Matt Tizzard (00:05):

Welcome everybody. I'm just going to give it maybe 20, 30 seconds or so before we get cracking. Good morning, good evening, good day. Thank you for joining us. We've got a fantastic presentation, real life case study for you today, which I'm really excited to bring to you. So I'll just let everybody get into the webinar and settle down and close my Outlook as you probably just heard that there, and then we'll get straight into it.

(00:36):

So welcome everybody to this webinar. My name is Matt Tizzard and I'm proud to be given the opportunity to host this webinar with our partners at KP Law, NetApp and Evisort. We have some slides, we have a case study, and we have some speakers. So why don't I let you guys introduce yourself, if we move to the next slide. So we'll go left or right. Shelle, why don't you kick things off?

Shelle Elzer (01:03):

Sure. Hi everybody, I am Shelle Elzer. I am the Legal Project Manager at NetApp. Within legal operations, I focus on contracts, technology and workflow automation.

Jeff Marple (01:18):

All right. Thanks, Shelle. And I'm Jeff Marple. I'm the Director of Digital Transformation Strategy at KP Labs. KP Labs is a legal, technical, professional services company. We've been longtime partners with NetApp and with Evisort, and I run essentially our contract intelligence practice, so trying to turn contracts into data and putting that data to use.

Matt Tizzard (01:45):

Hi everybody. So I'm Matt Tizzard, Director of Strategic Alliances here at World Commerce and Contracting.

Kimberly Dimicco (01:53):

And I'm Kimberly Dimicco, Director of Communications at Evisort. And Evisort is a contract AI, contract intelligence company.

Matt Tizzard (02:03):

Thanks team. Okay, so we have an engaging discussion today, and we're going to learn how NetApp saved over $2.4 million across five urgent corporate legal projects. So we're going to learn how they accelerated 92,000 documents in their provision to find 3,000 that needed action, connected sales, procurement and contract management systems together for a central source of truth and extracted a mobilized contract data across the business facilitate operations. So here's the agenda for today. We're going to start with an overview. We're going to look at designing a [inaudible 00:02:39] contract identification and review process.

(02:45):

Oh, just a little bit of background from you, Shelle, I've just muted you there. And we're going to look at implementing and iterating on the workflow. We're going to measure outcomes and look at ROI. We're going to look at Evisort and KP Labs and overview, and then a live Q&A. So yeah, before we get into the meet and drinks, a little bit of housekeeping.

(03:06):

So firstly not on the screen, but the housekeeping here is this webinar is recorded and will be available with the slides on the WorldCC Content Hub Afterwards. If you have any questions, please ask as we go, and myself and Kimberly here, we'll do our best to bring them up to our speakers and stars of our show. But if we can't, we do have a Q&A afterwards. And finally, please connect with us and reach out afterwards. We'd be happy to help. We've got this really interesting workflow we're going to demonstrate, without spoiling it too early, and I'm sure there'll be some print screens here and you might want to reach out to us afterwards and we'll be happy to explore that with you.

(03:44):

So that's out of the way. Welcome again, I'm Matt Tizzard, Director of Strategic Alliances at World Commerce and Contracting. So we are a 75,000 strong not-for-profit member association that represent the commercial and contracting community. Before I hand over, particularly to Jeff, Shelle, Kimberly, I wanted to set a little bit of context here as to World Commerce and Contracting, why we continue to give you the best insights to the best in class technology based CCM projects.

(04:15):

In recent webinars, you probably heard me talk about the operational overload and how it's the most consistent constraint on our members and a focal point really for our America's summit in Dallas, this October our APEX summit in Melbourne and our European roadshow. We want to do more. We want to demonstrate value, but it's challenging when day by day we are in the weeds.

(04:42):

Well, I believe, and our research indicates that technology has a tremendous part to pay when it comes to operational overload. And I saw in a tweet that said, "I currently work 50 to 60 hours a week. With the new advancements of technology, the introduction of AI and the improvements in data quality I suspect in five years I will continue to be working 50 to 60 hours per week." Now, that is a joke, but where the truth lies really is that our roles are going to change and technology will hopefully help us demonstrate more value, better anticipate risk, and operate more quickly due to the implementation of such processes, systems and tools, all stuff we're going to cover today.

(05:24):

So yeah, we're going to demonstrate a real life example from that of NetApp's and KP Law. When it comes to systems and technology in general, we know from our benchmarking report that CCM organizations, 61% now have technology spend in their budgets, and 48% are in the market for better tools and systems. That is why at WorldCC we recognized and ensure we were at the forefront of CLM technology and through our CEO Sally Guyer we are at the forefront of the emergence of AI within the context of commercial and contract management.

