Find the right support for your organization’s needs, or learn how to become a ThoughtRiver partner and offer tech-led services.
One of the many benefits offered by ThoughtRiver is the opportunity to become an authorized ThoughtRiver partner. It’s the perfect scenario for all parties.
- At ThoughtRiver we take pride in our legal tech product knowledge, building solutions to help legal professionals become better lawyers. We also recognize that our law firm partners have greater expertise in delivering those legal services using our platform. So we do what we do best, leaving law firms to deliver their areas of expertise.
- Our partners get to create new revenue streams by combining the power of ThoughtRiver with their specific fields of excellence. Ambitious law firms can build tech-led services that are cost-effective and operationally efficient. It’s a great way to attract new clients who are looking for a law firm that embraces technology to deliver fast and accurate services that won’t break the bank.
- Which leads us nicely into the third beneficiary: the end client. Clients can outsource work they either don’t want to do themselves, or lack the internal resources to do so. When choosing a firm to provide contract reviews (amongst other legal services), we’re seeing that they’re more inclined to opt for a tech-led firm – primarily because they get highly accurate delivery, at speed, and for a competitive price.
Let’s take a look at the five types of services offered by ThoughtRiver partners.
1. Playbook creation
The first partner service is to configure a corporate client’s risk playbook into ThoughtRiver to create a digitized version. This is typically to build a bespoke playbook that serves the needs of a particular use case that is a common occurrence or important for the client.
There are a number of steps required to build a bespoke risk playbook based on ThoughtRiver’s out-of-the-box capabilities. For example, our specialist partner will create ‘properties’, which are specific legal questions that the platform will ask when reviewing the contract. They will then need to decide whether the answer to the questions poses risk or not, and if it does, what advice should be served up to the user.
This advice will typically state where the risk is located, why it is risky, and recommended next steps. ThoughtRiver also allows users to drop in approved replacement text for a clause with a simple click, so all these approved clauses will need to be written in advance.
It’s easy to see how a wide range of knowledge and experience is required to follow all these steps. This is why a corporate client will want to employ a ThoughtRiver partner to deliver this service on their behalf. It’s simply too much hassle to do it themselves – which is great news for the partner looking to sell in these playbook configuration services. Because once they’ve developed the knowledge and capabilities, they can sell it into multiple clients and cash in.
2. Partner-approved playbooks
This service is not too dissimilar to our first example. But in this case, our partners don’t take a corporate client’s risk playbook and digitize it for the ThoughtRiver platform, but will instead create a bespoke playbook for them from scratch.
Again, this is no small undertaking. The client tells the partner what they’re looking to achieve and their commercial objectives, and the partner will create one on their behalf.
The process to accomplish this is as described above: properties need to be created to ask the relevant legal questions of the contract; advice notes need to be written; and approved drop-in text needs to be created. It’s a job that requires a combination of legal skills and technical expertise.
3. Managed services
ThoughtRiver enables law firms to productize their managed services offering. This is when clients outsource their entire contract reviews to the firm to conduct on their behalf.
A good example of this is Foley Equipped, recently launched by Foley & Lardner LLP. The solution is powered by ThoughtRiver and harnesses AI to quickly identify and prioritize missing and important provisions during contract review.
Foley Equipped makes it possible for Foley’s clients to have agreements reviewed faster, leading to more closed deals all while mitigating risk. It’s the sort of service clients love because they use a tech-enabled law firm to deliver vital services – and it’s made even more cost-effective because it’s driven by AI technology.
4. AI training
As already mentioned, when you want to configure ThoughtRiver to add specific legal questions on top of its out-of-the-box capabilities, you have to create new ‘properties’. There are specialist skills needed to do this, which is why some organizations will ask one of our partners to do this for them.
However, other users will want to develop this capability internally. So our fourth type of ThoughtRiver partner service concerns AI training to allow organizations to add new properties whenever needed. It combines legal and AI knowledge to enable companies to develop the labeling skills they need to build bespoke questions when conducting their contract reviews.
Creating properties carries a certain element of risk. If done incorrectly, it could fail to find the unsatisfactory wording that the business thinks it’s protecting itself from – and inadvertently expose the company to higher levels of risk. This is why our partners’ training skills are invaluable to ensure it’s done right.
5. Analytics-led projects
The four services listed so far are all pre-signature, revolving around configurations and capabilities to automate contract reviews. Our fifth type of service is post-signature, as it concerns analytics-led projects.
Your contracts contain huge amounts of important information. But accessing that information can be slow and labor-intensive – which is particularly worrying when external factors change and existing contracts need to be checked to see how obligations have changed. For example, which contracts have price index clauses, and how does it affect your organization? How has Schrems II impacted your contracts?
When you need to quickly understand the scale of potential problems hidden in your contracts, relying on slow manual checks can be costly. ThoughtRiver digitizes contracts at the point of initial review, which makes it far faster and more efficient to search for specific data points. This is the final service we’ll touch on in this blog – ThoughtRiver partners who are experts in scrutinizing a whole portfolio of contracts to uncover powerful analytics.
Multiple services, multiple partners
ThoughtRiver partners offer specialist skills and knowledge to remove the friction from contract reviews and contract analytics.
If you’re a law firm or data specialist looking for new revenue opportunities, why not speak to us to learn how to become a ThoughtRiver partner and attract new clients through tech-led services?
If you’re looking for a partner to deliver any of the services we’ve outlined here, we offer a global range of trusted partners who are experts in ThoughtRiver configuration, optimization, and service provision. Take a look and find the right partner for your specific needs.
