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Welcome to LawNext PR, the podcast where we put a spotlight on the latest news coming out
of the legal tech industry.

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This is Bob Ambrogi.

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And in each sponsored episode of this podcast, we talk to a company about its latest news
and developments.

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Today, we're talking about news that SimpleDocs, an AI driven contract automation platform
has acquired Law Insider, which is home to the world's largest database of contracts and

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clauses.

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And joining me to

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Discuss the news and tell us more about it is Electra Japonas She was previously the chief
legal officer at Law Insider and now becomes chief legal officer of these combined

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companies.

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Electra, welcome.

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Thanks for having me.

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Well, I've given you kind of the headline, but why don't you give us the details of the
news that you're announcing today?

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Yeah, mean, firstly, it's really, really exciting because I think this is an opportunity
for us to overcome the barriers that legal tech and AI in particular has had.

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and the fact that we've now paired the AI engine that is SimpleDocs with the data that is
Law Insider and usage of that database, the community that we've built around Law Insider,

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I think is going to be really transformational when it comes to the use of AI and the
tools that we're able to bring to the legal market.

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So yes, really, really excited to just get stuck in.

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Well, know, the point you're making, of course, is that content drives the development of
a large language model.

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That's why we call them language models, right?

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And SimpleDocs has had its AI platform.

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Law Insider has had this incredible collection of content.

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So as the companies come together, what does that mean for customers?

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What does that mean for the companies?

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Well I think that one of the biggest barriers to adoption of AI has been trust,
particularly in the legal community, which is completely understandable because...

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That's a fundamental element of what we offer in our profession.

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So if we're relying on tools that we can't trust, it either means that we have to
duplicate work, which doesn't align itself to the efficiency that lots of the AI tools on

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the market are promising.

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But there's a risk as well, right?

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Because if you get it wrong and you don't double check, then you hear all these horror
movies or all these horrible cases about people that didn't double check and then they got

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caught out and how that was detrimental to their reputation and their career.

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etc.

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So there's this fear coupled with just distrust of what the tools can do, whether they can
actually give people the efficiencies that they promise.

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A lot of this has to do with the fact that LLMs hallucinate, right?

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So you can ask ChatGPT something and it can give you an answer and it can sound really
confident and actually if you dig deeper it's made up and you can't have that in law.

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So what this will allow us to do is to generate language, generate red lines, generate new
clauses that may not exist in a contract, but benchmark those against a database of

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executed contracts.

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So these aren't even aspirational templates.

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They are executed contracts that are reflective of reality.

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So it's a very different offering to have something that's grounded in that reality and
grounded in data versus something that's completely generated.

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So having the capability

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to allow people to leverage that data that we have put together, but tailor it so that it
fits what they're doing in that moment within their workflow is unique.

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So that's the first piece.

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Secondly, just being able to offer insights.

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So that's what we're going to be working on.

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Offering people insights that will guide them during their negotiations because I've been
an in-house lawyer and you're reviewing an agreement and you don't fully understand how

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risky this is or what the chances are of this becoming problematic later on or what the
chances are of this causing friction in the negotiation that you're pursuing or even if

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you're building a playbook, you're setting

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your preferred position but it would be really helpful to understand how that position
benchmarks against your industry and against the broader world of contracts because it

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will allow you to then make decisions about how to structure that playbook or how to
approach your negotiation if it's grounded in real data.

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So you know I started off my journey doing a legal ops consultancy that then resulted in
one NDA and I'm a massive believer of standardization.

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This is what we're going to be able to bring to the

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world now.

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It's an element of standardisation that's grounded in data that will allow people to
understand what these insights mean to them, how they can use those insights, what they

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can say next time the other side says, but this is market, know, grounding all of this
stuff that has been guesswork today and just relied on hunches and institutional knowledge

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now surfacing all of that through data, I think is going to be the thing that this
industry needs.

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So yeah, it's an incredible.

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step forward for us.

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If somebody is listening to this podcast who has absolutely no idea what either company
does, kind of give us the nutshell version of the two companies and what they do.

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So Law Insider started 15 years ago, so it's not a new company.

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And what it does, or what it has always done, is collate public contracts that have been
published online, take those contracts and store it in its database, but also break those

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contracts up into clauses so they become very usable.

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So when a lawyer's reviewing an agreement and they're looking for language to fit a
non-solicitation clause in a specific industry, in a specific jurisdiction, they can

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access the Law Insider database

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and get that clause, copy it into their agreement, tailor it as needed.

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So we already have thousands of subscribers that buy into that database.

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then SimpleDocs is an AI first legal tech company that has developed a Word add-in.

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And this Word add-in, alongside other tools as well, of course, but the Word add-in was
the one that kind of paved the way for this joining of forces and this acquisition.

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So the Word add-in is an AI contract review tool.

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that allows people to review agreements against either their own playbooks or our Intel,
the LLMs that we rely on.

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So you can review an agreement and do what a lawyer would do, not all of it, but a lot of
it in a way that's very automated and intuitive.

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So in March of this year, and Bob, you and I talked about this when this happened, but in
March of this year, SimpleDocs and Law Insider partnered to deliver a version of the word

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add-in to the Law Insider.

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audience and the uptake was incredible.

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We have thousands of users on this tool which is an enormous achievement because legal
tech is difficult, right?

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Legal tech is difficult to implement, it's difficult to roll out, it's difficult to sell
because the legal community is unique.

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It has so many nuances that we need to cater for and so to see this uptake in such a short
amount of time showed us that A, Law Insider is the right audience for this tool and B,

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that people are very ready

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for tools that are going to streamline the way they work and take away some of the
drudgery that we have to endure when we're reviewing contracts.

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So, Simple Docs, AI First, Tech, Law Insider Database, and Community, and together we're
now building something that is much more holistic.

