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welcome everyone and thank you for joining today's webinar focus on higher value work how legal counsel can improve their contracting process my name is Taryn otter and I'm a marketing campaign manager for contract works I'm going to start with a few logistics first the GoToWebinar control panel is on the right-hand side of your screen you'll have the opportunity to submit text questions to today's presenter by typing your questions into the question pane of the control panel you may send in your questions at any time during the presentation we will collect these and address them during the Q&A session at the end of today's presentation one of the most commonly asked questions is what will we be recording this webinar and the good news is that we are will send an email with a link to the recording today's webinar is hosted by contract works and presented by Albert Oden our vice president of market development and will Reynolds our CEO we enjoy hosting free educational events for professionals in the industry we serve and that's why you're all here today we're going to get started today with our first polling question which of these problems is your organization experiencing no central place for contracts can't find contracts missed expiration dates client renewal dates and renew revenue waste of time on NDA's approvals for clients and vendors take too long this is multiple choice so please select all the answers that apply and hit submit okay it looks like 70% of you have responded those of you who have not responded yet go ahead and submit your responses now and we'll close the poll in a few moments okay thank you to share the results I'm going to hand things over to our presenter Albert hi everyone this is Albert I'm one of the co-founders here at contract works along with my colleague will Reynolds who the CEO and also a co-founder and we wanted to start off with this poll if nothing else to make you all feel better that if you're in this position you're not alone as you can see from some of these results sixty-five percent of you said there's no central place for contracts 65 percent two-thirds of you said you can't find contracts fifty-four percent said that you're missing renewal dates 38 percent you're wasting time on NDA s 48 percent said that proves for clients and vendors are taking too long in other words over 50 percent of you said that these are significant barriers for all of you to focus on higher level work and what I want to share with you is that I was recently on a panel at the association of corporate counsel and one of the core challenges that I observed when there will we surveyed the attendees there and the results came back like this 55% of inside counsel has less than five lawyers 66 percent have less than one hour a week to spend on technology 55 percent of you have less than $25,000 to spend on technology that may resolve some of these issues so in a sense you guys are in a rock and a hard place the rock is you don't have more than an hour to spend to try and resolve some of these issues and the hard place is you have less than $25,000 to resolve these issues so our objective today is for to provide you one or two items that you can focus on that help relieve you or remove the barriers that your coming up against that prevents you from working in higher level work and some of these barriers aren't technical and so one of the things that I'll try and communicate with you is that when the challenges you have is how the c-suite sees legal and so when you look at the c-suite they think of legal as an expensive cost center they also see your time as free and paid for and that a CEO and CFO typically prioritized revenue and cost savings more than your time if you think about it until you arrived the CEO and CFO were using outside counsel and some point outside counsel became too expensive for them so bringing in-house counsel in in-house a legal resource was a way of saving money and that's how they perceive you and so the challenge is typically legal folks tend to communicate their problems in terms of inefficiency or time or you know some other kinds of nuisance or annoyance that's beginning to take up too much your time the problem is when you communicate that the CEO or CFO it's your time your time is free if it takes you more time to find a contract that doesn't save the money and doesn't make them money all it does is it's a time problem for you it's not a cost or revenue problem for them and until you can start translating your conversation into a cost or revenue problem that actually impacts the whole business it becomes very hard for the c-suite to see your challenges as a business impact problem so again our objective is to try and give you a couple of ways to kind of see your way clear of that here's another polling question okay so our next polling question is what do you use for contract management today Excel SharePoint a purpose-built contract management system with ease signature again this is multiple-choice so please select all the answers that apply and hit submit like 69% of you have voted so if you haven't voted yet please submit your selection and we will be closing the poll in a few moments okay we will now be closing the poll great thank you very much Frank those answers is available to us so already you can see that the vast majority of you use whether either considered sort of free or no-cost solutions and a small minority of you actually use a purpose-built contract management solution to basically get things offloaded or manage your contract management systems so that you can actually focus on high-level work and in this you can see these results you can see the symptoms of the general barriers or challenges we described above which is that you don't have more than an hour a week on technology and you typically don't have more than $10,000 to find a solution so Excel and SharePoint typically are looked at as free and because most of you know how to use it you say this is actually a very efficient way for us to solve the problems we have with contract management the problem is that this becomes actually a little more complicated over time and when you start looking and saying we're starting to have some problems what you want to do is start translating those problems into costs or revenue problems for the business because that's actually what ultimately matters so your CFO your CEO and to you it's not necessarily a time problem just for your legal team that obviously is an issue it's a problem for work-life balance but it's not a business impact issue yet and so one of the ways to do this and start identifying ways you can remove barriers and which