- Speaker #0
Bonjour à toutes et à tous, bienvenue à bord des étoiles du droit et de l'innovation, le podcast qui vous propulse dans l'univers juridique de demain. Je suis Quentin Ramaget, juriste en droit des sociétés, LegalOps et fondateur de LegalJedi. J'accompagne les directions juridiques et les cabinets d'avocats dans leurs projets de transformation. Je les aide à trouver l'équilibre dans la force, entre l'humain et la technologie. Je les aide à ne pas tomber du côté obscur, du fameux on a toujours fait comme ça Mais assez parlé de moi. If you are here, it is especially that you want to hear the story of these real adventurers and visionaries of law. They come to us from four corners of the legal galaxy. They are jurists, lawyers, notaries, legal tech editors, entrepreneurs, but above all, passionate. In this podcast, you will discover captivating exchanges with these pioneers who, like us, have a more modern, clearer and above all, more accessible place. So, join me in the return of these revolutionary spirits who redefine the contours of our professions. Enjoy! for the auditors may I can ask you to introduce a bit yourself where you come from in the legal galaxy and where you plan to go yeah of course well thank you for having me
- Speaker #1
I started off kind of in the legal galaxy that's a nice way of describing it I started off as a real estate lawyer about 15 years ago now at a kind of a large UK firm as it was at the time and They invested in some legal tech when the first recession hit because they wanted to at that point kind of think, how are we going to still make as much money when there's less money around? So they invested in some automation software and I was the lawyer chosen to roll it out to my team. And I just absolutely loved it and thought this is actually really fun trying to improve the way we work. And I'm. I'd rather do this as a career than go back to being a lawyer and fee earning because there was so little about legal tech at that time around. Whereas today, you know, it's a it's a really big kind of industry, a booming industry. But then there really wasn't that many. So I was like it was those early days and I was excited to be part of it. I thought there's so much more we could do to help the way lawyers practice by introducing tech. So this is something I want to stay in. So. stayed at that firm helping to roll out and implement legal technology and improvements there for four years and then 10 years ago I set up BAM Legal and started doing it for lots of different law firms and I've been lucky enough to work with with many many law firms around the world also in-house legal teams as well and more and more these days we also work with like new law firms or alternative legal service providers that are wanting to kind of offer their service in a different way. So that's where I started and where I am now.
- Speaker #0
And to come back on your company, so it's BAM Legal. Basically, you have analyzed and you went through mainly all the document automation tools which exist on the market. Can you just give some tips, some examples on how huge was this work to... test and to try all the the tools to set up also your checklist uh with many many features uh i saw that you you grouped them within 12 main fields but each of them i assume have uh tens of uh
- Speaker #1
sub features you have you have tried how how was it yeah so so document automation we do lots of diff we help clients with lots of different types of technology but document automation is kind of my specialist area if you like and it's where I started at that law firm and for years I've been helping businesses with document automation and so I constantly get approached by software companies saying can we show you our software we do things differently and it will be interest to all your clients so I was seeing all these demos anyway and then clients would come to us and go What should we buy? Which software is the best software for us in our particular use case? So we thought there's why are we, you know, not just kind of seeing these demos and making it public or collecting that information for everyone? And also, people don't often know what the right. things for them are because they've never done it before. So I'll give you an example. There's an in-house team might want to document automation tool to allow all of their sales team to insert the deal details to get the sales contract themselves to self-serve. So for them, buying a software that is paid for by a per user license model. is not the right model for them because they might have like 4,000 salespeople, but they only use it once or twice a year. So for them, it might be per template model. Some of the software providers only do per user model. For others, it might be a bank, and they really want to make sure that it's, you know, the top security of client data. For them, there's a lot of software providers out there that maybe don't have... particular accreditation security accreditations like the iso standard for them they're just not even going to get through their first round of procurement so there's no point in them even applying um there's others that maybe want to do thousands of quite simple one page ndas and for those they don't need a tool that can do really complex automation they probably need something a little bit cheaper that's more form-filling And then there's others that want to do really complex banking facility agreements. So they need to do be able to handle tables, calculations, suite lots of documents together. So what we did was we came up with what we thought all those differences were. And we came up with 75 key requirements that fit into those 12 categories that you mentioned. So it's stuff like functionality, security, commercial model. integrations what they can integrate with you know some people insist that they've got to be able to integrate with salesforce others it's got to be able to integrate with docusign or you know whatever they may be um and we ran we ran the software through those we didn't go through all 250 with that level of detail we did narrow it down to start with to kind of top 20 and then we've gone on and we sent those out and we just sent out the questionnaires to the vendors which means when clients come to us now we take those them through those 75 things go what's important to you and then we can run it against the database and come up. So it was just it was almost like a for free side project that we did because we were kind of getting that information anyway. So it's like why don't we put it in a nice easy form. So it's not actually on the main BAM legal website it's just called the DocAuto database and it's there for everyone to just go on and just click a few top level requirements to narrow down kind of what might be right for them.
