What is Agiloft, and what makes it different from other vendors in the space?
Agiloft is an end-to-end CLM (contract lifecycle management) provider. We provide software that helps companies of all sizes and across all industries to draft and negotiate contracts, track obligations, and analyze the important information within and about contracts. In short, we’re a data-first agreement platform. We understand that companies are really the composition of their contracts, and that the contracts that they have are full of commercial and compliance-oriented data they really need to execute every day.
Our key differentiator is our no-code platform, which allows us to configure data models and workflows so that not only can our customers get to contracts more efficiently, but they’re better equipped to analyze the commercial data inside those contracts, and to have it flow to the rest of the enterprise tech stack. The no-code approach also means that our customers can iterate and build CLM maturity over time. They can adapt to changes in their company, the business environment and the regulatory environment.
We all have a better appreciation for the constancy of change, how big changes can be and what impacts they can have on business. Think the pandemic or interest rates or war: your core CLM platform had better be adaptable to such changes. Taking a no-code, adaptable approach to CLM has led to a customer retention rate in the high nineties and high customer satisfaction. In fact, our implementation team last year scored a hundred percent positives on post-implementation surveys. Agiloft has a reputation for bringing customers more value every year and for our commitment to our customers’ success.
Why is CLM growing at an exponential rate? What are the business challenges it is solving these days?
While CLM sits alongside other core enterprise technologies, such as ERP, CRM and HCM, it’s still being adopted by the majority of the market, so rapid adoption and improving tools mean that new adopters of CLM are actually getting something of profound value. Agiloft builds product around the reality that companies are operating every day without the valuable knowledge that’s in their contract data, without the guardrails that they want to have around their contracting processes, and without an efficient approach to getting to agreement.
What are the top three challenges your customers are facing today?
I think the three main ones are: number one, using old approaches to contracting, which is just inefficient; number two, lack of visibility into contract data, which really hurts their ability to make good business decisions; and number three, a lack of guardrails in their contracting processes, which makes it tough to comply with their own policies or the regulatory requirements they’re subject to.
To expand on those points, first, old approaches to contracting are, almost by definition, inefficient. Surprisingly, a lot of companies are still using email and SharePoint as their key business tools around contracting. That’s pretty inefficient when 25 percent of people in a company touch a contract at some point. Agiloft builds workflows that cut down contract cycle time, for example by using negotiating playbooks that allow for more distributed decision-making on easy calls in the contract while freeing up contract managers and lawyers for the tough decisions.
The second challenge I mentioned was the lack of visibility into contract data and how that affects business decisions. Too much of the information in contract is stuck in PDFs somewhere and hasn’t been turned into data that can live in the operating flow of the company. And that data is critical, because it allows companies to know what their obligations are, how to act on something like a contract renewal, and even what their exposure is when something happens in the world. Agiloft makes sure that that data is not only available to the CLM users—the users of Agiloft itself—but integrated smoothly with all of the other key enterprise systems, such as ERP and CRM, so that operations can be fully informed by that contract data.
The third challenge I identified was the lack of guardrails to help you comply with your company policies and regulatory obligations. Policy and regulatory changes need to be reflected in the company’s contracts and in how the company works with vendors and customers. Agiloft helps ensure that those changes get into the contracting flow and that they can be reported on. This could be a new policy on customer renewal or something more complex, such as a new policy requiring vendors to provide more information about their ESG practices. How do you ensure that the new requirement gets into your contracting flow? How do you know who has agreed to it and when they must comply? Those are things that Agiloft helps with.
Would you tell us a little bit about your legal tech journey and how you found your way to Agiloft?
I’ve been in legal tech my whole career, primarily serving in-house counsel. I worked on information products and tech-enabled services and software for in-house counsel. I ran a legal managed services business for Thompson Reuters and then for Ernst & Young, and inked a partnership during that time with Agiloft. It was great to meet the Agiloft team and their very satisfied customers. I saw a team that was committed to those customers, and as a partner my team got to work on the platform. It became clear to me that Agiloft’s data-first, enterprise-wide approach was exactly where CLM was going, so I jumped at the chance to take over Agiloft from its founder, Colin Earl , who had built this amazing platform that now has more than 800 companies using it.
