Paul Branch (00:00:00):

Hello, my name is Paul Branch. I am the chief networking officer here at World Commerce & Contracting, and it's my delight to be working with colleagues from Evisort and indeed from Keller Williams. And we're looking today at how Keller Williams extends the return on investment of contract management. So a really interesting topic.

(00:00:23):

I know there's lots of focus on delivering ROI and the challenges that we face as professionals in this space, on how to deliver the expectations of the business, particularly when we deploy complex artificial intelligence technologies. So we'll be touching on quite a bit of that today. So looking forward to an exciting session.

(00:00:44):

So if we could move on to the next slide. Great. So I'm joined on our virtual stage today by our partner in crime Evisort. And I'm delighted to welcome back to our stage here, Michaela Dempsey, who's the chief marketing officer at Evisort, and a little bit later, we'll be hearing from Derek Karpel, who's the product marketing manager, who is going to share with us some of the interesting features of the Evisort capability.

(00:01:15):

But our star of the show without doubt is Travis Somerville. Travis is the procurement leader at Keller Williams. And we'll be hearing quite a bit from Travis. You've joined the call today with your lines muted. Not because we don't want to hear from you. We most definitely do. So when you have that burning question for Travis, please do use that Q and A tab, ask the question, and as we move through, we'll ask those that are pertinent to the discussion and we'll set up the meaty ones for the end, and there'll be a Q and A slot then.

(00:01:49):

And you will get a copy of the recording, and most definitely, a copy of these slides. So we're going to move quite fast, because Travis has got an awful lot to share with you today. So if there's something that you might have missed, feel free to go back and view that recording or ask us questions as we go through the Q and A.

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So without further ado, guys, welcome to our panel today. So much looking forward to this. You're going to have to listen to me for just a couple more seconds as I set the scene and share with you some of our world CC research, and then all bets are off it's over to Travis to tell us a little bit more about the Keller Williams artificial intelligence story. And that session will be managed for us by Michaela. We're then going to flip to Derek to look at AI in action, really interesting set a demos that underpins some of the experiences that Travis will share. And then as I say, there'll be an opportunity for us to ask questions as we go through and indeed at the end.

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So let's make this as this session as interactive as we can, really keen to get your views, your experiences to share as you listen to the really relevant experiences, and indeed, some of the key business challenges that Travis overcame in his journey.

(00:03:16):

Right, so before we get into that though, a little bit of a setting of scene from me, it is obscene. It is really sad for our discipline, that we still leave material and amounts of value on the table. That 9%, 9.2% on average left on the table in terms of contract value over the life of an agreement as a result of poor contract and commercial management. Now not all of that is going to drop down to the bottom line, but even as a result of our actions today, even if half or maybe a third of that drops down to the bottom line, that's a head turning number for many corporations.

(00:04:02):

We are at a crossroads at the moment where we're dealing with a legacy of contracts that folks find really hard to understand. 90% of business stakeholders consider contracts are hard or impossible to understand. That's awful. We can do better. And technology is one of the ways to achieve that. 84% of contract professionals are experiencing pressure to apply contract simplification and also to drive throughput to improve the speed of response and to maintain some of that value that we talked about just now.

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So with that mindset and these set of challenges, let me now hand over to the next slide, which is our poll. So before I hand over to Travis, let's just wander through this poll. As our audience, have you implemented a CLM tool or a system for simple answers, two yeses, two nos. Yes, it has delivered return on investment. Yes, but it didn't deliver return on investment. No, but I plan to within the next 12 months. And no, and I have no plans to do so. So you get to bank one vote and we did have a brief discussion about how this was going to pan out.

Michaela Dempsey (00:05:38):

So what are your thoughts, Travis, on this? Where do you think it's going to end up? I figure it's going to be the top three, but I'm not sure anymore.

Travis Somerville (00:05:53):

Yeah. I don't know, does everybody get to see the results? Because I'm already swayed. I could see the answers.

Paul Branch (00:06:01):

You could see because the poll's in progress. So let's publish the results. Michaela over to you. Was this what you were expecting?

Michaela Dempsey (00:06:11):

I was not actually. I thought it would be yes, but not delivered the ROI. But I'm surprised that really the winner here is no, I plan to put one in next year. So that's [inaudible 00:06:26].

Paul Branch (00:06:26):

Right. Yeah. In a recent survey that we did, we had 50% of the respondees say they hadn't implemented a CLM tool, but that's what folks are here for. They're here to learn about how to do these things. Great. Thank you guys. We can share those results. Yeah. Let's pop them out there. Sorry if you haven't seen them. So nearly 40% are in that no category as Michaela talked about. Okay, perfect.

