One characteristic of the Corona Crisis is the variety of webinars on offer. Those who wanted to listen actively were able to pick up valuable insights at yesterday's event hosted by Frankfurt-based reinvent legal innovation hub. Guests were David Bloch from Swiss legaltech startup Legartis and Martin Kay from international vehicle supplier ZF.
Legartis offers an AI-driven software for highly automated analysis of legal documents. At ZF, this is in use to speed up the review process of NDAs. What are the key findings?
- If new software is to be deployed in a highly operational company, it is imperative that it is "ready". That is, the promised functionalities must actually exist and the software must have been extensively tested. If it turns out in live operation that essential functions do not work or do not work sufficiently, it is highly probable that this would be the end of the project. So there is no question of a "minimum viable product".
- The project is by no means complete once it has been successfully put into operation. Rather, it must be followed by a process of continuous collaboration. It is particularly important to keep this in mind because the entire contract structure and pricing must be based on this.
- The process change associated with the use of software only pays off if as many relatively uniform and not too complicated documents as possible are to be analyzed.
- Last but not least: software does not replace people.
The good news: Despite all the challenges that could be read between the lines, the project was judged positively on both sides; consequently, new contract types are now being tackled.