barriers to remove so you can focus on high-level work is to identify where the biggest impact problems are so here's an example so tant translate your contract management issue into a cost problem so for instance are you paying for services no longer use this is very common in things like IT maintenance IT no longer uses Cisco routers but they never told finance and so what you have is you're paying 20% maintenance on the Cisco routers but no one told finance that you don't use Cisco routers anymore so you're still paying for it or in another example we had a client who had been paying for Lane from AT&T since 1979 and they haven't been using landlines since 1990 so they've been paying for landlines for 27 years there's also the opportunity for miss there's also the issue of Miss renegotiation opportunities 60% of you said that you're missing those kinds of dates so think of things like real estate where they may have escalation clauses and the and you don't you miss the opportunity either to terminate that real estate agreement or to renegotiate those escalation cost clauses and negotiate them down that can cost companies hundreds of thousands of dollars and then finally there's the issue with regards to penalties so you may have penalties or requirements where you have to submit documentation or information to either a client or another party otherwise you risk losing money or losing the contract or losing a renewal to a contract so these are significant cost problems this is one way to start saying like what's the barrier that I want to remove what's the thing that I need to solve so instead of thinking it as a time problem thing that is a cost to the company problem that you need to start solving in addition that's another example you could translate a contract management issue into a revenue loss problem so one that's frequently overlooked by legal is just the matter of time and so here's the thing if you think that getting approvals or looking for contracts or getting NDA's back and forth approve cost the company a week in terms of closing new client contracts a week is where 2% in gap revenue and if you think about that if you could walk into a CEO CFO said I know a way that we could increase our gap revenue this year by 2% without adding a person or adding any more resources we don't to change anything we just have to remove the barriers in our company that make approvals for contracts by a week if we do that you know getting accelerated automated NDA's getting accelerated approvals from all the parties need to approve a contract before it goes out to a client we can increase our bottom-line gap revenue by two percent if you can do it by two weeks it's worth four percent every CEO every CFO will be interest that conversation and what you can do to make that happen with as little cost or time impact on you and your department the rest of the company another way you can do is say we're missing renewal documentation for a lot of our clients and so we've had clients that they have to submit renewal documentation to their clients if they miss that date the client can elect either to renew their services or not renew them and so if you miss that date and you don't go to them they have that option to opt out and that that happens and so if you have had that happen that's a revenue conversation with a CEO CFO they'll be very very interested in having that conversation with you final thing would be miss milestone documentation dates if you have contracts that are based on milestones and you have to submit significant documentation and you don't meet those milestones or sometimes penalties or reductions in what the payment will be and if you don't have a good way of alerting or or sending out scheduled reminders of people then all these things become at risk and all of them played a Revenue those things are very very interesting obviously CEOs and CFOs so here are some examples that you can quantify the value of automating the contract management so I know when you folks think about automating contract manager you think like it'll relieve me of a lot of time and things that I just just not a good use of my time I don't want to find contracts I don't want to look for contracts I don't want to have to miss you know I want the renewal dates to come up automatically all those things those are big time issues and those things are true for legal the problem is they don't translate into a business impact problem so here are some examples of ways to think about things translating these and business impact problems so that one the barriers you remove is is the c-suite understanding that this is a significant business impact problem that's just a time problem about whether you're staying late at work so do you think your company lost more than $10,000 in Auto renewing contracts it should have been terminated or renegotiated those could be real estate that could be IT maintenance it could be anything do you think the combination of ndas and getting approvals on contracts to clients in your company extends contracting time more than a week the answer is yes and you're on a gap revenue schedule that's 2 to 4 percent of revenue that you can get or recognize in a year without actually having any additional cost has your company lost a renewal with the because you feel attorney required documentation time and the client sub screen electing not to renew if the answer is yes that's a conversation I'm a CEO seat in CFO as your company lost or had a reduction in a milestone payment from a client because you failed to turn in required documentation in time and then in general just say how much money in aggregate has your company lost in the past year ten thousand ten to twenty five thousand twenty-five hundred hundred plus and the reasons why it's important that you do that one is improves your conversation with a CEO CFO but number two it helps you identify the areas that you think are most important to solve and not in terms of just a time issue but in terms of a business impact issue okay and the challenge you guys have obviously is it and you're gonna see we're gonna try and solve these things that can we solve these things in less than an hour a week and can we do it for less than ten thousand dollars a year that's the conundrum that you guys are in so let's try and see if we can do that and talk about that a little bit so we talked about this prioritized solutions based on business impact so an example you say look we missed I'm aware of missing expiration dates that cost us forty five thousand dollars right they could been automatic renewals or things that we wanted to renegotiate I know that this cost us more than forty five K it's really simple so you say