Michaela Dempsey (00:06:53):

Well, it's definitely exciting and invigorating way to get this webinar started, but I do want to turn this webinar over to Travis, because he's got a great story to tell and I'm excited to have you online with us today. So Travis, take it away.

Travis Somerville (00:07:11):

Sure. So let's start a really big picture. I don't know if everybody knows what Keller Williams does or how we're structured. So I'm imagining being the audience and you're trying to figure out if you're a company similar size to us. So let me just set the backdrop. So KW is the world's largest realty company, but we're franchise based. So we have 200,000 agents or so out in the field where basically our customers, but up at headquarters, we are, depends how you want to count us, we're one to 2000 in size, up here at headquarters. And so I consider that mid midsize business rate, and so we have those challenges to build technology that 200,000 realtors in the field use to do their day-to-day.

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So in my role as procurement, I'm over an organization of about 20 different departments, a hundred people each, and it's a lot of indirect spend a lot of technology that I buy. So that just sets the stage in case you can relate to the size of the company that we are.

(00:08:33):

Going to the next slide. And so I'll tell you a little bit about my journey. Three and a half years ago when I started, let me just admit some of the lack of maturity we were at in terms of contract management. So I'll tell you about some of the pain, right? We were at a stage when I came in, they needed me because we still kept track of renewals on spreadsheets. So if a person was absent that week or person changed out and that spreadsheet wasn't kept up, we might miss renewals and renew contracts that we didn't mean to. Or people actually had contracts stashed away in secure network drives, but not all in one place.

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So it was really hard to give an executive an answer of, "Hey, what's our total spend in a certain category?" And it was very difficult to maybe tell legal, what are some odd contracts that aren't the right state of law? Or whatever they were looking for. It was really hard to give answers on that type stuff. So we have worked hard to get to the next level, to at least get our contracts in a search repository. And I consider that level one, and then level two is maybe proactively data mining or giving reports. I just had a new C level person come in and take over some marketing spend, and he wanted to know what outstanding spend do we have for 2022. So lots of things like that led us on our journey to get the level one and level two when we really needed a contract management system.

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So of course we got your typical people together, we got legal together, we got the CFO, the finance together and the procurement and biz dev team all together to say, "What do we need?"

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And just real quick, I'll speed up this part. We went down a typical path of looking at your older legacy stuff, right? Stuff that doesn't have AI in it. And by the time we got to the RFP and we saw Evisort, give us a live demonstration, I thought it was going to fail. Evisort asked on the spot, "Give them three of our hardest contracts." I begrudgingly did, I was afraid I was going to waste everyone's time. Got them together, Evisort reads through that. And our jaws just dropped when it read the contracts correctly. And a light bulb went off. We immediately changed our RFP to include AI. Because without AI, you don't really solve a lot of these things quite so easily. So that's the beginning of our journey of how we got to start thinking even about what contract management system we wanted and then how we gravitated towards Evisort so quickly. So I don't know if we want to go to the next slide or if you want to interject anything on those thoughts.

Michaela Dempsey (00:11:34):

No, I think what was really interesting overall when you had shared with me, Travis, is that you had a solution that just really wasn't working. And so you were going back to market because of the challenges that the globe was facing because of COVID really needing to have full visibility and ending with finding AI and the bigger ... What is the bigger, I guess, view when you saw that? What did jump out at you with AI versus any of these other solutions?

Travis Somerville (00:12:15):

I see. Yeah. We did have another solution that we had been trying to stand up for two years. And so a couple of things jumped out at me, A, the AI makes it so easy to stand up. It's literally out of the box, we took five years of contracts 3,500 to 4,000 documents and just put them into the system. And we were just amazed that you didn't need professional services, like a six month engagement. Even the other products we started looking at, they said they had AI, but there must be people behind it or something because they still needed six months to set it up. They thought that was short. We needed something quick, because COVID had just hit. And we needed to make some. We thought sky was falling. It turns out it was our best year ever, we didn't know that at the time.

(00:13:03):

So just really the level of, you don't need professional services to set this up or to get value. And therefore, it reduced the risk, right? We had the previous project, very legacy, very draw and boring type CLM. I'm not going to mention the name, because I don't think that's fair to them, but this is new world where you literally, there's a folder, you put your documents in, you give it time to analyze them and you get value right away. So that's what the light bulb went off, just the risk and the time to ROI we just knew it was a no brainer at that point.