- Speaker #0
i remember i i used the website a few years ago when i implemented a document automation tool in a in a law firm also in exxonburg and uh and it's very important what you say that each use case is different so it won't be the same automation tool for a law firm for in house legal team in a bank or in another industry um people often ask some friends and call it hey which document automation tool do you use Okay, you can have some recommendations to your friends and your colleagues, but it's important to remember that each need is different and there is almost one solution for each need. Exactly. And what is your advice? Because I see that more and more people are a bit confusing about automation mainly since the increase of CLM, so Contract Life Management System, because... more and more CLM tool also offer kind of automation, mainly for contract. Often it's only some features to have a blank field in a contract template and just populate the field, but you don't have the option, the conditions. So it's not really automation tool. And more and more people are confusing because they think, okay, Yeah, automation tool, it's a CLM and I can automate contract. Yeah, but there is not only contract in the life of a lawyer or in-house legal people. I see in my daily job, I'm also in-house legal consultant and I need automation for corporate document for board minutes, convening notices, reports, etc. And the automation tool of a CLM does not allow or some maybe, but... not all CLM allow to automate this kind of thing. So what is your opinion on that? And do you see the same confusion also in the UK about CLM offering automation and really true automation tool specialized for automation?
- Speaker #1
Definitely recognize those kind of... problems or issues around CLM and the confusion. And we also get in-house clients come to us and say, which CLM tool should we buy? And when people say they want a CLM tool, the reasons for wanting one are very, very different. We had one large client, a French insurance client actually come to us and say, we need a CLM tool. And their reasons was that they needed a intelligent search capability on a very good robust repository so that if they were audited, they could find all of their contracts and all of the details they needed to at the touch of a button. Other people come to us and say we need a CLM tool because they want to speed up pre-signature. They want workflow. They want to be able to triage. and escalate a matter if it needs to go to someone else for approval because of a certain thing and they're very two very different things and when you assess the clm tools you find that some are really good at the workflow part some are really good at the repository part and all of the other tasks that they offer in between like some of them will say and we can also automate the document from what you've put during the intake But as you alluded to there, often that's not a very high level of automation. So it may be that it produces a form or a field. So it comes back. The advice is before you buy any technology, it's to really clearly map out your requirements as to what you need technology to help you to do. And then assess, is that one tool? Or is that a number of tools that maybe integrate together? So I just had a meeting this morning, for example, with Simon Black from Lexical Labs, and they do contract review. And they're talking to Kim Technologies, who do document automation, to see if together they can be all the modules of a CLM for a particular client that they're talking to. You know, so it's the main tip is to really not jump. to looking even having demos of tech until you've really and and get in an expert to help you because it's actually quite hard to get out of your head what you need so get someone in to almost go let's map out your requirements let's workshop this so that you can articulate what you want and need and then assess the tools based on how well they match those things that you've said are really important you know moderately important nice to have but not that important you know and i think where a lot of of tech projects fail is that something's been bought without doing that step and then the users the lawyers or whoever the the end users are are underwhelmed because it doesn't actually satisfy what they needed the tech for in the first place yeah
- Speaker #0
sure and what is difficult as you said is do do we have to take one tool being able to cover all the needs, or is it preferable to have different specialist tool, like one for CLM, like a repository, another one for automation, another one for workflow, and combine them with API or whatever. It's really difficult for lawyers or in a legal counsel who have not tech knowledge. More and more people start having some tech knowledge. But most of them have legal knowledge. So navigating within this technology market to understand what is API, how tools can discuss together. Because what is good with having only one tool is that everything is centralized and it seems easier. But at the same time, not many tools offer the wide range of...