(05:58):

I'm sure you will gain incredible insights and knowledge of what is possible, and I encourage you to ask questions. So please enjoy this case study. And before we kick off, let's think about our own current tools and systems. So Kimberley, could you bring up poll one, please?

(06:15):

The first poll is, "How familiar are you with using AI in your contract processes?" So we've got A, B, C, and D, A being very familiar. We use AI regularly in our work. B, somewhat familiar. We use AI occasionally. C, a little familiar. We are exploring the use of AI. And D, not very familiar. That's why I'm here to learn. So four options there. We'll give you a little bit of time to click what's appropriate for you. And I guess as they come in, I'll probably pass to you, Jeff, what are you expecting to see? I can see it filling up.

Jeff Marple (06:54):

Oh, well, I'm already seeing the results, so I'm going to be biased, but I would've thought it would be C or B are going to be the ones that are going to be the ones. But I'm a technological optimist, Matthew, so we'll see where we land because it looks like the numbers are not bearing that out.

Matt Tizzard (07:15):

I think we've got some champions here and we've got some people very familiar as well. So yeah, if we take a look, and I'm not sure if you can see them on the screen now if we share results, but yeah, 10% very familiar, which is fantastic actually. And hopefully you can contribute to this discussion in the chat as we go. Really interested to hear from you. We've got somewhat familiar at 16%, a little familiar at 32%. And then almost, well, 42%. Sounded like a sales guy, almost half tonight, not very familiar. So that's why I'm here, to learn. Yeah, something for everybody here. Let's move on.

(07:59):

The second poll is, "If you are using AI in your contract processes, are you using it pre signature or post signature?" And we've given a lot of examples recently at WorldCC, but do you use AI pre signature process? Are you using AI for post signature? Are you using it for both or not at all? And again, I guess, Shelle, as we go here, what do you reckon? Do reckon most of our audience are using it pre, post, both, not at all?

Shelle Elzer (08:38):

I'm going to go for post signature.

Matt Tizzard (08:43):

Yeah, absolutely. We're seeing a lot of our members come through talking about extracting that data, that meta and using it for better decisions. That's something that I'm sure we talk about a little bit today. So yeah, let's get these results, Kimberly, if we can see them coming through.

Jeff Marple (09:05):

Matthew, I'm hearing there's a technical glitch on the poll. So this one-

Matt Tizzard (09:10):

No problem, coming through in the chat [inaudible 00:09:14]-

Jeff Marple (09:13):

Remain a mystery for today.

Matt Tizzard (09:15):

That's okay. It will. But it's interesting that we're catering for both sides here, whether that's pre signature in the drafting stage, if it's post in extracting that data for better decisions moving forward. So something for everybody. We know we've got a real mix of technical knowledge here as well on the call. So yeah, if we move on, Kimberly, let's get into the meat of the session.

Kimberly Dimicco (09:40):

Yeah, that sounds great. So I'm so excited to welcome Shelle from NetApp and Jeff from KP Labs to share their story. Just in case you're not familiar with NetApp, they're a global company with operations all over the world, and NetApp really empowers organizations to lead with data in digital transformation. They provide systems, software, cloud services that enable their customers to run their applications optimally from data center to cloud to everything in between.

(10:15):

So in short, NetApp helps organizations build their own data fabric and securely deliver the right data, the right services, the right applications to the right people. As you might imagine, legal operations at such a dynamic company is a fast-paced and complex organization, and they're always on the forefront of using the latest technology, seeing where they can innovate in their processes.

(10:44):

In 2020, NetApp actually brought on Evisort for AI powered contract intelligence to help extract actionable data from their contracts. And NetApp is now managing contract data through Evisort, connected with their existing systems, and it's about a 70/30 split when we look at sales contracts versus more vendor procurement related contracts. So with that short introduction, I'll pass it over to Shelle and Jeff to walk us through how they looked at mobilizing their contract data for these really critical corporate projects.

Jeff Marple (11:27):

Great, thanks. Shelle, you want to take us away? You're on mute, Shelle.

Shelle Elzer (11:36):

Our first big problem that came our way was the relocation of our international headquarters. Between sales and procurement, like Kimberly already mentioned, we had over 90,000 contracts to be evaluated. Like most problems, we needed this turned around very quickly. We knew manually putting hands, eyes on all of these contracts wasn't going to be an option for us. So not only did we not have the time or the manpower, it just seemed like such an efficient way to solve our problem. This is when we started throwing ideas around with Jeff to determine how Evisort and KP Labs could play a role in our problem solving. We're lucky enough to have our contracts in the respective sales and procurement repositories, but that's kind of where it ended for us at that time.

