers out of the business of producing documents."]

To learn about the other nine disruptive technologies mentioned by Susskind, and the law firm case studies presented by John Alber of Bryan Cave and Gerard Neiditsch of Mallesons, read the full posts from Ron and David.

To find out how document assembly can help strengthen your firm's market position contact Exari.

The Assault on the Billable Hour Back in the News

2009-08-26T15:57:00.004-04:00

The Billable Hour is still under attack in the nation’s press and real change seems to be taking hold. According to several recent blog posts and the Wall Street Journal, corporations are using the recession to structurally change the way they acquire legal services.

Document Assembly is one technology amongst many that can increase the efficiency and productivity of a corporation by automating high volume documents such as sales contracts, services agreements, licensing agreements, etc, AND of a law firm by accelerating the speed of complex document creation. This increased efficiency drives lower and more predictable costs that can then allow law firms to remain profitable in a fixed price environment.

In the Wall Street Journal Nathan Koppel and Ashby Jones wrote about U.S. corporations pushing their outside counsels for flat fee contracts.

“The companies are ditching the hourly structure -- which critics complain offers law firms an incentive to rack up bigger bills -- in favor of flat-fee contracts. One survey found an increase of more than 50% this year in corporate spending on alternatives to the traditional hourly-fee model.” Pfizer, American Express and Cisco are all cited in the article has having done very creative fixed price deals with the outside law firms they use.

“Flat fees a growing trend among firms big and small" in the Minnesota Lawyer by Associate Editor Michelle Lore states that “St. Louis lawyer, writer, speaker and entrepreneur Matthew Homann believes that any case can be priced on a flat-fee basis if the attorney has the experience to properly evaluate the matter and has the systems in place to handle it economically.” Mr. Homann also has a blog about this subject called “The [non]billable hour”.

Law Office Technology by Roland Schorr & Tower, talks about how technology can help law firms bridge the gap between the billable hour and fixed pricing. "Tech can bring efficiencies. Ironically firms have long been wary of technology specifically BECAUSE of the billable hour. If you use document assembly software that cuts your time to compose a particular document down from 3 hours to 1 hour...well, you've just cost yourself TWO billable hours! But in a value-based system, that's a GOOD thing.”

It’s not news to us that good use of good technology brings efficiency.

Five Document Assembly/Legal Technology Blogs to Follow

2009-08-20T12:25:00.002-04:00

If you are interested in document assembly and other legal technologies, which you probably are since you are reading this, here are some other blogs you may want to check out:

Basha Blog
Seth Rowland is a nationally recognized industry expert on document assembly. He runs a technology consulting practice that helps clients use software to redesign the legal document drafting process. He writes about document assembly and case management.

AdamsDrafting
Ken Adams is a leading authority on modern and effective contract drafting. He is the author of "A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting."

DennisKennedy.com
Dennis Kennedy is a well-known lawyer, consultant, speaker and writer who is considered among the most influential authority on the application of technology in the practice of law.

Law Department Management
Rees Morrison, Esq., has consulted to more than 275 law departments over 22 years to help them better manage themselves and their law firms. Rees does include, though is not limited to technology issues.

Does it Compute?
John Heckman has worked in the legal industry for nearly 25 years. He consults with firms from solo practitioners to AmLaw 100 firms, and he specializes in Document Management issues.

What blogs would you add to this list?

MS Word is dead, long live MS Word

2009-08-12T11:11:00.004-04:00

Exari CTO Justin Lipton recently wrote about the potential demise of MS Word on the CIO blog after reading this article. In case you missed it, we are reposting it here.

Sure Word is bloated and many of the features are difficult to use or are never used, but it's hard to be beat for producing ad-hoc documents.

The article argues that where collaboration is required, web based authoring tools such as wikis and deal rooms provide much better solutions.But there's a part of the argument missing that applies as much to a wiki as it does to any unstructured document.

Most documents that contains useful information should be able to be separated into a data payload component, a text component and a style component.The data component consists of the dates, amounts, milestones, names, places, conditions, exceptions, etc that the document relates to. This is the key to tracking, reporting and analyzing a document.

The text is the specific wording that goes around the data - this generally requires a human to completely understand the meaning.

Finally, the style is the way the document looks.

XML based document assembly/automation technologies allow for a distinct separation of these three facets. There's really no excuse with the technologies available today to be writing commonly used documents from scratch or cutting and pasting from various sources. Important documents should be available as single sourced, marked up templates that require very little effort to produce, are beautifully formatted and are able to be easily analyzed and reported on.

What’s your greatest weakness in contract drafting?

