American multinational technology company IPsoft has swapped out its SpringCM contract lifecycle management system for ContractPodAi, citing its strength as a contract management as opposed to broader document management system.
Led by general counsel and corporate secretary Jerry Levine, IPsoft, which has a legal team of seven, began moving to ContractPodAi in around June last year, with legal going live in November and the sales team in January.
ContractPodAi provides end-to-end contract lifecycle management, from contract generation to negotiation and signature. In July last year the company secured $55m in Series B funding led by Insight Partners. Its customers include Bosch Siemens, EDF Energy, Total Petroleum, Benjamin Moore and Freeview.
IPsoft, which focuses on producing AI systems and is the company behind ‘digital colleague’ Amelia, has a workforce of just over 100. It uses Salesforce and Workday and speaking to Legal IT Insider Levine said: “This was a move from a document first system. I divide contract management into contract first and document first. Contracts first records the lifecycle of the transaction and means you can find the important details quickly. Document first means you can file and read the documents and the real problem is that people just upload every copy that my legal team then have to go through.
“With ContractPodAi you get the final contract. If you have a master agreement the only agreement is the master agreement. Yes, you can store and link to documents, but you can’t upload seven different documents in the same workflow.”
Despite the COVID-19 lockdown IPsoft is able to continue working remotely with some ease because its systems are all in the cloud. Levine says: “The fact of the matter is that lawyers don’t need to be in an office to do their job. We have been able to manage this regardless of where our workforce is, which is just as well.”
IPsoft has seen some of its customers asking for copies of documents because they can’t access them and Levine says: “I’m proud that we are able to – the only thing that we need to be connected to VPN for is in six weeks when we need to change our password. Otherwise we’re working in Teams, ContractPodAi and Zoom.”
The hiccups have come from gaps in training and Levine says: “We didn’t train for the purpose of working at home and for a significant period of time.” However, any issues are being added to the ContractPodAi remote training schedule.
While lawyers are no longer able to walk into one another’s offices Levine says that the process of generating and delivering work hasn’t changed and he says: “If I have to turn to my team they are all already tightly knit and have the ability to go into Teams. We’re in Office 365 so you can download a document in OneDrive for Business and set as shared directory, so whether we’re sharing a screen or working in the same document it’s been a fairly straightforward. It’s harder for people who worked next to each other but we’re always able to collaborate globally – if you’re in a global organisation that’s something you should already be able to do or will have to be able to do very quickly.”