(12:24):

Of these 90,000 plus contracts, we needed to know which contracts were going to be affected by this change. So here we are taking that 90,000 and shrinking it down. We used Evisort to deter to determine the legal entities in each of the agreements, and once we had our hands on that data set, we could then solve our next problem, and that was the conditions of reassignment. Based on the consistency of the language Evisort was finding, we're able to divide these up into three major buckets. We had a notification bucket, those were the customers that just need notified what was happening.

(13:03):

The second was a consent bucket, so they got the notifications, but these customers actually needed consent and acknowledge that they accepted this change. And then there was a small subset who needed amendments. That was a really small bucket, but worth mentioning there were some that fell out of that automated process for us.

(13:25):

Once we had our buckets defined, the next step was to generate communication to the customer based on which bucket they fell into. Given the volume of the customers being affected, it made sense to automate the communication. We built a workflow to not only automate the communication going to the customer, but also automate having the said communication go back into our contract repository, connecting it to the agreement that was affected, and we'll have more to that to come on a future slide.

(13:55):

In the past 18 months, we took what started with our change in international headquarters and grew from there. We realized as we were going through this problem solving process, this was really a concept that could be applied to a lot of other big manual legal project. This was a defining moment for us. We knew we needed to take the time to set it all up correctly for future use. Since the headquarter change, we've used this concept many times. Jeff is going to walk through each of these projects in a bit more detail in the next slide.

Jeff Marple (14:33):

Great. Thank you, Shelle. Yeah, so the change of the European headquarters was the first project that we did. Probably the most complex. Part of that was because we didn't know what we didn't know yet. It was the first one of these and we've gotten a lot better at doing these over time. Also, extremely large. That in the creation of the new legal entity that you're seeing on the screen, were probably the two from a size perspective.

(14:59):

So again, we had to figure out which contracts were responsive in almost all of these projects, and responsive contracts were typically defined by a contract being in force and associated to a specific entity. NetApp is a very large company that has many different entities, and sometimes those entities change names over time. You don't find that out until the month before you're supposed to go live. So that was the first step. So cutting out a lot of static. Searching for contracts is, I call it contract sudoku sometimes, because you don't necessarily know what the right answer is, but what you don't want and that gets you down to a smaller number of contracts, which is much easier to manage.

(15:43):

We built a robust responsiveness matrix for each one of these projects so that when we understood that something was in or out of scope, we could tag it appropriately. So we created data that gave us basically shorthand to tell us why a contract was in or out of scope. This was incredibly useful down the road.

(16:06):

Post projects, there's always questions around like, "Hey, was this entity contacted?" Or, "Why wasn't this entity contacted?" And we're able to answer those questions very quickly as to why we took the action that we did. One of the great things about Evisort is you're able to create all that data in Evisort and associate it directly to the contract. So Evisort, while it's not what I would call the source of truth for contracts at NetApp, those would be the proper repositories. It was the source of truth for the analysis on all these projects.

(16:40):

Everything was contained there so that we were able to always go back and answer those questions as we needed to. The first project also contained both sales and procurement contracts, so we had two different types of data sets coming in, which is always interesting. And then we had to get down to the language review. Evisort has the ability to extract provisions out of the box and basically put those into spreadsheets or tables. We were able to leverage that ability to find common language down to the punctuation even.

(17:16):

When we found contracts that had exactly the same language, essentially what that means is you might have 300 contracts with exactly the same language. Those 300 contracts can go all into the same bucket because they all have exactly the same language. So while we got down to about 5,000 and change on this first project that needed to be reviewed from an assignment perspective, we probably only looked at, I don't know, somewhere around 600 or 700 different versions of that language, and that covered the entire corpus of contracts.

(17:51):

We went through that, we went through the European headquarters move, and then we moved into an post M&A acquisition project. NetApp had made an acquisition, there's a bunch of contracts that need to be ingested in and they have to fit into the NetApp data structure. So that means in order to populate the correct metadata fields within their repositories, data had to be extracted from the four corners of the contract.

(18:24):

Also, so there was some things that NetApp wanted to know about the contracts that they had just acquired. Things like, are there any special pricing discounts on here? Are there any most favored nation statements in here that they need to be aware of? Anything that might affect their business with this new acquisition and those new clients that just acquired. And then at the end of this, we had to also review the assignment language, which we've gotten really good at. I can tell you that me and my team can now probably read assignment language with our eyes closed, so we've gotten at least NetApp aside assignment language. We're really good at that.

(19:01):

The next piece is something probably a lot of folks on the call are familiar with, that there was a December deadline last year to come into compliance for the Schrems II remediation. So we looked at all the data processing agreements that NetApp had. NetApp does a great job of capturing contract type within their repositories, but some of these contracts were a little bit older and perhaps some of the data hygiene wasn't always there. And whenever there's humans in the loop, things get missed from time to time. So we did the sweep to make sure that we captured all the data processing agreements, and then we used a feature within Evisort that allows you to look for keywords within specific provisions. So we were able to do keyword searches in very targeted ways on a very targeted set of contracts to very quickly go through 70,000 contracts and understand what the exposure was here as well.