one I need to have a central repository two we need to be able to create reports on contract attributes meaning that we know we know the dollar amount is when they expire things like that we need those reports we generate and sent out to staff when they're about to come up and and and renew so that people can say yes you want to keep that no we want to get rid of that and we want to renegotiate it and we also want to alert sent out to the head of the department so they can confirm those are things we want to do one solve but we want to solve it automatically we don't want me or my paralegal or any other people to go dig through files or look around for things or look through their Outlook to find out where this stuff is you look at that as a time problem but this is actually a business impact problem that you want to solve okay so now that you kind of know what the processes of identifying what the key problems aren't person terms a cost and revenue and putting those things in place you do have to face another critical challenge to think about the power of inertia which is going and implementing some kind of solution whether it's a combination of free samples like Excel SharePoint and Outlook or even something that's simple like our system like contract works reality is putting in some kind of contract management process you want to try and automate does take time I don't care who you talk to and the knowledge I use is like going to the dentist right the reality is whether it's a free solution or an inexpensive solution like contract works it's still gonna be like going to the dentist you have to decide that the pain that you have in your mouth is is worth going in because when you go into the dentist the things are it's gonna cost you a little bit of money it's gonna cost you some time and it could be a little bit painful and so your objective when you go into the dentist is you say we want to keep the cost as low as possible we want to spend as little bit as time as possible and at the end we want to make sure that the solution makes it so that we can you know eat okay after we're done that's the that's what you want to be able to do so you want to solve high-value problems with as minimal pain time and cost as possible okay so here's a free and simple solution and it looked like the majority of you you know in some way 70 to 80 percent of you are using this and so I think you're aware of this but we want to make sure you knew that there are free solutions you you can these ones will be heavy on time but they'll be very low on cost so there are things like SharePoint and Dropbox share drive and email for your central repository and over a certain amount of time these things will work just fine right and turns a data tracking and be able to know when contracts are expiring things like that you're looking at Excel Google sheets there's you know other data databases like access that are free SharePoint long as we know it's kind of a database as well Outlook another calendar alerts and there's a lot of companies to get by just fine by trying to get all these things together right but over time what happens to a company is that things get a little more complicated you start having multiple employees that need access to contracts you start having several offices that have contracts so they don't put it in the right place and the problem for the legal staff is when someone can't find a contract the first place they go is legal because legal is probably the last person that touched the contract and that's where your time issue starts coming in when you start having to deal with more than one hundred more hundred or more new contracts a year that becomes a problem because now there's just the sheer volume and trying to keep track of what things are happening when and when things are renewing you have lots of contracts with various vendors you have compliance that's a priority there's all kinds of things that start becoming more complex as the company grows so in addition to free and simple you have two other options one is to get some kind of dedicated software that's non enterprise and again the key constraints that most of you have is can you implement or use something that is that takes less than an hour a week to maintain and set up and get going and the second constraint you have is can you do something that cost less than ten thousand dollars a year those are really tough spots to be in so one for those of you that are in that spot typically a dedicated software that's not in price works just fine because it solves the biggest imprison impact problems that you're looking for so typically these solutions have these kinds attributes I'm not trying to solve all things for all people they're relatively simple relatively inexpensive easy to implement opt and can be used by any size company to address big business impact problems with minimum resources this is this is a solution that's perfect for like when you want to go to dentist you have some cavities that need filling you know that the solution can be done and that when you're done you'll be able go out and you'll be feeling a lot better and just fine and when I'll be really clear when we say relatively inexpensive they lock that cost less than ten thousand dollars when we say easy to implement and adopt that they should take less than 30 minutes to get set up and that other users can set up and start using in less than five minutes because one of the key things that come back to the survey over and over again is you don't have time so you need to have something that is time efficient but also inexpensive and that's when you start looking at some kind of dedicated software that's not non-enterprise contract work falls into this bucket but frankly you could go look at kaptara and there's literally like 130 different contract management solutions that are out there that you're welcome to look at for some of you though you're in a much more much bigger and more complex company and if that's the case and definitely it's possible you may have to look at a dedicated enterprise type of solution and these solutions have these kinds of attributes or comprehensives they do anything at which and there also can be very expensive and when I say expensive I mean they can be anywhere from a hundred thousand to five hundred thousand dollars a year and that doesn't include implementation time or cost right so the complexity and the implementation could take you a year to actually implement or it could take six months to actually implement those these are very big sophisticated solutions they're typically used by very large companies with have which can have 20 30 40 50 in-house lawyers that are working and addresses