Scaling Legal Operations in Hypergrowth B2B Tech Companies

Intro

In this blog post, we'll explore the strategies and tools essential for legal departments in hypergrowth B2B tech companies. We'll share valuable insights, proven methods, and real-world experiences to help you navigate the demands of a fast-paced business landscape.

Author's background

As one of the founders of Canveo, David has felt the pain that we're talking about here. He spent more than 15 years in the legal industry, as a senior lawyer at a global law firm and as the head of legal of private and public tech companies. He co-founded Canveo because he wasn't happy with the solutions available. With Canveo, his intention is to contribute his part to making B2B contracting - finally - easier.

What should be the intention of implementing any contract management solution?

Legal processes often become bottlenecks in companies. The ideal solution would accelerate these processes without merely adding more personnel. The overarching theme is "enablement" – providing tools that offload work while maintaining risk control, and ensuring satisfaction.

However, not any solution will do. Specifically, it's important that it will not require the user to overly compromise in the way she currently does her daily work. When it comes to contracts, this means two things: one, the solution has to fully integrate with Microsoft Word, in a seamless manner, and two, the solution needs to handle sufficient complexity so that it doesn't break when the user is trying to do something a little bit more custom.

Contract Creation

The contract creation process can be initiated either by the legal team or the sales team. However, the latter should be more prevalent. A significant challenge is controlling risk, especially when documents are stored locally and frequently altered due to rapid company growth. Your system should allows access without copying, integrated seamlessly into platforms where sales teams operate, like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Slack.

Food for thought:

• How static or adaptable do you expect workflows in your CLM platform to be?
• How complex are the workflows you anticipate?
• What roles do you foresee for people involved in workflows?
• Will workflows involve external parties or only internal members of your organization?
• Will your workflows include individuals who aren't regular users of the CLM platform?

From Template to Contract

Transitioning from a template to a finalized contract involves merging information and deciding on the inclusion or exclusion of specific details. This process should be as automated as possible, pulling data from CRMs and ensuring the setup is user-friendly.

Food for thought:

• Will the system support clause-based or document-based contract drafting?
• Is the goal to enable non-legal users to draft contracts, or will it be reserved for legal specialists?
• How much guidance do users need to select the right template?
• How fluidly can the system transition from automated document drafting to manual adjustments?

Negotiation Phase

Traditional negotiation involves multiple versions, leading to increased time, risk, and costs. A more efficient approach would be to have a single source of truth, similar to platforms like Google Docs. However, Google Docs itself doesn't work, because of negotiation privacy. You don't want your counterparty to have immediate access to everything you do in the document. Otherwise, you're required to create a separate version for your internal negotiations. Any tool that you use needs to be tailored to the process of contract negotiation. It should allow for easy exportation and maintain all data when doing so, akin to music being available across various mediums without loss of quality.

Food for thought:

• Do you intend for negotiations to take place “within” the CLM platform?
• Should your CLM platform allow for opening a shared space with the counterparty?
• Do you plan to enable users to use parallel editing of a document in real time?
• Should the software contain your organization’s negotiation playbook?
• How does the tool treat cases where a draft contract is downloaded from the tool, changed, and then uploaded?

Approvals

The approval process can be tedious - just think of taking screenshots and sending them around via email or Slack. Not only is it a manual headache, but this also doesn't create a great audit trail. Two years after signing, you will be hard pressed to find out who approved what. Ideally, approvals should be in the same location as the final contract, with minimized steps.

Guidance

Machine Learning Models (LLMs) like GPT, Gemini, and Llama 2 are becoming commonplace. While they can be powerful, especially for individual clauses, they aren't foolproof. There's still a need for human oversight, by actual lawyers.

Even if you don't incorporate AI APIs, for example because you are concerned by data privacy issues, your tool should allow your legal team to provide guidance on topics and clauses manually.

Signing the Contract

The signing process should be straightforward, accommodating different esignature tiers and requirements specific to countries.

Food for thought:

• Do you require an e-signature integration with your organization’s e-signature provider?
• How does the tool handle ink-on-paper signatures?

Contract Management

Contracts aren't static documents; they need to be visible and accessible. Whether companies opt for PDF storage or a more comprehensive strategy, the system should allow for lossless import/export.

Food for thought:

• What exactly are you planning to store in the tool?
• Should the tool provide a pre-defined structure for storing these files, or should users be enabled to create ad hoc structures?
• How will diverse documents be stored that are relating to one another?
• How will the CLM platform enable you to search/filter through your contracts?

Communication Concept

Even if the negotiation takes place directly in the tool, there's still the question on how the accompanying messages are treated when you share an agreement.

Food for thought:

• How much of the communication happening around contract management does your organization expect to capture within the CLM platform?
• Are you expecting the tool to offer rich commenting/chat functionality?

Analytics

Contracts should be as visible as possible. You may not know it now, but there will come the day where you need to answer a granular question across hundreds of contracts. The system you choose should be able to tag and classify your contracts accordingly, enabling you to run detailed reporting, rather than having to go over all your contracts manually.

Food for thought:

• What do you want to learn about your contracts, or about the processes that relate to contracts?
• Are you interested in data-driven insights about performance issues along the Contract Lifecycle?
• Do you plan to use AI/NLP to support the extraction of relevant information from a contract automatically?

In Conclusion

There a lot to think about when going about scaling your legal operations within a hypergrowth company. Canveo has been designed with these challenges in mind, ensuring that workflows are adaptable to the tool rather than the other way around. The focus remains on user satisfaction and the intricate details that drive adoption.

Are you ready to take your contracts to the next level? Book your Canveo Demo today!

About Canveo Ltd.

‍Canveo is a leader in contract automation software. With data centers located in Switzerland, it helps businesses all over the world digitze and streamline their contracting processes. Through its econtracts, it gives companies an easy way to create, negotiate, esign and manage agreements - dramatically reducing the time it takes to complete an agreement, with a fully digital and collaborative contract management platform. Designed as an intuitive and simple contract management software, it is capable of handling the most complex B2B use cases (including contract negotiation) - the perfect extension to electronic signature. This is CLM software for digital contracts.

‍www.getcanveo.com