(19:57):

Finally, we just wrapped a project where we created a new legal entity for a specific line of business. That line of business and all the contracts associated with the line of business were being moved to this new entity. So we essentially did this very similar work that we did to the change of European headquarters. Again, we looked for responsiveness, not this time based on entity, but actually based on specific language within the contracts. And then we did our assignment language review as well. All of these projects, they're throwing off tons of data, and again, we're able to capture that data within Evisort and then we're able to extract all of that data out to generate some of the notifications.

(20:42):

We're going to show you a visual of that in just a moment. But if you wouldn't mind going to the next screen real quick, Kim. Just very quickly, just to show you sort of what we had to do on each one, we had to identify responsive contracts on three out of four, we included procurement on two out of four, we reviewed assignment language in three out four. And then of course, we looked for standard contractual clauses or the lack thereof for the DPA remediation. I will pause there in case I missed something that Shelle knows about or in case there's a question or anything like that anyone wants to ask before we get into the next slide.

(21:24):

All right. As a dad, I can tell you that silence is a good thing. When they're young. Although now I have teenager, silence cause becomes more and more dangerous. If you wouldn't mind going to the next slide, Kim?

Kimberly Dimicco (21:41):

Yep.

Jeff Marple (21:42):

Great. All right, so this is kind of the visual and then you can see that there's a nice big circle here, and I'm going to sort of try to walk you through it. NetApp has two contract repositories. They have a sell side and a buy side. So revenue and procurement, those contracts are loaded into Evisort. That's done on a regular basis to keep Evisort up to date. One of the nice things about Evisort is that if there is metadata that exists with those contracts, you can marry that metadata up with the contracts when you load it into Evisort, which means if you have data that lives in those repositories, and that's how the business talks about those contracts, thinks about those contracts, for example, customer names, they're going to have very specific customer names that may not match the entity names that are on the contract.

(22:33):

Those can often be very, very different things depending on which entity you're contracting with, you're able to pull that information in and then use that to either search or split those contracts by that metadata. It's not the biggest selling point, but it should be because it's an amazing way to marry up that hard fought for business data with the data that you pull from the four corners of the contract.

(23:02):

So then we went through our analysis, and I walked you through some of that on the last slide. That creates a bunch of structured data and we drove insights from those. For example, is this contract responsive or not based on what this list of criteria? Do we need to notify? Do we need to gain consent? Do we need to amend? All of that then essentially turns into a data file that we extract out and we pass that into an automated workflow that we had created. We created the first one for the headquarters move, and then we're able to clone that workflow with slight modifications for each of the subsequent projects. So we had some initial development up front. We did a ton of initial development up front on that first project, both from a process perspective, learning about how to massage metadata the right way and from that workflow design perspective.

(24:05):

And then from that, we were able to automatically push out thousands of notifications all at once out to the respective counterparties. Not only were we able to do that, but we were able to send out automated reminders every 60 and 30 days as we got closer and closer to the dates, the go-live dates. And we were able to tell which emails went through, which ones bounced. If any of you have ever dealt with contact data, it's fleeting as people move from one company to another change roles. So we're able to see which ones were read, which ones bounced back, which ones we needed to go get additional contact information for. And then we would take the notification or the consent document that we had created, and those get automatically filed, integrated back in to the contract repositories.

(24:59):

What that means is that we needed to know which contract workspace, which agreement number is associated to every single contract. We needed to understand what we were going to do on those contracts, and we needed to trace that all the way through digitally so that we got those notifications back, we got those consents back, we're able to file those all the way back through. So we had clear line of sight from loading the contracts all the way to the notifications that we built and then loading them back through, along with all of the responsiveness and categorization matrices that we used. And I'll pause there for a minute.

Matt Tizzard (25:45):

Yeah, a couple of questions coming in, Jeff. And if I lose you, we've got unbelievable thunder and lightning coming down right here in Milton Keynes, England as we speak. It's just rolled in, but question from Bob-

Jeff Marple (25:56):

Don't go outside.

Matt Tizzard (25:57):

Sorry?

Jeff Marple (25:59):

Don't go outside.

Matt Tizzard (26:00):

Yeah, I'll do my best here. But yeah, so question from Bob, more of a clarifier, "Is Evisort being used as the content server?"

Jeff Marple (26:11):

The content server. That sounds like a technical question. No, it's being really used as a ... it's like a business intelligence tool for contracts is the way I would think about it. The contracts are loaded into Evisort in order for aort to be able to do its magic and extract the data points out that we are looking for. And maybe that's what he's asking, but I don't believe that's what he's asking in this particular question.

