Implementing new Legal Technology often uncovers unique hurdles. To keep technology projects on track and budget, it is important to address these hurdles early in the implementation process.
At Mindcrest, we have a wealth of experience implementing CLM solutions and troubleshooting expected problems early in the implementation cycle. We often use a Spike solution to find definitive answers to technical queries ahead of and throughout the build process.
A Spike Solution is a small isolated experiment to inform the decisions of the technology team during an Agile Development cycle.
Agile Development is a term for describing iterative project management and software development process. An Agile team delivers work in short increments called sprints. These shorter development cycles allows the Agile team to respond to customer feedback and changing requirements quickly.
Three issues during a CLM implementation that should be spotted and resolved early are:
- Integration issues;
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities; and
- Quality of Document Automation
We will now look at each of them in turn.
- Integration issues
Contracts touch almost every part of a business; this means that your CLM solution will likely interact with other platforms used in the business. Does your CLM solution "play well" with other modern and legacy systems or does it need custom integrations to pull data from and push it back to these systems using complex integrations that will take time and effort to maintain?
There is only one way to find out, that is by quick but functional workflows that require the CLM to integrate with other platforms.
Spike solution can help you implement an end-to-end process without substantive time investments and would help you identify early if the CLM of your choice can work with all the other platforms in your technical eco-system.
- AI capabilities
Many new and existing CLM systems are leveraging AI technology. To test if the AI functionality in your CLM platform is all that it is touted to be, use a few sample contracts to check data extraction or a few sample clauses to build a playbook and test it against a small data set.
Again, this would incur a small cost in terms of the engineering team's time and resources as the work may not be reused but it will provide much needed concrete information to assess if the AI capabilities offered by the CLM are useful or not.
Often, real world contractual data is messier and more varied than what CLMs expect. The results may vary based on the quality and quantity of your contract suite and a Spike solution will help you assess the results early enough to make an informed decision about the CLM implementation
- Quality of Document Automation
There is a wide variation in available document automation capabilities within CLMs. It is worth spending some time selecting a representative template and automating a document using the template to assess the amount of time and effort required for the automation. Next, compare the results against other document automation platforms to see how they hold up.
To sum up, a Spike solution does not need to be perfect but uncovers implementation roadblocks early. A working Spike solution demonstrates to the technology and client teams what is possible. Practically, it is a small and quick implementation to answer a narrow question, like in our three examples above. It should not take a long time to implement but teams may need to collate all the necessary information and relevant access rights to software platforms or applications ahead of time.
Often the Spike Solution, or part of it, is thrown away. That is okay. The information from the Spike Solution is what we are after. Once you have the information, you do not need the solution. You can now use this concrete, verified information to implement the actual solution.
No more speculating in group meetings!
Mindcrest works to find the optimal technology implementation solution designed for your organisation. To learn more, contact Bhavya Rawal below.
