Calling all Power Users of Legal Tech Tools
I’m calling all those who spend most of their days negotiating contacts: the power users of legal tech tools, and experts of contract negotiations working in-house in companies.
I need your honest (and even brutal) feedback.
Our team has been working on a contract negotiation tool (Recital) that automatically gathers and organizes all your in-flight contract versions and related emails, deal-by-deal. You can see our tool working its magic in the 1-min video on our homepage.
Our Legal Tech Tools Delighting Customers
Teams of in-house counsel and contracts professionals are already using Recital to save significant time with their negotiations and eliminate wasted time hunting for versions and emails while juggling several contract negotiations. Context switching can be a huge time suck during contract negotiations.
1. Recital has an email plugin that enables automatic one-click contract comparisons (for both MS-Word and PDF files) straight from your inbox of choice.
2. Recital auto-organizes all of your contract versions and emails relating to each deal.
3. Recital allows you to open MS-Word files directly, to make edits and track changes.
4. Recital also allows you to save your new versions directly to your cloud storage tool of choice.
Legal Tech Tools and Our Place in the Industry
Legal tech tools have been around for a while. I founded a company in 2010 that aimed to make creating contracts easier using templates in the browser. Now, lawyers and other legal professionals can choose from a myriad of tools. Every year, our fellow Vancouver legal tech software company Clio releases a legal trends report. As they note:
“The most successful law firms today use technology tools to work more efficiently and securely in an increasingly remote workplace. Since what works best for your firm depends on factors like your firm’s size and practice area, not every firm needs the same tech stack. But it’s a good bet to start with the basics, then add in tech tools to fill gaps, enhance productivity, and better serve your specific client base. For example, legal practice management software is an essential starting point for most modern law firms (more on that below).”
For our part, we like to think of ourselves as somewhat disruptive. As such, it’s hard to put Recital into a category of legal tech tools. The one we are most adjacent to is CLM (contract lifecycle management). And yet, our current focus is not a contract’s entire lifecycle but the crucial process of negotiation, pre-signature. Most CLM tools foc us on the handling and repository of contracts post signature, or lead with the signature process itself, whereas we aim to relive the burden of the back-and-forth, when the deal is getting done.
How You Can Help Us Build a Better Product
My question is: Which features of our product are the most useful and valuable to you, the power user? What is missing in our product to help you save more time and support you in your negotiation workflows?
We’d love to hear some honest (and even brutal) feedback about our product and how it can help lawyers and contracts professionals. That’s why we need to hear from power users who spend most of their day negotiating and live and breathe contracts.
Know someone who matches this description? Someone who deals with high contract volume, spends most of their days negotiating contracts, and wants to relieve the pressure and work faster? They’re probably too busy to see this post, so send them a link.
We’re excited about what we are building, how we’re helping lawyers and contracts professionals, and ready for your feedback to make it even better. If this interests you or one of your colleagues, don’t hesitate to contact us.
