Like them or loath them, new years resolutions are here to stay. Could harnessing the power of AI for your contract reviews be one way to work towards your 2022 goals?
A new year heralds a fresh start. A chance to look at new ways of doing things and to reassess our professional and personal goals. For many of us, given the unprecedented change and uncertainty of the past two years, this will take on a fresh urgency in 2022 as we look to rebalance our lives and prioritize the things that really matter to us.
The lawyers and contract professionals we talk to daily here at ThoughtRiver have seen their working lives change irreversibly. Remote working, increasingly competitive global markets, supply chain concerns and the ‘great resignation’ among other stresses all add up to a uniquely challenging professional environment. It isn’t all doom and gloom, however; we’re seeing that these challenges can also be opportunities to reinvent job roles, change up old-fashioned ways of working, and invest in technology that helps improve both business outcomes and professional satisfaction.
Here we look at how legal technology can help you work towards some of the common goals we often strive for when we enter a new year.
Improve your work / life balance
The past couple of years have been tough. Many lawyers are working longer hours than ever before, reporting that they work long into the night with little prospect of respite or downtime. This echoes the macro trend amongst home workers during the pandemic, which has seen those able to work from home logging significantly more time at their computer. Long hours are taxing enough, but when combined with home working and the boundary blurring this often brings it is little wonder many in the profession are worried about burnout.
Work pressure will never end, and it looks like home and hybrid working will be with us for the foreseeable future. But that doesn’t mean we can’t wrestle back control and close the laptop early occasionally! How many times have you worked late reading page after page of an urgent deal, knowing you have several more that are also marked as urgent sitting waiting for you in your inbox? Utilising the power of AI for your contract review can help.
ThoughtRiver uses its proprietary and market-leading technology to perform a first review in moments, meaning contract review using our platform is up to 66% faster than a manual review alone. For example, ThoughtRiver customers Shoosmiths have seen their average time to review agreements cut from 4 hours to 40 minutes. This means you can get through more contracts more quickly, freeing up your time to focus on other things (be that wowing your boss or walking the dog!).
Embrace remote working
While home working can have its challenges, recent events have proven that many of us can do our jobs just as successfully from home as we can from the office, and that we want to continue to do so. It’s something that employers are beginning to embrace, with ‘work from anywhere’ policies meaning more and more people will be free to work from wherever they like. (Bali beaches, we’re looking at you!).
Of course, it isn’t all digital nomad Instagram pictures and being able to load the dishwasher at lunch. While there are lots of upsides to working remotely it still has its challenges. In particular, it can be significantly more difficult to communicate effectively with colleagues. For professionals tasked with reviewing and negotiating contracts (and all of the team coordination and colleague chasing this entails) this can mean an already frustrating job is made even harder.
This is where ThoughtRiver can help. We automatically review your contracts for risks and create an issues list of everything you might want to negotiate and / or review with colleagues. Having one central, sharable point of truth on the issues you are discussing in a contract makes it easier to keep track of where discussions get to, who you are waiting on for information, and what still needs to be done. No more time consuming, manually created issues lists or endless email trails – now that’s worth a like!
Secure that promotion
2022 looks set to be a good year for employees. The well-publicised war on talent is pushing up salaries and forcing employers to focus on reward and retention as key business strategies. If you can demonstrate your value to your business the time is ripe to push for that promotion, ask for that secondment, or take the lead on that key project.
And one way to do that? By implementing and using ThoughtRiver, of course. Not only does our software offer significant time savings on every contract reviewed, it also has the potential to speed up deal velocity. This incredibly useful, but often undervalued, metric is one that can make a significant impact to the bottom line. Simply put, deal velocity is the speed with which a company can negotiate and then sign a contract to close a transaction. It is absolutely key for any organisation in terms of maximising the full value of a deal, yet it is often overlooked as a KPI that can be measured and improved. Showing your employer that you can make meaningful changes to a key metric is a quick-fire way to gaining that promotion.
Move jobs
More than 40% of employees across the world say they are considering quitting their job or switching career, and the legal profession is no exception. If the time has come for you to look to pastures new, experience of implementing, using and understanding legal technology such as ThoughtRiver will make your CV stand out against the competition.
Legal technology, once an afterthought for many legal departments and firms, is now one of the hottest topics. Spending on technology increased 3.3% in 2021, a trend that looks set to continue into 2022. AI especially is really beginning to mature, bringing with it previously unimaginable efficiency gains and new ways of working. Someone who is legal-tech fluent and confident assessing and using the latest tools is someone who will be in high demand in any forward-looking organisation.
Of course, if you’re looking to make a more radical career shift, legal tech is also a great field to move in to. We might be biased (!) but few other professions can boast such an exciting range of opportunities for those with a background in law or contract management. You get to use your skills and experience to create a better future for the legal community, which we think is awesome! If the idea of being in a pioneering legal-tech company gets you excited why not consider ThoughtRiver? Whether you want to get involved in building the products that will define the future of work for the legal profession, help global corporations digitise their playbooks, or help keep the wheels of commerce spinning by ensuring all contracts are easy to understand by everyone, we might just have the role for you! Check out our latest vacancies to find out more.
If you want to experience all the benefits that ThoughtRiver has to offer for yourself, you can sign up for a free trial. It’s 14 days, completely commitment free. Sign up now.