2009-07-30T17:02:00.012-04:00

Sinning, we know, is human. And we all know what Capital Vices are. But no one before has applied the 7 Deadly Sins to contract drafting, and explained how common errors in writing legal agreements can lead to “eternal contractual damnation”.

Jamie Wodetzki, Founder of Exari, did. Led by his experience in document automation – just like Dante was led by Virgil – Jamie starts a fascinating trip to investigate the 7 Cardinal Sins with a focus on contract drafting. He walks us through the most common mistakes that lawyers and professionals make when writing contracts and legal documents, and explores the solutions provided by intelligent document assembly to cut costs and eliminate risk.

Originally presented as a Technology Session at Legal Tech 2009, this interesting and timely presentation is now available in seven free 2-minute clips on the Exari website, and includes stories from the front line of legal service automation at leading companies and law firms around the world.

Here is Jamie’s list of don’ts:

Lust: Don’t lust after sexy documents and be obsessed by beautiful fonts.
Gluttony: Don’t draft fat, excessively long contracts.
Greed: Don’t write take-it-or-leave-it, one-sided standard form contracts.
Sloth: Don’t make mistakes due to inaccurate, lazy drafting.
Wrath: Don’t be caught with the wrong clauses and get aggressive.
Envy: Don’t fail to focus on details, as well as the big things.
Pride: Don’t find yourself guilty of excessive love for your own drafting.

The 7 Deadly Sins of Contract Drafting teaches us that a little bit of sinning is acceptable, but in a global financial crisis the cost of sinning blows up and smart companies must be able to avoid such common mistakes and have complete visibility into their contracts.

Check it out and tell us: what is your sin?

This post was guest authored by Federica Ionta

3 signs you should automate your contracts

2009-07-29T02:02:00.001-04:00

If you manage a corporate legal department, there are three telltale signs that you might get significant value from automating the creation of your day-to-day business contracts.

Internal clients "work around" Legal

If contracting is being done by people in the business without Legal's knowledge, the company is being exposed to unacceptable risks. Why do they feel the need to circumvent Legal? What can be done to remove the incentive?
All transactions must go via Legal

Another problem is if Legal is drafting and reviewing routine agreements. It's an awful waste of highly skilled legal resources. Lawyers find the work tedious (cutting-and-pasting from a variety of templates and previous agreements, fixing broken auto-numbering, etc). Not to mention the frustration for internal clients caused by slow turnaround times. Why are routine documents being drafted by Legal? Is it because you don't trust the business? Do they not trust themselves?
Work is being outsourced to law firms

When Legal's too busy, it uses panel lawyers as an overflow. While this helps with the workload, it's an extremely expensive way of scaling. Is this really the most cost-effective way to provide legal services for your company?

How automation can help

Automation makes it easy for your internal clients to follow approved processes. As a result, they're happy to comply. They're presented with an intuitive web-wizard containing business-friendly interview questions.

Standard transactions, - after answering the questions, clients get auto-generated, execution ready documents (in PDF format) tailored to their requirements. Instant access to legally pre-approved documents allows them to quickly "get on with business."
Non-standard transactions - by the same token, higher risk or more complex deals are automatically flagged and routed to Legal for review (in Word format).

The best thing is that you're now able to track all the company's agreements, and gain deep visibility into the types of transactions being entered into by the business. It also frees the legal team up to focus on value-added work. Which means that less stuff needs to be sent out to expensive external lawyers.

Automating contract drafting enables you to cut costs and reduce risk, while also being more responsive to your internal clients. Happy internal clients; happy legal team; happy finance department. A win-win-win.

Drafting contracts with style(s)

2009-07-16T20:22:00.019-04:00

My post on drafting contracts to be understood mentions the importance of typography (the layout and appearance of printed material) for clear communication. In a recent post, lawyer Sam Glover reinforces the point with five typography tips for lawyers. But it's Sam's sixth tip, a non-typographical one, that I'm most interested in.

"Learn styles

Manual formatting is clumsy, requires more effort, and yields inconsistent results. Learn to use styles, so that all your headings are formatted consistently, and so that you can change them all, if necessary, by changing only the style definition."

Lawyers spend a great deal of time editing and tweaking documents. And styling has a huge impact on how quickly a document's layout can be updated. So, if you're a lawyer, you owe it to yourself and your clients to invest some time in understanding how to use styles.

Fine, but where do I start?

As well as the Microsoft tutorial mentioned in Sam's post, I highly recommend Shauna Kelly's MS Word tutorials. (Anyone who's been hit with Word numbering mishaps will be particularly interested in Shauna's excellent outline numbering tutorial.)