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Yeah.

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And I think I asked you a moment ago, like people have never heard of the two companies.

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I think people who have heard of the two companies might have thought they were already
had a tighter relationship in some way because they share a common co-founder, common

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founder.

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But in fact, they are separate companies or have been until now separate companies with
separate leadership and separate funding in separate organizations.

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That's right.

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they've always been separate.

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Preston has been the kind of the glue in the middle.

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But we have we are distinct companies, distinct teams.

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So like any acquisition, we now have to do the actual merger of the two and to smooth it
all over.

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So, that's coming.

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Yeah.

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Given that that it's Simple Docs is acquiring law insider.

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What does this mean for current customers of law insider?

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How will things change?

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How will they stay the same?

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I mean, it will predominantly say the same for them.

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Nothing will change.

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They will still have access to the same tools they always had, but now they have immediate
access to tools that will allow them to streamline their whole workflow, not just one part

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of it, which is research.

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And they have had access to the word add-in as well.

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We've also developed on the Law Insider side an AI Assistant, which is a chat experience
where you can use that to do search in a

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more intuitive way but also to generate documents so that coupled with the word add-in and
also the access to the broader tools that SimpleDocs has to offer just gives people a more

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complete solution for all their needs, their legal contract.

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You formerly joined Law Insider last year when it acquired OneNDA as you alluded to
earlier, the company that you started to develop open source contract standards.

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What happens now with that whole initiative involving OneNDA and the further expansion of
these open source standards?

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I mean, One NDA is a really good indicator of what the market, or at least the segment of
the market that believes in standardization and has kind of given its time to building out

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this initiative.

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You know, what that market standard should be and what is fair and balanced.

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So we're going to continue pulling that community element and that standardization
ideology, I suppose, across everything that we build.

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And the work that I did at One

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One NDA has been so useful when I've tried to build playbooks for the Law Insider add-in
and the SimpleDocs Word add-in.

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So it's all kind of, it's all connected.

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We will still continue promoting the standard.

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It still gets adoption every day.

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So every day we have new adopters, new downloads, and it's not like we're pushing it hard,
but because of the network effect that these initiatives have, you if I'm a One NDA

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adopter and I send it to the other side, it's an opportunity to spread the word about it.

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So we're seeing that network effect and now it's kind of snowballing.

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yeah, we'll see what we do with more standardization initiatives.

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I do wonder whether there's a way to take what we did and tie it more into the tools that
we're building.

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Because when we did OneSaaS, which was an initiative that we ran last, end of last year,
early this year, we then took what we built with OneSaaS and we created playbook rules.

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So now if you use our tool,

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the SAS playbook, the standard SAS playbook is based on one SAS.

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The standard NDA playbook is based on one NDA and the standard DPA playbook is based on
one DPA.

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So with the approach there was to start with a document but I wonder whether we now start
with the rules.

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So it's something that I'm thinking about a lot and yeah, watch this space.

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Well, it's interesting that you've you talked about that as something you're thinking a
lot about because according to the press release, one of one of your responsibilities

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going forward will be to oversee development expansion of the company's legal engineering
function.

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So I was kind of wondering what what else you're going to be looking at, what else you're
going to be thinking about in that role.

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Yeah, so I mean, the legal industry, the legal profession was not taught to prompt, right?

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So when you're interacting with an AI tool, you don't always know how to make the best use
out of it.

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So firstly, we need to develop...

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products that are intuitive in that sense.

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But we also need to build internal muscles so that we can support people as they come
through because again, just in terms of barriers to legal tech and because I ran a legal

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ops consultancy previously and I helped with lots of tech implementation, I saw that
firsthand.

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other than trust, you also have adoption.

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And it's hard to get people to adopt your tools, but it's absolutely imperative.

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And I think the companies that have invested in that side of their business are the
companies that are doing really well, because you understand that it's not easy for a

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legal team to take a tool and just roll it out the next day.

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That's not how it works.

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So we have to ensure that these tools are working as the lawyers need them.

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So when we talk about a legal engineering function, it very much means that I will support
people to build out whatever workflow

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they need within our tool in order to make it work for them, including things like
playbooks.

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If you have a preferred standard that you want to use or if you have a set of rules that
you've already documented, I can help pull those into the tool and make sure that they

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work for you as you need them to work and just help with general implementation, adoption
and change management so that customers aren't unsupported during that process as well.

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So it's not just about the product, it's about the wraparound care that customers need.

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as well.

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You can correct me if I'm wrong, but those customers for Simple Docs are primarily
corporate legal in-house legal departments.

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Law Insider has probably a broader customer base that goes beyond legal departments, law
firms, and even probably small businesses and others.

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Will there be some effort to somehow expand?

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bring together these sort of various customer bases now as you go forward.

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I mean, SimpleDocs also has law firms that we work with and Law Insider has lots of
smaller boutiques as well.

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So yeah, we will serve the whole market and we can now because we have the distribution to
do so to reach a broader audience through Law Insider.

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But we have the product and we have the infrastructure to support both law firms and
in-house lawyers.

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So yeah, that's the plan.

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Electra, anything else that you would like listeners to know about this news that we
haven't had a chance to talk about yet?

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I mean, I think it's just interesting to watch the development of the whole ecosystem and
how it's progressing.

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think that tying AI to precedent is the missing link and being able to surface insights
and negotiation guidance that is grounded in data rather than just AI is really the way

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forward for legal because it builds that...

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trust bridge that's currently missing.

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So yeah, very, very excited.

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Well, congratulations and thanks so much for coming on the show today to tell us all about
it.

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Thanks for having me.

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That's it for today's episode.

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can find all of these episodes on YouTube.

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Tech Directory under the Resources tab.

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This is Bob Ambrogi.

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Thanks for being with us today.