Um, Sean, before we start, can you just tell me what’s the, what’s the biggest benefit of having contracts and matters in the same system? The biggest benefit has to be creating that single source of truth, that single source of everything which is of importance to your legal team and to your business operations, and being able to get access into that all information through one, one place.

So. Tell me what we’re looking at on the screen here. This is the legal workspace and we’re looking at your hub. Yeah, so this is my hub. This is, these are all the things that are importance to me personally. So I’ve got the recent things that I’ve been working on my matters or contracts so I can get quick access into those.

Um, I’m also able to see the, the matters that are of high priority so I can get access into any of those if I want to. All the high risk contracts as well, and also any actions that are waiting on me to, uh, to keep things moving. So whether an invoice needs approving or a contract needs approval, I can get quick access and I can, um, action those things if I need to.

Before we move on from this, Sean, how do you define matters? Matters are, are anything, any legal request, anything that legal is involved in is a, is a matter. So it’s, it’s not just, um, work that’s been sent out to external law firms. Uh, it’s everything that the team is working on, internal and external as well.

So why don’t you talk us through an example of how bringing matters and contracts or, or a set of matters and a specific set of contracts together in one space. Really helps the team. So this, this is a matter project Avocado. Um, in the, in this paint panel that you can see here, there’s some basic details or data about the matter about, um, what it’s about, um, who it’s for what department, um, it’s priority.

I’m also tracking some key data to help with, um, giving insights into how the team’s working as well. So I’m tracking risk. Complexity and significance as well. Um, so that feeds through into our reports. Uh, so this is my key matter and it’s bringing together, um, two contracts. So this is a, a very common scenario and I’ll, I’ll just open up on this panel to the right are all the contracts and matters that are related to this project.

Avocado, it’s what we call parents and and children. So these are child matters or sub matters or contracts too. The, the larger project, if you like, and I’ll just click on this, um, NDA, just to show you what a contract looks like in our contract management module. And like many times, you know, many, um, many times we create NDAs, um, and they exist in their own right.

Nothing ever happens to them. Uh, they’re just a contract that exists in the contract repository. Legal really doesn’t have any involvement in that, and they don’t really. Um, create any issues. Sometimes they go forward and they’ll actually create a relationship that needs legal support. And in this case, it’s an example.

We have a, a master services agreement with Flat Cap Enterprises, which is also, um, a, a contract that exists in the repository, but I’ve also linked it through to the main project Avocado. And very similar here you can see the contract document. On the panel to the right, um, we have some, um, what we call conversations.

That’s an area where you can track conversations internal with, with, uh, the team. What you can also leave that for your file notes. Uh, and in this case, I’m recording a decision that was made to. To agree to this contract, even though it was a change to our standard terms. And I’ve recorded there why we’ve agreed to those changes to our standard terms.

Um, and that there’s a risk there that needs to be managed by the business. And quite often these are the types of things that get lost. They’re sent in an email to somebody, the contract manager at the time within the business. Uh, but they would get lost in, in the, um, in the massive emails that get sent, um, around business operations.

Uh, and in this case there was something that came out of this, uh, a relationship that we sought some additional advice. So I’ve got some advice about whether this was actually an employee or a contractor relationship. Mm-hmm. Um, and I can just add new matters from this panel. Um, the same panel as well, so I can add children, child matters to this, uh, right from here.

Okay. So you created a matter. When you sought the outside counsel advice and it’s related to the contract itself. Correct. So I’m managing, and again, I can access that matter directly from this same location, and I can have access to all the information that was sent to the, um, to the external law firm and any advice that they gave to us as well.

Um, and in this case, you know, sometimes every, you know, in many times relationships just happen. Contracts finish and, and everything’s great. I. Um, well, it’s only when, um, there becomes potential litigation or the dispute starts to arise, which is when you really do see the value of having all your information in one place and not having to look for that.

So in an another, situa another scenario without a legal workspace, without having your contracts and matters in one location. Those emails over those years would be spread around different people. People leave, new people come in. There’s all these different inboxes where different information is stored.