Exari's customer, staff and business philosophies

2009-07-09T20:19:00.014-04:00

Company culture is heavily influenced by the views of its leaders, particularly the people who've been around since 'Day 1'. Exari co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Dr Justin Lipton, is one such person.

Juz recently started blogging over at CIO. So, I've decided to review some of his posts to provide insight into aspects of Exari's approach to doing business.

Eating your own dog food

For us, that means using the Exari document assembly platform internally for all manner of template automation. Why? One reason is to help everyone in the company to better understand things from the customer perspective. (Read the post)

Walking the walk

At Exari Juz (and other senior execs) get their hands dirty by regularly taking support calls, doing coding, and helping with other front-line work. The aim here is to gain first-hand experience of the issues faced by the majority of our staff. (Read the post)

What the CEO tells you and what she's really saying

This is a lighthearted look at the disconnect that sometimes exists between the CIO and the CEO. The lesson for me is that clear communication is extremely important. That can be a challenge for distributed companies like ours (with offices in the US, Europe and Asia, we're spread across 14 times zones). One way we try to overcome the 'tyranny of distance' is by having weekly inter-office web/phone conferences; even when there is no formal agenda. (Read the post)

In a nutshell, at Exari we think it's really important to make sure we're on the same page as all our stakeholders (gotta love that work) by maintaining regular contact and also by 'walking a mile in their shoes.'

You can read more of Juz's musings over at CIO.

(P.S. Juz hates the 'Dr' prefix that denotes his PhD credentials; which is precisely why I included it in the intro ;-)

Tim Cummins on what's holding back contract lifecycle automation

2009-07-08T06:31:00.013-04:00

Predicting the future is a mug's game.

In 2002 Gartner predicted that, by 2007, there would be a $20 billion market for Contract Lifecycle Management software and services.

Tim Cummins - CEO of the International Association for Contract & Commercial Management (IACCM) - has written a post suggesting why market growth hasn't met those expectations.

His reasons?

Difficulty in fixing cross-functional processes; because contracting cuts across Legal, Finance, Sales, Procurement and Operations there is often a lack of executive sponsorship to fix the end-to-end business process.
Resistance by internal IT (who are forever being promised the 'imminent' arrival of a Contract Management module by their ERP provider).
Under-appreciation by companies of the impact of the contracting processes on financial performance, company reputation, and risk management.

So, how much is contracting really costing you?

How to cure the numbering headache in Word documents

2009-07-02T10:00:00.004-04:00

If you work with legal documents, you've probably had to contend with MS Word's outline numbering. In which case you may have also suffered the pain of your numbering spontaneously going haywire.

Sound familiar? Then read on.

There are 3 ways to avoid spontaneous outline numbering corruption.

The Typewriter approach

Best for single-page documents being drafted by Baby Boomers.
(Examples: none that I can think of.)
The Shauna Kelly approach

Best for long bespoke documents.
(Examples: books, journal articles, instruction manuals.)
The Automated approach

Best for rule-driven, semi-standard contracts and other complex documents.
(Examples: proposals; services agreements; renewal letters; employment packages.)

So, the next time you're about to start bashing away on the keyboard, make sure your outline numbering's up to the task.

Susskind: Rio Tinto deal heralds huge changes

2009-06-19T01:46:00.013-04:00

I just read Richard Susskind's take on Rio Tinto's legal process outsourcing (LPO) deal, which he describes as "ground-breaking."

Why is the arrangement with CPA [Rio's LPO partner] so significant? Primarily because it is evidence of a profound change in the legal world. In-house lawyers are under great pressure to reduce their head count and to spend less on external law firms, but, at the same time, their workload is increasing.

Clients, in short, need their advisers to provide more-for-less.

As we have noted previously, "more-for-less" cannot be achieved by focusing purely on hourly rates. Susskind agrees and posits that offshoring will provide one of many alternative approaches, another being "computerisation, using tools such as automatic document drafting and workflow technology."

The takeaway

Rio Tinto has made it clear that it really does want change. Whether you're in-house or in a law firm, you've got to decide whether this is a one-off or the start of a trend.

If it's the latter, you better work out what it means for you and how you're going to respond.

Rio Tinto to slash legal costs by 20%

2009-06-18T22:27:00.018-04:00

In an effort to reduce it's annual legal bill by 20% (or around US$20M), Rio Tinto is outsourcing legal work to India. According to The Times, the work will include "tasks such as reviewing documents and drafting contracts."

Targeting expensive lawyers

Rio estimates that its Indian operation "will be seven times cheaper than comparable lawyers in London." Rio's legal process outsourcing partner, CPA Global, "provided us with fresh thinking about how to unlock real savings on our legal costs without altering the level of service we offered our internal clients," said Leah Cooper, Rio’s managing attorney.

