A couple months ago we shared some insight into the changing legal market, including new competition faced by law firms in recent years and the resulting new career paths we’re seeing for legal professionals. In addition to the emergence of alternative legal service providers, law firm subsidiaries and innovation divisions and expanding corporate legal operations, another area we’re seeing with exponential growth is in contract analytics.
The contract lifecycle management market has seen significant investment of late. Evisort, for example, recently raised $100m in capital, including equity and venture capital financing; and CLM provider Ironclad landed $150m in Series E funding while LinkSquares received $100m in Series C funding. As noted by Artificial Lawyer, LexCheck, an NLP-powered contract negotiation tool, recently raised an additional $5m of seed funding, indicating that investors remain hungry for early-stage legal technology tools.
Last month I had the opportunity to attend the annual CLOC conference, held in person for the first time in a couple years. Being back face-to-face was certainly welcome after seeing people only virtually for so long. Several topics under the umbrella of contracts were addressed as part of the conference educational content, and 40% of the vendors attending are involved with contracts, making it one of the primary areas of focus for the event overall.
Among the excellent educational sessions presented was one titled, “Supercharge Your Career with Contract Analytics.” The session’s impressive panel included moderator Marla Crawford, General Counsel at Cimplifi; Matt Durney, Esq., Senior Manager, CLM Specialist, also at Cimplifi; Christina Wojcik, Esq., Director Innovation at Citi; and Julian Tsisin, Director, Head of Legal Technology at Meta (fka Facebook.) Having worked with legal technology professionals for more than two decades, I welcomed their expert insight about this emerging area of growth.
Among other interesting points, the panel discussed how legal technology professionals with experience in other areas often possess skill sets that are transferable to contract work. As organizations continue to prioritize and increase their investments in contract analytics and contract lifecycle management solutions, particularly amid a tight labor market, they are wise to seek talent from outside the narrow pool of those with direct experience in contracts. Specifically, the panel identified eDiscovery professionals among those with the skills for contracts.
In fact, with the EDRM expanding, privacy, data security and contract analytics are becoming required knowledge areas for many legal operations professionals. These critical areas are increasingly integrated, and law departments can gain efficiencies by using common processes, principals and workflows of AI, analytics and automation routinely used eDiscovery and parlay them to contract analytics and lifecycle management applications. The session panelists further discussed how creating cross-functional teams of model builders and contract reviewers can be applied and scaled to delivery across both eDiscovery and contract cases.
Legal technology professionals seeking new opportunities to apply their diverse skills sets in different areas have more options than ever. And hiring managers willing to cast a wide net and consider talent of diverse backgrounds are finding the best candidates to fill positions in the ever-growing area of contracts.
- Chris Egan