JULY 2019CIOAPPLICATIONSEUROPE.COM9· Due diligence: This is the process by which a buyer of or an investor in a company, asset or business investigates the target to obtain sufficient information about the target's business to help decide whether the proposed transaction represents a sound commercial investment. It is essentially an audit of the target's legal, business and financial affairs. During the due diligence process the target generally creates a dataroom (usually online) storing relevant records of the target for the buyer or investor to review. Features of LegalTech solutions in this space include helping generate more accurate due diligence reports in a faster timescale and the use software based on ML to carry out tasks such as finding and collecting clauses from the contracts loaded onto a dataroom for review by the lawyer, potentially improving lawyer output by claims of 20-40% .· E-Disclosure: In the field of disputes, parties in many jurisdictions are obliged to preserve and disclose to their opponent documents pertaining to the dispute including electronically stored information. E-Disclosure is the process of identifying, preserving, collecting, filtering, reviewing and disclosing such electronically stored information. e-Disclosure LegalTech solutions can assist with this process, collecting the data without damaging its integrity and automatically organising such data in an efficient and cost effective manner.· Contract review: Companies entering into agreements with suppliers or customers will generally do so on either their own, the supplier's or customer's terms which can vary significantly. Where using the other party's terms, such terms will need to be reviewed and negotiated depending on the risks identified. The process can be slow and costly, and is prone to human error.LegalTech solutions here include features that automatically and quickly locate certain pre-specified information in contracts (e.g. liability clauses and termination rights), and display the results through an interface helping users refine or organize results.A relatively recent example of adopting LegalTech was the introduction of an e-signature and contract management solution for Inmarsat's non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). The set up and adoption of the solution was fairly straightforward, easier in fact than agreeing the internal process we wanted automating, finalising the agreement template to be used and rolling out the internal training. Since going live, the business benefits have included providing the business with the means to self-service its NDA requirements, speeding up the time to executeNDAs, providing greater control over the integrity of the agreements, ensuring all the required data fields are completed, providing automatic prompts where steps haven't been completed and keeping a centralised store of the signed NDAs.How to approach LegalTech?For every LegalTech success story there are plenty of war stories and the legal industry is by no means immune from getting things wrong. The reasons for a failed adoption of Legal Tech vary from a lack of buy-in from the wider legal team and business, a failure to align user requirements with solution functionality, the solution doing one or more tasks brilliantly but others less well (and therefore fails as a whole), a lack of training in the use of the solution, the adopted solution fixing a problem but not the right problem. In fact, the same reasons for the failure of tech adoption in any number of other industries.One message that comes though time and time again when LegalTech is discussed is that those looking to adopt LegalTech should start with the problem and then work to find a solution. This means assessing your processes and procedures, identifying any problem areas and then approaching the market to see what solutions can address those problems and working forwards from there. LegalTech when applied in the right way and for the right use case can be a great advantage for legal departments but there is a cost which will need justifying
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