Law Department Management Blog
Marketing material from Business Integrity distributed at the recent LegalTech Conference tells an impressive tale about how three law departments have worked with the company’s DealBuilder software to automate chunks of three contract processes.
For example, Rosemary Martin, global general counsel at Reuters, explains how her legal department deploys the software to help sales executives and contract negotiators “generate consistent and legally pre-approved sales agreements in seconds by updating a few business questions on a browser-based questionnaire.” The software produces PDF contracts in English, Spanish or Portuguese.
Microsoft has used DealBuilder to tame its monstrous demand for end-user licenses. The Legal and Corporate Affairs group now assembles licenses much more quickly and confidently. Furthermore “DealBuilder records and captures the business information enshrined in each document. The contract ‘metadata’ can then be analyzed and made available to other corporate systems.” Someone can search the library of license agreements, say, for all of them executed by companies based in France.
The final example comes from Cisco (See my post of June 16, 2006 with more details on the NDA capability.). The Business Integrity handout includes background material from the GC Roundtable. That material describes the entire Cisco initiative, which also generates sales contracts and licensing agreements, and consumed approximately $500,000 in development and external consulting costs.
These are three powerful examples of the benefits that can come to a law department that invests in automating the process by which routine agreements are generated (See my posts of Aug. 31, 2005 about Schering-Plough Canada and its use of document assembly; and Jan. 16, 2006 about document assembly at McDonalds.).