With CLM, The Pre-Sign/Post-Sign Contract Dichotomy May Have Outlived Its Usefulness

// You’d be forgiven if you showed up at the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium Global Institute convinced that “CLM” had a stable, uniform definition. How much variation can “Contract Lifecycle Management” offer? Maybe it’s the litigator in me speaking, but you make a deal, you live with the deal, you terminate the deal.

But it turns out the differences in CLM offerings go a lot deeper. While some legal tech offerings are distinguished by variations on the same theme — this is faster, this has more security accolades, this has better support — the differences in CLM products have an almost philosophical edge.

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That sounds exaggerated, and maybe it is. What I’ll say is that I sat down at a table with four legal operations folks and listened as they compared notes. Without getting into the particulars, one said, “We just implemented X, because for our company we needed something that could deal with a high volume of relatively simple contracts, but if you are looking to pull more datapoints from your deals, you should consider Y.” That’s not a conversation that happens in, say, eDiscovery where everyone’s looking to just do the job better — this space is marked by vendors with fundamentally distinct approaches.

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The idea that there’s a healthy dose of philosophy involved in the space brings me to Evisort. Back in 2020 — right before the world went haywire — I checked in with the then-small company to see an impressive demo. Today, the company announced a $100 million raise driven by TCV.

“Every time an organization buys, sells, hires, or otherwise transacts, it creates a contractual data layer. We created Evisort because it is absolutely critical for organizations to easily access and manage this data inside their contracts. We couldn’t be more grateful for the trust of our hundreds of customers to build this innovative technology with us,” said Evisort Co-Founder and CEO Jerry Ting. “Now, we will accelerate this momentum as these additional funds will supplement our existing capital to further our vision for making contract operations stronger and more meaningful than ever.”

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Funding aside, catching up with Ting in 2022, I learned that Evisort has undergone a simple but substantial philosophical shift that separates it from a lot of the CLM conversation.

“When we talk about contracts, we have pre-sign and post-sign. I even used to talk that way. But our new thinking is that the contract doesn’t stop when signed.” Contracts beget other agreements. Companies execute new deals off old ones. The line defined by the signature isn’t necessarily a dividing line.

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Evisort performs the usual CLM tasks too — letting corporate counsel know they have deals they forgot about expiring in a week — but based on this holistic lifecycle philosophy, Evisort’s AI treats the contract as a more fulsome relationship document, allowing it to provide data insights both upstream into client relations functions and downstream into budgeting functions. Vendor onboarding, Know Your Customer, all these other tangential functions of a working relationship. At that point, is CLM still the right term for something this expansive?

Dwight Krossa, VP of Product at Evisort, explained that “CLM is focused in the legal department, but it touches everywhere. In order to have agility it needs to be pushed down to the people facing the customers.” Evisort puts the contract on one side of the screen for the lawyers and the pulled data points on the other so the business side can understand with a glance what’s in the agreement without having to constantly step the process back to legal.

To quote one of the legal operations managers from the conversations above, “Evisort is really useful if you need to be pulling a lot of data from your contracts — they pull so much data.”

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That’s probably why they’ve trademarked the term “Datatize.” Sorry, DatatizeTM. Got to use those fancy formatting options when I can.

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

Topics

CLOC 2022, Evisort, In-House Counsel, Technology