- Speaker #1
features and etc whereas the resource the resource available you know it's it's it's not many people have kind of you know you don't have developers to do those integrations or do maintenance changes so that's why you want to buy one thing that's a low code thing that you can tweak yourself if you need to um but then unfortunately yeah then there might be functionality and features that just aren't the highest performance um One thing we are seeing, though, is and one tip I would definitely give people to start with is. thinking about where your lawyers currently work and with advancements that we're having in technology at the moment, almost having, you know, for example, you know, I've seen some lovely stuff built for like global in-house large enterprises just using the Microsoft Suite and some other tools. So they've got a document automation tool behind it. They've got a repository behind it. but the lawyers don't see no one sees the doc auto tool and no one sees the repository they are just working in the microsoft suite as normal and then they when they click a link within teams or click a link within sharepoint then they have their doc auto questionnaire to complete their contract when they do it it's being saved into their repository key data from the contracts are being extracted and put somewhere else that it can be interrogated but that's just again another find button where they currently work they don't see they don't have to go and log in to another platform and piece of software and i think that's where we definitely need to get out of because you don't want to have five different logins for five different tasks that you carry out day to day as a lawyer yeah even
- Speaker #0
if you have the sso you don't want to log into the repository and then to the automation and then the electronics initial tool it becomes more complicated than doing things manually. To go back on document automation, well, something I often see that people think they are ready to automate because they need it, but they don't realize that the pre-work or the pre-automation work is really important because having a Word template with just a few words into brackets as field is not a template ready for automation because to automate a document you need to to have written and understand all the the conditions the or even the loop the the fields the whatever in your document so many people underestimate the time to be to be ready for automation the the what is your your tip to be prepared for document automation?
- Speaker #1
Simple things to start with, making sure actually just even that your document, your Word document is formatted correctly, your house style has been applied, all of those just nice things of having your document ready, is really helpful to have before you start the automation, because putting anything in after, it's just ultimately is slightly more getting your document. agreed with any peers or colleagues first so that you're not halfway down and then someone goes oh no that's not the wording I put in I want to put this wording in and then you're trying to change it again but one thing I would say that like over the years is what everyone's kind of done and actually I'm coming around to the idea that it's not the best way so people always when they started to come up with what are the questions you to fill in the square brackets people would start with the document in front of them okay so they'd look at the document and go okay there's a square bracket there what's that asking okay that's asking the rent deposit oh there's a square bracket there what's that asking right that's asking the landlord's name say we're talking about alicia um a better way to do it to make sure your automation gets done in a way that works well is rather being led by the document It's a bit like we have the expression in English, like tail wagging the dog, rather than the dog wagging the tail. It's like the tail wagging the dog. That's it. Rather, put the paper aside and go. So let's say, for example, it is a real estate lease. What are the questions that we would need to, what's the information we would need to know from our client to be able to draft a lease? So not looking at the document, just. as a lawyer coming up with what are the questions we would ask to do a corporate share purchase agreement and writing those first and then sharing those with colleagues so almost just writing the questionnaire first and going do we agree that these are the key things to consider when any of these documents and then apply it to the document so rather document first questions first because that way then if the document doesn't work for those questions you change the drafting of the document rather than trying to design your coding of the automation to fit a poorly drafted document in the first place. Does that make sense? It's quite a hard to explain. And that's something that, you know, it that's taken me almost 10 years to realize, oh, maybe I've not been recommending people do things, or I've not been doing things right myself. Because I've seen the success with, so tools like Document Drafter, for example, are doing extremely well. in the DocuVote world at the moment. And it's they take that approach and it's enabling people to get so much further, so much faster. So I'm seeing how that's working in practice. Sure.