Um, shared drives, um, hard drives information. You don’t have access to that. And when a dis dispute starts to arise, then you really do need to have access to all of that information in one go. And time is of the essence because you’re gonna be making decisions about how you’re going to resolve that dispute, whether you are going to proceed.

To a hearing or, or, um, through the court process or whether you’re actually going to try and negotiate and mediate a, an outcome and your ability to make those strategic decisions. It really depends upon how well informed you are about your, your position and how strong your position is. Um, and this is the situation here is we had a dispute.

Which started to arise, we had access to all the emails that were saved in the system. We had access to all the contracts that we’d agreed to. We had those foul notes that we’d also, um, tracked as well. So we could instruct our external law firm again by creating a new matter from this panel, instructing the external law firm to advisors on how best we should resolve this dispute.

And they had access to that information. It’s, we didn’t spend any time. Looking for emails, collecting data to give them a real, um, a real decent briefing, which is what they needed. Another common scenario is, um. Contracts, um, whether we actually need a new contract. So somebody’s thinking about forming a contract with Flat Cap again, so, uh, uh oh, that’s right.

So they, so they’ve done a search of our system to see if there any contracts exist. So we can see that there are actually three contracts with Flat Cap. We’ve got an MSA, we’ve got an NDA and there’s already a statement of work. So they don’t need another MSA. They might be able to piggyback off this original one if they needed to.

They could also have a look at the matters as well, and they could see that we’re actually, we’ve got a, a performance dispute with flat cap. So they might want to think twice or have conversations about whether they actually do need to or should get into a relationship with, uh, with that party again.

Got it. And that was just one search. And we’ve got our contracts, matters, documents, everything coming back that full email history. Okay. So that’s a real, those are a couple really good examples of. You know, individual matters and contracts going through their lifecycle. If we zoom back out, what’s another benefit or another way that we can see the benefits of having matters and contracts in one system?

It’s your data, the data that you wanna have access to. Instead of being spread across multiple different software solutions, you’ve got all of your data going into, into one place. So if I was to have a look at my general counsel dashboard, uh, it’s capturing those key summary information about the matters that the team’s working on, the contracts that are working on with, with the team and within the business.

Um, and also giving me information about the performance of our external legal providers as well. So I can see, um, how many we’re working with and, and, um, how much work is going their way. So I can, I can drill down into those if I needed to, or I could actually have some more, uh, detailed. Reports specific to the matters.

Uh, so I’ve got my matter reports, um, which will give me the information about the various types of matters that we’re working on. Turnaround times risk and so on, and departments. Um, the same for contracts as well. It gives me data about all the different types of contracts that we’re working on. Um, and also the external spend with our, um, external law firms as well.

This is all out of the, out of the box reporting that collects data just by you using the system. So, okay. So one more thing. What about for the business? What about the intake side of the equation? The business? Um, so we, we engage with the business through our business portal, um, which is the place where the business can go, and that’s one of the other advantages of having.

A single source of truth or a legal workspace is there’s one place where they go to if they need legal advice. Or whether they need to generate contracts or whether they’re looking for other, uh, policy related information, they can go to the business portal is what we, so this is like our legal front door for everything, the legal front door, perfect description.

Uh, in this case we’re, we’re looking at our portal here, which again, is configurable to suit the, um, the different organizations as to how you want it to be set up. But they can submit a legal request. They can submit a contract for review, or they can search the knowledge base. So the knowledge base. Is a location where we are capturing all the key information or key data and key documents, um, generated through the legal process.

So anything which is a precedent document that we want to have access to within the legal team. But also it allows us to surface information and provide that to the business as well. So the business doesn’t need to search the knowledge base, it doesn’t have to have access to all the information that we have access to, but we’re providing them with information to help them to solve some of their own problems.

Or you can give access to template documents. So you can automate your contracts, your NDAs, your certain matter services agreements, your statements of work, any document, any standard terms and conditions you can automate and allow the business to create or self-serve their own contracts right from the, uh, business portal without even engaging with legal.

And I guess that’s how a lot of that great data gets into the system in the first place, and that’s where it all begins. Okay. Well we’ve come full circle. Thank you very much. Thank you.