all problems but it does take substantial resources so whereas before I use a dental analogy and said you have some cavities you need some filling you might need a root canal these are things you can get solved according to dentists this is like getting reconstructive jaw surgery you need something that is comprehensive it goes across the board with with everything okay and so what kind of solutions are you looking for again I go back to the things that say look you guys don't have very much time and if those are the constraints you have less than an hour a week or that you have less than a couple thousand dollars to spend or anything like that in a year you're looking for these kinds of solutions you need to get a central repository that is one of the central problems most you said so you want to look for a solution that actually allows drag-and-drop of all your contracts into their system it's that simple you can't make it hard for your users and you can't make it for you hard for you or your paralegals or other associates another solution look for is document tagging tagging is just attributes you want to be able to do searches by you know how many contracts are worth more than a hundred thousand dollars how many contracts are being renewed in the next 30 days because if one of your biggest issues are automated renewal contracts you need to have reports that go out automatically that alert people that this is coming up and if they want to exit terminate or renegotiate they need to do it now so you need to have something that has very simple tagging that allows you to run those reports and those kinds of solutions and this is when the attributes you need to have another attribute you want is to create and schedule automated reports so this is the solution you're looking forward the problem you're trying to solve is say we want our department heads we want our Finance and we want our legal teams to be aware of the contracts that are coming up in the next 60 days they could be with a vendor or a client they could be for renewal contracts or other type of Revenue contracts milestone contracts so that everybody is aware these reports go in automatically it doesn't require someone looking inside of a spreadsheet or remembering that they have to do it it automatically shows up in their inbox it's a list of things they need to review and look at to validate that they want to either renegotiate a contract terminate a contract to keep it or if it's a renewal that they make sure they they submit all the documentation I need to make sure the renewal is is continues and then finally what you want to do is prioritize the solutions based on business impact so an example might be an TAS are taking days approvals are taking days and so the solution you can look forwards we need like a template at NDA we need to eliminate the email open print sign scan attached email open print counter science can attach email file your copy process because if that's adding a week on to your contracting process with say clients or even cost-saving process with vendors then again that is money that is you're missing in terms of gap revenue a week will cost you 2% in gap revenue a week will cost you 2% in gap revenue two weeks is 4% it's just math so you again if this is a business impact problem these are the things you can talk about and see these are solutions when you put in place to solve these business impact problems another solution you may look at is like built in a key signature because if you want to automate and facilitate very fast approval of NDA's to collapse that time getting NDA's back and forth if you want to collapse the time that it takes to get approvals from all the key safe colors in your company before a contract goes out to a party then having built in a signature becomes critical to that process it's not a feature it's not a tool it's a business impact solution that helps you save time it helps the company make or save money that's that's what you're looking for so process change is hard as you guys know everybody hates change changes upsetting can be a lot of hard work there's a risk of failure contract management process are often ingrained so there's a lot of challenge for that so again this is like you want to limit the time that you're going to be spending and asking people to disrupt what they do so you need something that can be a top relatively quickly ideally you know users can start using it within five minutes an administrator can get set up and running in less than 30 minutes on a solution some tips detail your current process bring your colleagues into the conversation keep solutions simple ideally you want to say we can get up and running in less than an hour if you can't say that you don't have one an hour a week so it's been really hard to have deep conversations with everybody where they say we don't have an hour more than hour a week to talk about this all right at this point we're going to switch over and we are going to do a short presentation of contract works and you'll see that for some of you this might be a great fit for some of you it might not be but what at the very least what it does is it can set a standard for you about what's possible and will it eliminate the barriers that you're facing in your business in terms of business impact and conversations and again our objective with our solution was to provide something that people could get up and running in less than an hour and that would cost people less than ten thousand dollars a year and so with our system administrators get set up in 30 minutes or less users start using it in less than five minutes and when the key thing is again when you sit in that dental chair you want to know that it's not gonna be very expensive it's not going to take you very much time but the real key thing is you want to make sure that everybody everybody will adopt this thing when it's done because what you don't want to do is adopt a really expensive solution it takes - a lot of time that everybody hates because then at the end of that operation that jaw surgery which it will end up with is you won't have solved the problem all you will done is wasted a lot of people's time a lot of money and everybody hates what you've done so our objective is try and remove that that burden on you make it as easy as possible people adopt and use and we're basically six thousand dollars a year for unlimited users and documents and we employ built-in electronic signature it's included part of the system so again all of these things are designed to remove the barriers for you guys in terms a little time that you have and the little money that you have to remove the barriers that are keeping you from focusing