- Speaker #0
It's interesting what you say because if you put the question first, it means that you put yourself in the end user's shoes. whereas if you start with the documents you you remain the the lawyer or the in-house legal consult thinking about your legal document etc whereas if you put the question first okay what will the end user maybe it will be the lawyer himself at the end but if the questionnaire is put at the disposal of the of the client or whatever then what is the information i would ask what yeah it's and it's really important to to think first about the end user uh because yeah often often we are stuck in our in our automation project and we we still think as a as a lawyer or as a legal professional instead of thinking about an user and which only wants to answer a few questions it doesn't matter what is happening behind with with documents and and something which is sometimes difficult uh for legal professional because the the speakers specific language there so that it's not the the best quality of legal people to to put themselves in the in client shows so it's a it's something really really important and uh if you would give some your best advice or your best tips to start a document automation project but when when to start, how to start, what are the Catherine's best tips for this?
- Speaker #1
If we are thinking about starting what you might think of as a single project, so how do I automate this document or this set of documents for this type of transaction? The things we've discussed already, so make sure that you've already decided your house style and your documents are all there ready, how you want them to appear when they're output it. Then I would say top tip would be to make sure that the subject matter expert, so the person that understands the document, has set aside time or you've got a bit of a project plan where it's like you've got an hour of their time every week or something like that. One of the main things that goes wrong is you've got someone that can do the automation but you don't have the time of the person that needs to be able to tell you the specific questions and actually understands the legal content. The ideal is that the person with the legal content and that mind can do it themselves. So you buy a tool that is very low code that allows them to do that. Always have a project plan and weekly catch ups, because also it's very, very easy when you've got client work to. you know that these kind of continuous improvement projects get pushed to the side because you're very very busy with an urgent client which is understandable but it can as soon as these things lose momentum and go on weeks um or months when they should be done you know in days then it's that's kind of painful so i would say like top tip on is just around your project management you're applying and making sure that the the resources there if you're starting a project where you don't have any software yet The first thing to do is to think about the type of documents within your organisation that you want to be automated. And then it's coming up with, as I said earlier, those requirements that are specific to you and what you needed to do before you even go anywhere near a demo of software. So that when you... see the softwares you can really assess whether or not they're the right fit for you because there's so many out there um it's and it's very easy to be impressed by really nice ux and a very you know kind of shiny product and a shiny sales team but if they can't do If they can't, for example, there's some that, you know, make it very, very easy to let's say you have a list of warranties and you need to pick which warranties do you include rather than having to answer 20 yes, no questions saying, do you need this warranty? Yes, no. Do you need this warranty? Yes, no. Do you need this one? They'll give you the ability to do what's called a multi selection answer. So you put them all in one question and they take what they want. But if they do that. If you think of what the computer is doing, it then needs to know, well, what's the punctuation rule on that? If they choose two rather than three or only one, is it a full stop and the clause finishes here? Or do we break it into sub clauses and paragraph? So all that kind of detail as to what you want your legal document to look like and the content. It's important to consider your requirements. So, again, I would say, you know, getting someone with experience to help you with that. we'll get you a lot further a lot faster but um obviously that sounds like me selling my own so i would just say don't look at any tech until you've really worked out the type of documents you need um and the requirements within those yeah it's
- Speaker #0
it's fun that you gave the example of the punctuation in the inner list because this is something i also uh i also take is that an example because we know that uh legal professional they like to have the beautiful document at the end but if you have a tool which is able to speed your production process but at the end you have the wrong punctuation and you need to add the the comma the final point by yourself manually you lose all those yeah the other one is automatic generation of table of contents so
- Speaker #1
if you have an automation tool that takes clauses in or out You want all of the cross-references to update, and you want the table of contents to update. Some of the tools look lovely, might be nicely priced, can cut and paste clauses in and out, but then they can't do simple things like that because they're not linked. They're like a clause base rather than a word add-in. So those kind of things are really important because, as you say, if they need to do all that afterwards, all the time they've saved doing the heavy lifting, they've then lost in having to do the boring stuff like,
- Speaker #0