Matt Tizzard (26:40):

No problem. And more from a people perspective, because naturally getting that contact information is quite difficult from the sales side, and sometimes we keep things in Outlooks and finding that information can be challenging. We don't have that anymore, obviously. How long did that take till you got to a point of being happy with the information and the contact information that you'd have?

Jeff Marple (27:08):

How long did it take for us to be happy with the information that we had developed during the projects?

Matt Tizzard (27:14):

Yeah, and the people side of communicating with the business to get those contact information that you needed to basically action from the contracts?

Jeff Marple (27:25):

Shelle, you want to take a stab at that one?

Shelle Elzer (27:28):

Yeah. Yeah. So I think our first project was sort of the Guinea pig on this. We didn't know what we didn't know, so that was a little bit more painful. There was a lot of contacts also needed. So that process, I think we might have been in the months if not many, many, many weeks. With that though, we learned so much. And so from every project going forward, the upfront ask, the very first thing, and the most critical thing we always told the team was, "We can do all of this stuff for you, but if you can't provide contact information to us, there is no project."

(28:09):

It seems like the simplest thing, but it really becomes the hardest part in this entire slide. So we really send that message upfront. And I think the last two projects, we had contact information really before we had ... that structured data that Jeff was talking about? We had contact information before we had some of that. So we definitely learned with each one.

Matt Tizzard (28:35):

Think about, we could probably do another webinar on stakeholder engagement, but the contract repositories, question from Paul, "You've got here a sell side and a buy side. Why did you have two? I mean, would one not be better, cheaper or more integrated?"

Jeff Marple (28:59):

The two different repositories that are used by NetApp, the feature sets on each one are more specific to the jobs that those people do. One is very specific to sales and sales operations, and the other is very much focused on procurement. And I can tell you that both of those platforms don't necessarily try to sell across lines for the most part.

Shelle Elzer (29:28):

Yeah, we've always tried to have a really clear distinction between without any overlap.

Kimberly Dimicco (29:34):

Shelle, maybe can you explain a little bit more about the different teams that you worked with for this workflow and how that overlapped? Maybe that'll give people a little bit of a better picture of the technology landscape that you were working with.

Shelle Elzer (29:50):

Yeah, sure. I would say with the contact information, we really pulled from a few places. We pulled from our sales and our sales ops team. They're the ones who are constantly working with our customers and seem to own that relationship. So the majority, I would say, of our information came from them. We also used the information that we had in our CLM tools. A lot of times that information's entered, so we know who to send this contract to for signatures. So I would say for the contact information, it was really primarily sales and sales ops.

(30:34):

Legal operations had a hand in every single one of these stages. Jeff and I worked together, Jeff and his team worked together, so we touched every single one of these stages. We also did have legal involvement and each of these projects. There was a representative from legal who helped work with Jeff to define responsiveness criteria, who just throughout the project sort of consulted. And that was really upfront in the scanning of the contracts, the automated workflow, legal developed the language that was sent to the customers. And really though, once we set out that workflow, legal was able to step back a little bit and ops and the KP Labs team really handled it from there. So some legal involvement upfront in the process.

Kimberly Dimicco (31:43):

Awesome. Do we want to move on to the next slide, or Jeff, anything you'd close on this one with?

Jeff Marple (31:49):

Oh no, I think we covered it. Yeah, we can go to the next slide.

Kimberly Dimicco (31:54):

Okay, sounds good.

Shelle Elzer (31:54):

All right.

Kimberly Dimicco (32:01):

It's really exciting because this is the money slide, right?

Shelle Elzer (32:08):

This is what everybody wants to know. I mean, I'm sure you're here, you're listening, you're crunching in the numbers in your heads thinking, "How do you have a problem this big?" You can use incredible technology. You can get a team of experts to help you and save your company money at the same time. It seems a little bit crazy, maybe even too good to be true, but it's true, it's possible. And we have many projects now at this point to show that this really does work.

(32:42):

So here's a little bit about how the savings is formulated. We take the estimated cost of manual contract review knowing we wouldn't have the manpower to put our eyes on all 90,000 of these contracts. So it's just estimated using outside legal support for this. We also take out the administrative costs of the notifications.

(33:03):

This is everything from drafting the communications, getting the contact information, the actual sending out of these, but then also the retention of that communication. You need to keep record of this to be able to refer to it in the future, creating a contract record, storing it, tying it to the parent, et cetera. All of that costs money. And next, we take out the obvious costs, the analysts we use, the software that's used to make the magic happen. The number that we give at the end is our savings. And I think on the next slide you're going to see that the number varies each time we complete a project like this.