on higher level work and at this point I'm going to turn it over to my to my colleague and our CEO will Reynolds hi everyone Thank You Albert appreciate the presentation we're gonna be very quick here it's gonna give a very quick scan of contract works so you guys can get a little bit of a feel for what it looks like and give you some context if you're considering moving away from current solutions and I heard Albert talking about you know the number of people out there using say SharePoint and Excel for their contract management processes and you know you guys are in great company there we've got many many companies large and small that have come off those solutions and when I when I go to trade shows we can we can talk to people walking up to the booth and be almost sort of 89 percent sure that they're going to be working off SharePoint and a spreadsheet even very large companies there was a guy I was speaking to just the other day at a trade show one of the world's largest insurance companies 15,000 provider contracts they have all detailed on a spreadsheet with 15,000 lines on it so this is this is not unusual you guys are in good company but it doesn't have to be that hard and contract works is a very simple way of organizing collating and managing your contracts so that you can get to them quickly get them signed quickly and also introduce other people in your business to the contracts so that they they have access so you guys are looking at the interface we have at the moment and we've got a very simple set up here just for demonstration purposes we just simply set this up for non-disclosure agreements but this could be any type of contract with vendors or customers whoever you need to and the file format just sets up a little bit like it does with a shared drive on your desktop or with with you know of the folder structure that you'd be familiar with on your computer our process for getting documents in here as albert mentioned is extremely simple if we've got a customer that we've just acquired who's maybe in the USA is all my USA contracts I've got my newly signed document and I'm just going to drop it into the system here and it uploads so we're storing a copy of the contract here it's uploaded I can open this document in the system it's very fast I can then scan through the document if I need to and I can go back here and the key point here is that now we've captured this document we can also capture data points against it so we call this tagging Albert mentioned it earlier and we have templates set up of tags so we can say here are the items we want to capture against our non-disclosure agreement and we have these templates set up for two reasons one is so you can capture this information very quickly and then also so you can capture information very consistently the old adage of you know junk in junk out in terms of information and reporting remains true with any software system and house is no different you want to be able to capture information as quickly as you possibly can so we're going to put this document in here we've already got to set up to enable notifications we're going to get a 30 to 60 day notice that's going to go out to my email address you can put in as many email addresses as you want and you can have a note that goes along with that email and we click Submit the key piece to take away here is that you guys decide what you want to capture so these items here are all customizable all these tagged items are customizable whatever Naumann clayji you use within your business for the end date you know whose expiration or termination or whatever it is you choose and you make that up this is just the demonstration purposes so we click Submit and this is now available you can see my document here my NDA with Microsoft has been signed I've got the little green tag against it sorry it's been tagged I could also send it out here for signature as well and I'll show you how to do that in just a moment once the document set up everything again is drag-and-drop so if I want to move this somewhere else I just drag it across to partners it's now in my partner agreement and then the key piece for picking up all this data and all of these tags is that you want to be able to report on them very very quickly so I go to reports and I've already got a document set up here for NDA's expiring in 2023 I can click on this and it's going to give me an incident report I've got one document expiring in 2023 I can preview the document here in my report if I want to these reports are customizable so if I want to add and change columns out of this report I can very easily if I want to extend the date range for example I can just come in here and go to 1231 2024 which is the document we just put in with Micra often you'll see I've now got three contracts appear in my report here so very simple reporting and this is the piece that people really struggle with when they're using Excel and say SharePoint the ability to capture data against contracts is is challenging with SharePoint there's a lot of customization required and a lot of IT time required to get it to work for you so it is possible but it's a non-trivial process to get these things set up and in obviously no worries they're as easy as just being able to you know hit a button and run a pre cam report as we as we showed here when I want to get something signed we have this advantage here that if you're using something like DocuSign then you can get something signed very easily it's a great system but once it's signed it sits in DocuSign and doesn't really go anywhere else and you probably have to integrate with some other system to make use of that signed document a lot of people will integrate it with a salesforce system or maybe a contract management system but if you have it completely built in you have a significant advantage so if you have a totally templatized document like an NDA and we can have this pre setup in the system so we've already got the template document set up we've got the signature block set on the document and I can just click here and I can put in the name of the party that's going to receive it we're going to select a folder that is going to drop into so this is a customer for USA when I send this out for signature here here's the document preset this is all the signature block preset onto the document I may hit Send I'm effectively done at this point documents now out it's being processed and being sent out there's nothing else for me to do and the key piece is that once this sign is going to land back into the folder where I wanted to reside going forward and part of the contract works architecture includes the ability to have people or employees or people you're