The test will be whether Rio can actually maintain current service levels after transferring their processes to India.

Other benefits

"As more of our standard legal work is filtered though to CPA Global, we will have more time to lift our heads up from the day-to-day reactive delivery of legal services and focus on being more proactive," said Cooper.

Where to next?

If the offshoring really enables Rio's lawyers to focus on being more proactive, it could open up other opportunities. For example, it may just give Rio's lawyers the bandwidth they need to look at improving service delivery, rather than simply maintaining it.

Now, as we've previously noted, the only way to do that without increasing costs is through innovation. And increasing productivity by transforming and automating your business processes is not easy. It takes a big commitment of time and effort from subject matter experts and other skilled employees.

However, the good news is that success results in valuable competitive advantage that's difficult to replicate. Which means that, at the very least, you owe it to your clients and shareholders to investigate the business case for taking service delivery to the next level.

So, what are you waiting for?

The 10 Most Innovative Legal Departments

2009-06-12T02:35:00.032-04:00

Is your department innovative? This is the question being asked by Inside Counsel, a magazine for in-house legal departments.

Why is innovation important?

The answer, in a nutshell, is that innovation is what enables organisations to remain competitive. It's transformational in nature, enabling step changes in productivity (as opposed to incremental improvements). It's what drives progress. And in corporations, innovation is just as important in the legal function as in sales, procurement or HR.

What is not innovation?

Many in-house lawyers are under the misconception that beating their external law firms over the head about hourly rates constitutes innovation. (Funnily enough, one of last year's submissions was a "patent-pending method for forcing law firms to lower their rates.") Another common approach is to shift work from top tier providers to chepear firms or regional offices.

Focusing on billing rates and cost cutting isn't innovation. All it does is lead to bill padding, poor service or both.

So what is innovation?

Real innovation involves finding new ways of doing things. And sustainable innovation can only be achieved by revamping and automating key business processes. What are the major activities and processes in your legal department? Is contract drafting/review/negotiation up there? If so, how effective is your current process? Have you ever analysed it? Could it be made cheaper, faster or less risky?

If your contracting process is world's best practice, nominate for the Inside Counsel 10 now. If not, test drive Exari to see what's possible.

Drafting contracts to be understood

2009-06-09T11:00:00.033-04:00

Everyone who deals with legal documents can point to unintelligible agreements. Many would argue that this is the aim of the drafter.

That may sometimes be the case. But, more often, the drafter(s) in question simply know no better. Most lawyers are NEVER taught how (or why) to draft in Plain English.

If you're interested in removing ambiguity and communicating more clearly, there are a couple of sites you should check out.

Adams Drafting assesses all manner of contract language and advises on best practices for clear and concise usage.

Typography for Lawyers focuses, not on the words per-se, but on their visual presentation. This site explains how poor text layout impedes readability and comprehension and tips for better typography.

And for an interesting take on the proliferation of legal gobbledygook in contracts, see Why Our Agreements Look Like Crap.

Automated document assembly software can help keep your contracts consistent and compliant, but the document author still must use clear, understandable language.

How to Fix Turnaround Times

2009-06-05T10:54:00.011-04:00

The previous post ended by asking how banks could better handle unanticipated spikes in lending applications. Or more generically, how can a service provider respond effectively to an increase in client requests?

Scalability
And that doesn't mean hiring more people. It means automating processes to capture quality data up-front and remove bottlenecks to downstream fulfillment. The real issue is how to do that properly. Tactical solutions focussed on an individual function or channel cause as many problems as they solve, while strategic solutions are out-of-date before they're implemented.

Quick wins
The key is to start with a quick win. Rapid deployment to handle a targeted problem. Then, after solving that problem (and celebrating the "win"), iterate.

The right tool for the job
But to do this effectively you need the right platform. From the start, the system needs to be:

Robust - to mimize expensive down-time.

Scalable - to reliably handle increased volumes.

Flexible - able to handle new business situations.

Usable - to be embraced by the business.

It's all about the user
It's the last requirement - usability - that is most often overlooked. And, it's the most important. If a system is not designed for business users - as opposed to by IT - it will fail. For a system to be owned by business users, it needs to be easy to use so the business can maintain it without needing to continually go back to IT.

The result
By automating their document intensive processes with document assembly software, Exari's clients have been able to cut cycle times and costs by 70%. Think about how much more productive you could be. You'd be amazed how much you can achieve when the business "owns" the solution to its problems. Contact us to learn the ROI for your project.