Exari's customer, staff and business philosophies

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

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

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.

1. The Typewriter approach
   
   Best for single-page documents being drafted by Baby Boomers.
   (Examples: none that I can think of.)
   
   
2. The Shauna Kelly approach
   
   Best for long bespoke documents.
   (Examples: books, journal articles, instruction manuals.)
   
   
3. 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

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%

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

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

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.