In the past, you’ve mentioned CLM isn’t “legal tech,” but “enterprise tech.” What do you mean by that?
Legal tech’s entire focus is on helping legal departments become better at their jobs and, having spent my whole career in legal tech, I do think that’s incredibly important. However, I think the right approach to CLM is to think of contracts as a set of data that is critical for the commercial and compliance operations of the whole enterprise, not just the legal department. When you have 25 percent or more of your people touching contracts, it can’t stop at the legal department. So while you need to think about how CLM can build value for legal, you also need to think about procurement and sales, HR and alliances, finance and IT. The platform has to become a system of record for the whole enterprise, and to integrate with the other core enterprise systems.
What do you think is missing in legal tech and more specifically CLM today?
Two things: First, there isn’t a full appreciation for the end game of CLM. CLM isn’t just about the contract record or using less of legal’s time: it’s about really connecting contract data to the rest of the business so that the commercial operations of the business are more successful and that compliance obligations can be met. A contract is a critical set of data, but it’s not isolated. It’s integrally connected to business operations, and it’s impacted by the company and the business environment. All those things dictate what you want in a contract, then the agreed terms in the contract go on to impact how the business operates.
The other thing I’ll call out is that CLM is an industry obsessed with technology—and now with AI—and what’s missing is an appreciation for the fact that contracts are about people and relationships. They’re about handshakes. I believe that we should be making contracting more human, and that’s the mindset I have when contracting with my own customers. At Agiloft we say we are reintroducing the handshake. Not only are we reinventing how our customers connect their agreements to their overall business, but we’re committed to our customers’ success. We promise that we will support them and we stand by it. I think that’s why our customers stick with us and why we have such high customer satisfaction.
What kind of advice would you give a company thinking about investing in CLM for the first time?
I talk to new adopters of CLM every day. I typically ask them to think of the journey that they’re on around CLM; to be honest with themselves about where they are today and the changes they’ll likely make over time as they learn more. Anyone who thinks about this journey inevitably recognizes that they need a platform that can adapt over time to their new business realities and their new objectives—and that they need a partner with a reputation for truly caring about their success.
What role do you see for traditional AI and GenAI and in CLM software?
As I mentioned Agiloft is trying to make CLM more human. That said, AI is still going to play an important role. Many of your readers will fall into one of two camps. One camp believes AI is the be-all and end-all; the other believes AI is over-hyped. At Agiloft, we try to be pragmatists around AI. We start with a use case. Where can AI be valuable to a user and how can we make it easy for them to use? You shouldn’t have to be an expert in AI to take advantage of its power within the Agiloft platform. We also respect that many companies have different levels of comfort around how their data is used in an AI context. We provide options and ways to harness AI safely. Having said all of those things about how we’re being very practical about AI, Gartner recognized us as having a very robust generative AI roadmap.
We build for use cases where we believe AI will be helpful. We’re not just falling in love with AI itself, but with helping our customers be successful in various parts of the workflow. So traditional AI is certainly helpful in turning unstructured contracts into data that can be useful in tons of contexts. And generative AI can be helpful in making first drafts or edits or summaries. GenAI can help the very human process of getting to a contract easier; helping with things that, for example, a first-year associate might do in a law firm; things that can get you started.
What do you think is coming to CLM in 2024?
I don’t think it takes a crystal ball to see that there’s going to be continued innovation in CLM. (If you look at our roadmap, that’s what you’d see.) On a slightly more negative note, one thing we might see is that early adopters of some of the less flexible CLM tools may be hitting the ceiling in terms of what they can accomplish on those tools. At Agiloft, we take a very flexible and long-term approach to helping customers through the changes in their business. So we’re ready and standing by to help folks who have hit ceilings with other tools to have a better experience that can grow with them.
Published February 1, 2024.
