We get the low down on the latest people/tech offering in town from new UK managing director Bridget Deiters
Silicon Valley-based alternative legal services provider InCloudCounsel is to launch in Europe, with its new London office led by former Kirkland & Ellis corporate and capital markets associate Bridget Deiters. The business also intends to launch in Asia-Pacific by the end of the year.
InCloudCounsel takes care of companies’ routine, high volume legal work via a remote network of lawyers and account managers using a proprietary cloud-based contract management platform.
Much like its potential competitors (in the UK that would include the likes of LOD) the company also sells itself on the alternative career path it can offer lawyers, allowing experienced professionals to continue to practice but with a more attractive work/life balance – a gig economy for the legal sector.
InCloudCounsel was founded by a trio of law, business and technology professionals. CEO Troy Pospisil previously worked at private equity firm HIG Capital, where he says he saw the frustrations of badly handled routine legal work. COO Ben Levi joined from Kirkland & Ellis, while CTO Lane Lillquist was the vice president of engineering at Uversity.
InCloudCounsel says that it has more than 300 highly qualified attorneys in its network and has handled more than 100,000 legal documents for “hundreds of clients”: its clients include Warburg Pincus,Oak Hill Capital Partners, Hamilton Lane, and Pine Brook.
We asked new UK managing director Bridget Deiters to explain a bit more about InCloudCounsel’s cloud platform, which is describes as a document management system. This is what she had to say:
How much of InCloudCounsel’s business model is driven by the corporate attorneys, and how much is driven by the platform itself?
Our business model is to deliver the best possible solution to the problem of high volume agreements. We use many ingredients to cook up our solution, with technology and top-tier corporate attorneys being two of the most important ones. We weave them together in a way where one plus one equals three. In other words, the software and the people are both critical and complementary elements of the value we deliver.
What is InCloudCounsel’s platform based on and how does it work?
Our proprietary software platform combines document management, abstracting (aided by AI), and reporting functionality to make routine legal document processes more efficient, more insightful, and yield a higher quality work output.
The attorneys working in our network use the platform over the course of an entire negotiation. Signing into the platform takes you to a Document Overview page, where our attorneys and clients can easily navigate all completed and ongoing work requests.
Clicking on a document will display all of its relevant details. Our attorney teams continually update an active document’s negotiation progress in a status window, displaying its history and current status. This page also stores all versions of an agreement as they become available.
A robust amount of business and legal data is captured in the platform by attorneys and AI. It’s then turned into an easy-to-reference scorecard that efficiently summarizes the material terms of a finalized agreement.
Our platform generates interactive reports that enable our clients to leverage their legal data to gain insights about their company and the broader market. They can filter their data or use preconfigured reports to identify trends in agreements over time, helping to make future negotiations more efficient and to easily track and comply with obligations.
What other platforms (if any) does InCloudCounsel compete with?
There are no other platforms that we know of that offer an end-to-end solution to solving the problems we address for our customers.