Jeff Marple (33:51):

Here we go. Here's the actual money. Shelle walked you through the formula and we tried to be incredibly conservative on this because we knew we had a good one here. So you could see that HQ move, we think we saved about $571,000 on that in change. For the Schrems II was even higher because we just flew through those contracts. So very little hours spent compared to the amount of work, number of contracts that we had to sift through.

(34:28):

The M&A one is the interesting one because you're probably looking at that and saying 3%, yeah, we saved like $2,000 on that. We wanted to throw that in there because this one didn't go the way we wanted it to. It wasn't, in our opinion, any failure of the technology or even our process. It was the fact that the scope of the contracts continued to change, which contracts we had to look at, which contracts we didn't need to look at. Shelle may be able to say this better than me, but trying to communicate to the acquired company what it was that we needed and when we needed it, getting that information on time and understanding which of the documents they thought were in scope versus what NetApp thought was in scope really churned a lot of time. So we actually kind of did that M&A one, probably two or three different versions of it. Would you say that's right, Shelle?

Shelle Elzer (35:24):

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the complexity of what we thought we were getting into versus the reality was just completely different. It doesn't show a big percent, but I love having this in here to give the reality. We're not saying everything's going to be amazing. It's not going to be $1 million with every project, but that was our first time doing it with an M&A project, and we learned so much.

(35:51):

We actually have another one coming up we're in the middle of right now, and the numbers are going to be a lot bigger just based on what we learned this first go around. And also, we were maybe halfway through the project and we learned, oh, by the way, this isn't one project. It's really broken out into three. We have to do it with three separate entities. And oh, by the way, there's translations involved as well. So that time spent on this one was much larger than any other, but it's also that time spent would've been much greater had someone manually been looking at it.

Jeff Marple (36:31):

And we had notifications going out in multiple languages as well, Shelle. We had all sorts of stuff.

Shelle Elzer (36:40):

Extremely complex. Yeah.

Jeff Marple (36:42):

Yes. I would say the new entity project at the end is probably the most analogous to the first project, the HQ move. And you can see our savings have jumped up on that from 69% to 90%. That project, we invested a ton of time in that, and it's really paid off as you can see, in future projects. And we expect those numbers to go up at least from a ratio perspective as we go forward. And we'll be watching it closely.

Matt Tizzard (37:16):

Just looking at the numbers, Jeff, you're obviously ... with two questions. Firstly on digital solution costs, the HQ move for the automated workflow came in at 20,000, but then it drops there on after to 5,400. Why is that?

Jeff Marple (37:34):

Because we developed the workflow on the first project and then we cloned it essentially for every subsequent one with minor tweaks that we needed for each one. So obviously the language that's going to go out is going to be different. NetApp, as we went along, NetApp wanted to capture different parts of information that we didn't capture on the previous one or drop information that was extraneous, so we got a little bit better, so you see a little bit of configuration on each one of those, and then just the analyst time to actually load the data process and hit the button [inaudible 00:38:08].

Shelle Elzer (38:08):

With the workflow in particular, we really took the time to make sure that it was perfect. We knew at that point that what we had was going to be something special, and we already knew it was going to be cloned and used from here on out. So it was worth taking that extra time and the extra testing to make sure that we had it for future use. So it was higher up upfront costs, but after that, it's really a matter of cloning and just doing small tweaks.

Matt Tizzard (38:42):

And I guess there's people listening in here that are thinking, I've not got a HQ move going on. If I did, I'd a probably leave. I haven't got an M&A project underway, I'm not overlooking it. I think you saw the lightning coming there. How is that relevant, how can you relate this to the rest of the audience that aren't in those two buckets?

Shelle Elzer (39:09):

Yeah, I think that's a great question. How does this apply to me? And the answer is yes, it does apply to you. This is just a concept. This is a framework for so many big projects that are being completed across various industries. You have some kind of change happening. It doesn't have to be an acquisition or a headquarter change. It could be a mass termination, it could be a billing address change. Really anything that needs to have some sort of communication or some kind of big action, you've got to start with whatever that problem is that needs to be addressed and kind of let Evisort do its magic. [inaudible 00:39:51]

Jeff Marple (39:47):

Sorry, go ahead.

Matt Tizzard (39:53):

Sorry, Jeff.

Jeff Marple (39:54):

I was just going to say, any project where you need to pull data out of contracts and then do something with it, we call it turning nouns into verbs. We try to ... contract extraction technology is amazing and super interesting when you look at it, but if you don't do anything with it, it's just interesting, and what can you do to act on it? So I'm sure there are projects out there that folks on the phone are listening ... on the phone. How old am I? Are thinking about, and there might be something they can glean from this that they can take home.