checking the punctuation yeah it's the same with dates and numbers uh i know that's right in luxembourg we we have international clients but for the the notarial did uh the documents are usually in english with a french or german translation but we all know that dates and numbers in english and in french are quite different in english we have a a comma between the thousand whereas in french we have a space uh for the dates uh we have the the months first in english then the day number and then the year in french the reverse and if you don't have a tool which is able with a single number field to spread it into different uh format in the same document you will have at the end four times the same question what is the date in french what is the date in english what is the capital increase amount in figures also to be able to have the same number in both figures and letters and this is some some feature that legal people don't think they want something to populate fields but the all the the logical the constrained the conditions in the document that that's why the the preparation phase uh for automation is really important to really understand how each document is built from both a legal perspective from a format perspective for everything yeah and
- Speaker #1
and that's that's an example of something that most people wouldn't find out until they've already bought it and started to build it you know and I think it's lovely I really enjoy speaking to you because you really get it and you understand those nuances and the pain of the you know people that get this geeky about whether or not software can deal with like dates and currencies and commas and punctuations and Arabic's an interesting one as well you know a lot of the tools out there can only do text when it's written from left to right as opposed right to left you know and global law firms need to make sure they can they can cover that you know it's an entire region to cover so yeah it's a it's a problem that
- Speaker #0
you wouldn't know to ask unless you get someone with experience to help you ask those questions in the first place so um yeah by this podcast hopefully you're helping people to know these little details yeah and and maybe one
- Speaker #1
more question because we we may have some students also listening to us and uh all this uh legal tech fields are leading to a new job you because you were a lawyer, now you are a consultant, but you are also a legal engineer. What new jobs are you seeing more and more on the market to help people navigating these things?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, so there's so many new roles, and it's an exciting time to be getting into legal if you're interested in technology and how it can improve. the delivery of legal services. So there's legal engineer that kind of encompasses anyone that works with all of these softwares and tools to build out the automated systems for law firms, and law firms have their own legal engineers or you can work as a consultant outside. There's a lot of people also focused nowadays on, so there's law firms now are hiring more like analysts. just to keep up with all of the different products out there. So more of like a product analyst role. There's people more looking at like legal design, which is more around how the documents work in the first place. So there's like legal designers. There's, you know, when I was at DLA, I worked with some data scientists. You can do like kind of the more technical back-endy kind of roles where you get your hands on and you build. or there's a lot to be done around working with the lawyers to identify the problems and to process map what it is that they do and then there's even more client facing where you actually law firms now are offering themselves as consultants to their clients to say look this is how we've improved the delivery of our services internally the way our lawyers do it can we help you do it there's those client facing roles as well there's so much out there you know there's I was speaking to a lady the other day who's just finished uni and she's working for an organisation, a legal organisation that have brought in a Gen AI platform. And her role for the next six months is prompt engineering. So she's coming up with the prompts to better get out results when the lawyers want to know something. So, you know, just little things like if you type in what is the deposit? you might get a definition of a deposit. So you need to go, how much is the deposit? So when people talk about prompt engineering, I think sometimes people don't know what we're talking about. That's a very, very simple, very simple example of how the way you ask a question and insert the prompt will get you a different result in a legal context.
- Speaker #1
Sure. I think we are almost at the end. Do you? Do you want to give the auditors a final word or final tip from you?
- Speaker #0
Final tip, if we're specifically talking about document automation. Final tip, I think my brain has gone quenching in terms of my cold is fully coming out and I'm like it's time for more cold and flu tablets, I'm sorry. There's nothing to bring to mind. I think we've covered all of the top kind of things, I would suggest.
- Speaker #1
Maybe the tip is don't be afraid to move to automation, but be careful and prepare yourself because preparation is really important. And of course, if... If any legal professional are listening to us, don't hesitate to reach Catherine because she shares some things, but I'm sure she still has a lot of tips to share and advice to give to legal professionals. So thank you very much, Catherine, for joining today on the podcast. It was really great to have you and to share your view on document automation. the tips you can give the difference with clm and everything so thank you very much i look forward to speaking with you again