doing business with sectioned off by folder so you can set the permissions at the folder level that says I want all my sales people to have access to my customer folder but I don't want them to have access to my vendor folder on my consultants folder for example so once they have sent out the NDA signature is going to land back in the folder you won and the people who have access to that folder will automatically be able to see it and they'll be included on reports for them and those reports could well be you know scheduled to go out to them automatically go back to the documents tab here and so just at the user level I can just demonstrate very quickly we have this concept of roles and the idea here is that we can set up a role for the sales team for example which says I want them to have access to only NDA's for our customers and they're going to have download rights against that particular folder and when they log in they're not going to see anything for consultants partners vendors or expired NDA's this is extremely difficult to do with SharePoint extremely difficult to do a SharePoint so SharePoint involves setting up holes in the firewall to be able to access documents for people outside of your organization the other piece finally to look at is the automation of reports or so we have saved reports here I've got the NDA report we looked at earlier I can actually automate them schedule the sending out of these reports so this is how to loop in your colleagues and management and the c-suite into the contracting business so I can click on here and I can just set up a schedule it has this clever kind of learning where it will give me a give me a schedule so I say every week and it previews the schedule here I can decide what format it's going to go out in Excel or PDF and when it's gonna start and now I've put in the email addresses of my colleagues and they'll be automatically scheduled on this report on whatever frequency that I set up for them so that is it in terms of a quick overview so hopefully that gives people some food for thought maybe this solves some big problems maybe it doesn't solve all your problems maybe you need something more complex that's totally fine we are very open to discussing people's needs we will happily talk to you about you know whether we're actually going to solve the problems that are impacting your business or not we'll be very upfront about that and on that basis were also very happy say questions on it and I think Tara has been probably receiving questions from the audience and happy to answer some of those now okay Thank You Albert and will we're now going to begin answering the questions submitted during today's presentation as a reminder you can still submit questions through the question pane and your attendee control panel so if you'd like to submit a question please do so now I do have one question to open things up where would I learn about what's out there okay good question well number of places you could go actually Alba mentioned a CC earlier association of corporate counsel and this is an organization that we became part of a couple of years ago and we do that the big trade shows twice a year it's a really great kind of collaborative network so they have a website they have discussion boards they have trade shows they have conferences and educational panels if you're not a member already I'd highly recommend it it's a great place to go and kind of learn from from from colleagues and from peers in the legal industry just online research googling contract management software there's another great place to go and a site that will come up very often is kaptara comm which is a software review site and there are a lot of contract management systems listed on there but people can actually leave reviews as well so if you want to see third-party reviews about software then that's a great place to go we have some good stuff on our website and our blog we actually have a downloadable white paper on how to research contract management software and then there's other general council news comes through on my email every day I think it's also a great resource so there's a number of places you can go online research and then peer reviews is probably the place that recommend the most wrong okay thank you well we have another question do you have to have an account and log in to use this product is this the cloud-based system do you have to have an accountant long as you spray so yeah as a company you would buy an account from us you would subscribe to an account from us once you've subscribed to an account you can invite anyone into it that you want see whether they're within your business or outside of your business so if you want to bring in outside counsel for example or if you have vendors or so on who you want to give access to then then then you can so yes you subscribe to an account yes it's online it's hosted online it is a cloud service so to speak our system is hosted on the Amazon Web Services cloud which is the biggest and biggest best and most reliable in the world and we're very very pleased with the performance there and then yeah once you've got an account with us you can invite as many people as you want so it comes with unlimited documents okay I have another question I have hundreds of documents and thousands of data points that I want to bring over to a new system how do you handle this mm-hmm ok good question so with our system and I would say probably other systems have similar processes you've really got two pieces to consider one is the actual document so the electronic you know PDF usually of the document and then the data points that go along with it you might call this metadata we call them tags getting them into our system is very simple you just drag and drop them in so if you have a folder full of contracts you just drag and drop that folder and the order of folders subfolders and documents that were on your desktop or on your shared drive will be retained within our system so there's nothing to do it all just uploads if you have hundreds of them and it might take some time but they will just upload the metadata is a little harder and this is where you need to make some decisions as a company you know if you have thousands of legacy documents you may want to decide do we really need to bring all these data points across are they necessary we always recommend a go forward position so get started so get over some of that inertia that albert was talking about you know the the idea of bringing historical data can be can can kind of cause people to freeze and panic so we would recommend setting up to in a go forward position and then bringing in those meta data points over time if you have