Kimberly Dimicco (40:28):

Yeah, I mean I think it goes back to you don't know what's coming up next, and so you need to have that contract data at your fingertips. I wouldn't even consider working without something like Google today, just information, whatever I want to know at my fingertips. I can just type it in and hit search and why wouldn't we use that same technology for our contracts? That's really, that's data that's been negotiated. There's been so much time and effort that goes into setting up the contract and then to just store it in a system and never look at it again until something goes wrong. We're past that now, it's 2023. We've got technology to do better than that. So I think that's really what it gets back to.

Matt Tizzard (41:17):

With the technology, Jeff, I've got a question in here from Jordan, which is, "Which software/programs were you using for automated communication?"

Jeff Marple (41:30):

Yeah, sure. It's a product called Tap by Mitratech. Mitratech owns the product, it's called Tap. It is a low-code, no-code legal focused business process automation platform. NetApp and TAP go way back, and as does KP Labs. As a matter of fact, KP Labs, NetApp and Tap are sort of how KP Labs started, and we've built everything on there from legal front door requests. We've built vaccination card requests. We did an office move on there. So it's a very flexible tool and it can integrate with a lot of different of other types of systems and pull data, push data, that kind of thing.

Matt Tizzard (42:22):

Thank you. And just flicking back to the M&A, the 3%, and more for our members really from a learning perspective, you talked about the scope changing. Thinking about it now, if you can answer, and I suppose for you, Shelle, as well, what would you do differently in that communication to speed that process up moving forward so you don't have that kind of rinse and repeat cycle and we are losing costs and so on and so forth?

Jeff Marple (42:53):

That's a good question. This was a tough one because we were dealing with another company that maybe didn't have everything that we wanted right out of the gate. I think we would probably have a sharper ask upfront around exactly what we needed, and that might head off some of that. What do you think, Shelle?

Shelle Elzer (43:15):

Yeah, I definitely think that would've been helpful. I think we had some date changes as well, a lot of shifting deadlines and see I think all around just a much clearer project path, little firmer project path up front would've been helpful and full cooperation with our asks outlined up front.

Matt Tizzard (43:41):

Interesting to hear. I mean, we did a lot of research at WorldCC about what we classed later as our 10 pitfalls of contracting and clear scope and goals fell into the heart of that, and lessons we're always continually looking to learn from actually the writing to the communication between the parties. So no, good to gain some insights.

Shelle Elzer (44:09):

Yeah, I think next month when we have our next M&A, we'll have some numbers to be able to populate our next one. You're going to see the difference, but the only reason why those numbers are going to look as good as they do is because of this first one and the lessons learned. So as much as it doesn't look as high and as great, it really is critical to all the future projects what we learned and how we're going to set the stage for everyone coming at us.

Matt Tizzard (44:34):

Absolutely. And that relates to something we spoke about yesterday where we were talking about, yeah, you've got your formula for cost saving, but actually there's future implied savings as well by repeating this process and repeating this framework moving forward for a similar and likewise project. So fantastic. I don't think there's any other questions coming in, so I think we'll move on and we have.

Jeff Marple (45:04):

All right, great. Just so, I mean everybody knows who NetApp is and probably a lot of people know who Evisort is, but I think probably less people know who KP Labs is. We're a small boutique legal technology professional services company. We have three main areas, contract intelligence, which you heard around about today. We also have our workflow practice, which tied into this project as well. And then we have a third prong, which is our solving hard problems, which essentially is, we have a strong engineering department where we build a lot of custom solutions for folks where there's just not necessarily an opportunity out there.

(45:40):

We partnered strongly with Evisort on our contract intelligence side of the house, do a lot of work for folks both on pre and post [inaudible 00:45:49], helping them turn their contracts into data and get them the information that they need to make the business decisions that they need. So that's who we are. My name's like, as I said, Jeff Marple. I'm on LinkedIn. If you have any questions, would love to talk to you. Please feel free to reach out and really appreciate being here today.

Kimberly Dimicco (46:09):

Awesome. Thanks, Jeff. And for a little bit more about Evisort. So Evisort offers enterprise grade AI and contract intelligence. Evisort helps companies connect, analyze, and manage their contracts. So you can also use Evisort for traditional contract lifecycle management and digital workflows, et cetera. We're powered by proprietary AI that has been trained on 11 million contracts and has extracted over 1 billion data points at this point. We also take security and data privacy very seriously.

(46:48):

So we are supporting, as you can see, many, many global customers, a lot of different industries represented here and dealing with contracts in multiple languages, contracts of different types on your own paper, on third party paper. And as Shelle and Jeff has mentioned today, a lot of our customers are also using Evisort to extract that data and then connect it across different systems. So ERP systems, procure to pay, CRM, those really large systems that need to be connected at an enterprise level. And with that, I think we have time to open it up for Q&A.