those meta data points in a spreadsheet we can import them for you so if you have a spreadsheet that says here's the document name and here are the data points associated with that document start there the end date you know etc whatever you want to track if that's in spreadsheet then we can import it for you in overlay it onto the documents that have already been uploaded into the system so two pieces to it upload the document and then import the tags or metadata and if that data is in a spreadsheet then we can pull it in for you and if it's not then you may have some work ahead of you thank you well here's another one for you how does a system handle a client or a vendor templates in Word format or PDF format this is contracts that are generated by third parties client or vendor templates generated by third parties I it doesn't frankly so if there's something coming to you as a company potentially the vendor or whoever you're working with could collaborate with you through our system on their document so they could be sending it to you through our system you could provide them with an inbox just a folder that says you know drop your documentation in here and we'll take a look at it and complete it and send it back to you that way so there are possibilities of collaborating on a document but generally speaking it's used for contracts and documents that are being generated and processed you know by the company that's using a software it's not to say the II can't you know set up a folder you know in complex contracting processes there may be a whole variety of documentation that goes with it and I can give you an example you know if we're dealing with a you know a larger company maybe multiple departments and we've got a lot of paperwork going back and forth they're sending us IT reviews and they're sending us NDA's and this kind of thing I'll set up a dedicated folder just for that company with a bunch of subfolders and the documentation will be you know passed out into those subfolders and the company that we're trying to do business with will have access to some of those folders and that we'll be able to collaborate some of those folders so there are ways to do it and become creative but the system isn't necessarily set up for you know dealing with you know there's kind of vendor documents like like initially look at the question product okay do you integrate with DocuSign what we don't need to so now we don't the system has electronic signature built in which is as comprehensive and comparable to other systems out there so it is a true electronic signature system in that we're digitally stamping the document on completion there's a digital rap to the document which becomes what's called tamper evident so you can see the whole audit trail when you open it up with Adobe so our customers don't need it they use our system and you know quite often we're replacing other electronic signature systems and like I mentioned in the demonstration the advantage of using something that's completely integrated is well first you don't have to pay for another system but secondly I have to deal with integrations and integrations are generally pretty good DocuSign and other companies do a really good job with integrations but if they're complex they require some management they may require IT input and by using something that's fully integrated that problem kind of goes away and then of course you know you're using our system to send out the contract it's getting signed and then it's returning straight back into the system where you also want to store it and where you also want to handle the sharing with other you know colleagues and other third parties so there's a massive advantage to having everything just completely built in ok and another question here is there a means to enter items or information unique to a particular contract what which do not otherwise fit a template or similar one-size-fits-all program yeah so in terms of capturing data against the contract so if you wanted to capture certain clauses against a contract for example which i think is what the question is asking there so if you want to capture certain items then yeah absolutely so just within our tags or than our tag templates we have substantial fields there that will open up and take whole paragraphs of data so the answer is yes you can capture whole clauses against a particular contract very quickly and very easily any other questions that are okay yes how safe is the security of the storage of the documents first somebody sorry for us some of these documents contain very personal and important information very good a company called secure docks so contract works is a product from secure docks and we have two products on the marketplace actually we started in the virtual data room space so anyone who does have been in deals will know what a virtual data room is and so our company takes the security and privacy very very seriously we're handling details of M&A transactions for public companies where share prices can be impacted and so on so we probably take a far more cautious and might even say paranoid beyond their privacy and security of the most contract management companies would in terms of where the data resides it's it's with Amazon AWS you can hook them up and research them if you haven't heard of the AWS service but thousands of companies use it with incredible track record of security they've been zero issues with it over time and all of the data is encrypted they're at rest and in transit and then you know in terms of how the system sets up with the permissions that you can set within the system to segregate data by folder for example is also somewhat unusual in the contract management space we also have other features in there that you can use like water marking on the document so if you do have to chair things outside the company you're going out to General Counsel's or sorry outside Council or to third parties and then there's water marking on those documents and you can share them in what we call view-only mode so that the document doesn't necessarily have to be downloaded to to be viewed so you can just share it as an image on the screen and not let people take it with them a final thing I've mentioned is probably the most important thing any company can do in terms of securing their documentation is ensure that the users are fully protected as well because there's a tendency for people of any computer systems to reuse passwords over and over again so you know you use your password on LinkedIn and on your Gmail and then you go and use it on contract works and your Salesforce system and the challenge there is that if one system somewhere like LinkedIn happened for example