Matt Tizzard (47:38):

Perfect. Thanks, Kimberly. We've got a few questions here, some quite technical. We'll do our best. If not, we'll definitely reach out afterwards. A couple of us, and the first one, Shelle, I want to draw your mind back to your workflow and we talked about extraction of data. Sharon asks, "What was the contract data that you needed?" So what was it you were pulling? I believe that's the right context, Sharon.

Shelle Elzer (48:04):

I think Sharon's question might be asking about the contact.

Jeff Marple (48:07):

The contact.

Matt Tizzard (48:08):

Oh, contact data.

Shelle Elzer (48:09):

Contact information [inaudible 00:48:10] looking, yeah. [inaudible 00:48:13]

Matt Tizzard (48:16):

The lawyers have looked over the question.

Shelle Elzer (48:16):

Yeah, no worries, no worries. We actually learned a lot about this too. When we first started, we were like, "Yeah, we're going to need name, we're going to need email, we're going to take as much as we can get." Once we realized how hard some of it was to get, we're like, "Okay, let's make this a little easier." So with each of these, we have gone to really just email, email information and we ask for a backup too, just in case. That way if one bounces, there's not a lag in between and we can get a second notification out ASAP.

Matt Tizzard (48:53):

Fantastic. Okay. And how are we doing for time? We'll move on. Question from Bob, "For tracking assignment clauses, is contract metadata being married to ERP data using the contract repositories?"

Jeff Marple (49:11):

We can track the contracts back to the CLM information in this particular case. You can marry any kind of data that you want up to your contracts as long as you can make the joint, as long as you know that this contract's related to whatever outside data that is. And you can store all of that together in Evisort. We didn't have a need to do that on this particular project, but we did marry procurement CLM data up with the contracts, which then in turn you could blossom back out to ERP as well.

Matt Tizzard (49:52):

Thanks, Jeff. And I think, Brian, that answers your question as well about how can software and AI interact with the CLM system, a Ariba and ERP systems to consolidate metadata between them? Anything to add on that piece, Jeff?

Jeff Marple (50:10):

Yeah, every document that's stored in Evisort has a row of data associated with it. Some of that data is extracted from the contract, some of it might be created by a user when they're examining a contract. And then some of that data can be brought in from other systems. So as long as you can make a join from the document that you're seeing in front of you to data that exists in other systems, you can bring it all together in Evisort, which is incredibly powerful when you're able to again, marry that data from outside with the data that lives within the contract, because that's usually the only place that data lives. The data that's in the contract.

Matt Tizzard (50:50):

Thank you. Yeah, fantastic. Thank you. And thanks everybody. Thanks, Brian, Bob and everybody for your questions. We've got one last that's just come in, actually. Kimberly, you can see that Abinesh has asked, "What is the relationship between KP Labs and Evisort?"

Kimberly Dimicco (51:10):

Yeah, so KP Labs is an Evisort partner. We have many different partners from other service providers and technology providers to consultancy firms. And KP Labs have been wonderful in working with a lot of Evisort customers actually in helping them with getting the system stood up and optimizing their use of the system. And Jeff, you can probably speak to this much better than I can if you want to add anything.

Jeff Marple (51:37):

Yeah. Evisort is our technology partner, or sometimes almost an extension of the company, and vice versa. We try to help Evisort's customers get the most out of their Evisort licenses. Sometimes that's through highly customize work. Sometimes it's through somewhat simple implementations and sometimes it's like what we do at NetApp, which is essentially the center of excellence type work or what we call wraparound services. So when NetApp needs something done on Evisort, they're usually giving us a ring. So that's our relationship.

Matt Tizzard (52:12):

Thank you, Kimberly. Thanks, Jeff. Okay, so I think that's all the questions. One quick one actually from Pinesh, "But can we use it for IP contracts?"

Kimberly Dimicco (52:25):

Yes. If the question is, can we use Evisort for IP contracts? Yes, you can use Evisort to extract data from any type of contracts, including IP contracts, sales contracts, NDAs, pretty much any type you could think of.

Matt Tizzard (52:41):

Absolutely. Fantastic. Well, I just would like to thank Shelle, Kimberly, and Jeff for your time today and your efforts in bringing this to our WorldCC membership. Fantastic case study, really interested to see what happens from here. Obviously lots of projects lined up already.

(52:58):

But for the members, thank you very much for logging in today and viewing our webinar with our partners here at Evisort. If you have any questions post or would like to reach out to Kimberly, Jeff, Shelle, or even myself if you wish, you're more than welcome to. Have a great rest of your day, rest of your evening. Thank you once more to our speakers and we will see you again very soon. Take care.

Kimberly Dimicco (53:26):

Thank you.

Jeff Marple (53:28):

Thank you.

Shelle Elzer (53:28):

Thank you.

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