or Yahoo passwords get compromised then the hackers know that you know that passwords probably being used somewhere else so that's the main weakness and we protect against that with two-factor authentication which is not unusual these days but it is unusual for it to be easy to use and for it to be completely free and to be baked into the system from the outset which it is without and so we ensure that your passwords are protected with the double layer of an SMS text code sent to the cell phone and we recognize the browser so you don't have to do it every single time it's like once every 30 days but the the text code to the cell phone along with the password ensures that if a user's password is compromised then your system's still protected so we the number one thing that you can do to protect any data system including including ours okay and we have another question here can you recommend solutions for the red lining and versioning process yeah that's a really good question so we don't do that right so our system really starts at the signing process so if you have a negotiation going back and forth you can use our system to send the document back and forth that the document would have to be downloaded and adjusted and it is very easy to do that but we're not maintaining the version and we're not managing a redlining process of you know editing within the system there's a reason why we haven't gone there and I'll come to solutions in a moment there's a reason why we haven't gone there and it's because it's quite complicated to do within a software system and of course there's a default program out there that everyone uses which I would point you to which is word so getting away from word is hard so what you have to imagine is that if you put in a contract management system you might love the redlining process that is included in there but if you're going to go out to a third party they've never seen your system before are they going to love it and the chances are you'll send it out and there's a really good chance that you'll get a note back saying you know I don't wanna learn the system can you just send it to me a word at which point you're back to word so this is feedback we've heard over and over again from people and we've heard it from people who have implemented more complex and enterprise level systems and it's not to say that you can't achieve a good redlining a negotiation process within a software of course you can there are systems out there the work very effectively it's just can you get people to adopt it can you get third parties to actually use it as well and those are the two questions I would ask in terms of can we recommend any you know any enterprise system we'll have it and I'm sure there are systems out there that have included redlining I don't know of names off the top of my head but a quick search on google or kaptara as mentioned earlier well we'll bring bring up systems that deal with the redlining and negotiation they may deal with you know the signature process they may deal with storage they may deal with tagging they may do with reporting you guys have just got to figure out you know what part of the cycle do I want to solve don't want to try and solve the entire thing in one shot or other pieces that I want to bite off because this is where you know our business is being impacted this is where we're wasting time and where it's costing us money okay thank you will another question is do you integrate document drafting functionality we don't and that's the part of the redlining process to be to be frank so the document creation and redlining process I would include all of those in the kind of the the the pre signature and pre storage process so we don't the only time that we do is you know I showed earlier if you have a templated document like an NDA or something very simple that you want to regenerate over and over again our system will regenerate that instantly for you so an NDA or some kind of you know approval form you can just hit a button and send it out for signature in a matter of seconds okay okay so for the interest of time here this is going to be our last question today it looks like we had a lot of great questions come through today and I apologize if we didn't have a chance to answer them but we will email you an answer and to respond or at the end of the presentation today I'll offer the email of our presenters so this question is is there a way to download contracts uploaded to a contract works regularly to serve as an additional local backup archive yeah yes there is honestly I don't know if it's a great use of time to be doing that regularly because the system you know is your backup effectively but I would point to actually another use case for it which would be you know if you ever actually needed to leave our system so it's actually pretty common that we have people come to us from other systems and it's a real struggle for them to get documents out like a real struggler they can't do it and the software companies essentially got the documents held hostage well we have a button in our system which says archive the whole account and you can hit that button and in the backend a process will start of building all of your documents and actually the audit logs and any index of the whole account into a set of spreadsheets and zipping up the actual PDF documents as well it happens on the back end and if you have a lot of documents it may take a while but you will receive an email when it's completed and you can then just download all of your documents in that zipped file straight to your desktop so the process of archiving everything is very simple there's a feature for it don't know there's a great use of time to do it regularly but you know if anyone ever needs to leave the system for any time we don't believe in holding documents or data hostage you should be able to come and go easily so that features available and if you needed to use it for a kind of an occasional backup that would be fine as well okay thank you Albert and will and thank you everyone for attending today's webinar if you have any other questions that come up or if you'd like to see a demo or start a free trial of contract work you can visit the contract Works website at wwlp.com our presenter bill Reynolds can be reached at will period Reynolds at contract works calm and Albert Odin can be reached at Albert period Odin at contract works calm once you leave today's webinar you will receive a survey on the presentation and we would appreciate it if you'd complete that and provide your feedback you'll also receive a follow-up email with a link to view today's recording thank you for joining us today and have a great rest of your day