Michaela Dempsey (00:13:42):

And looking at your timeline here it bought or made a decision, right? You uncovered something, made a decision, you had it running and you started using, really custom training and workflows that really helped you organize the company and the contracts, and rolling forward into 2021 and 2022, do you want to talk about what that looked like in a nutshell?

Travis Somerville (00:14:24):

Yeah. My big takeaway here is, it's probably best with an anecdotal story. It's like at the time I was trying to do this RFP, the CFO froze all spending because COVID had just come along. I had to bet my reputation and I bet the CFO, if she would just let me buy this one product that I could get her an ROI in one month. And it was a very daring bet, but she believed in me because she runs a tight ship and she's like, "Okay, go show me this." So we turned up that tool and just the point is that very low risk. We were able to put those documents in and there's, and I can talk about it more in the next slide, but very fast ROI at first and very long lasting ROI over the time.

(00:15:10):

And the thing that slows us down the most is just us internally. I've got 20 departments that I need to get them to learn to use this tool. So the first year we had a couple of departments that I was already working for under my responsibility that jumped right on. Then 2021, I expanded to 12 of those 20 and then this year I'm going to go get those last eight out of those 20. So that's the big takeaway. It's a very safe bet and you can get a lot of fast and long lasting ROI. And I think the next slide talks about a little bit of the detail.

Michaela Dempsey (00:15:50):

Great. So let's go to the next slide, but while we're transitioning, we did get a question, how did you quantify your ROI? And I know you shared with me, it came in waves, right? So it came immediately then a month later, then every year since. So if you want to maybe go through that or if you're going to hit it in another point.

Travis Somerville (00:16:11):

No, absolutely. And remember our pain, right? We had tried to stand up a CLM that takes professional services and just takes a terrible amount of money with those professional services, over-engineered, going really slow. You're not getting any value out of that. And so we're flying blind. We're basically flying blind. Finance had their stuff together. Bill comes in, they've got the finance part, but you couldn't tell an executive what was coming in the future, right, and just paint a big picture.

(00:16:43):

So imagine the first month we get all our contracts in it's like your shields are up, right? That dashboard of renewals, I don't know what you're doing in your company, but without that dashboard, all I had was spreadsheets that I hope someone was keeping the dates up correctly, the notification dates that you got to hit, and then you got to go back a month or two so you can give the business owners time to think about whether they want to renew or make a new strategy.

(00:17:10):

And so with that shield up, we caught, immediately, within that first month, two data contracts that were for Canada that we'd never gotten around to implementing because we usually implement US first and then we get to Canada and we just didn't need them. We were going to go into a defensive mode, we were never going to use that data. And so I measured in dollars, right? It's like, how much did I spend on Evisort and how much were those data contracts that we would've missed? And they would've renewed and we would've been locked in for another year. So that's an easy metric on a quick ROI.

(00:17:49):

And then there's other metrics about long term value. In other words, how many staff, like we have staff and you'll find out when you use AI to help you read a contract, it does 97% of the work for you in terms of identifying what you're trying to look for and brings that information out. So you can move really quickly. It's like you're a bigger, stronger person supercharged, running super fast through these contracts that you need to get through. And so there's ROI in terms of, it's never going to replace humans, right? I need humans on my staff. I need me and my staff, but it augments, it's a together thing where maybe I need one less person out my four people, right? I've got four people and I don't need that fifth. So there's ROI just on headcount there, but it's never going to replace your staff. So I just want to make that clear.

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And then there's some others. And I think on the next slide, it might talk about that sum, but just right here, it's talking about the time saving of digging for those contracts and dealing with those contracts. It's amazing. And then the workflow part is really a governance thing. I call it orchestration, but basically governance is, who's allowed to do what, who authorizes it? Why did you make that decision? So it's got all that in the tool. And so there's value in not making mistakes, putting it through a certain governance process. So that only things that should get approved get approved. And so that's a little harder to measure, but it's definitely measurable probably in terms of risk avoidance or money, once again.

Paul Branch (00:19:24):

Yeah it's money. I agree. I think there's a lot of risk in that or risk eradication in that workflow component. I would agree. I've seen that in many times. It's clearly a feature of a quality CLM tool that can support that sort of workflow. Something to look out for guys when you're buying that tool set.

Michaela Dempsey (00:19:45):

So as we move to the next slide, the question we had was, the result of the analysis. We can cover this in a couple different areas, but one of the things I think, Travis, you might want to share is when you did throw your contracts into this solution, and because the product comes with predefined clauses and such that it's looking for, do you want to dive into it? What's the result of the analysis he talked about? So meaning, what did that look like when you took your existing documentation and then threw it into the system?

Travis Somerville (00:20:39):

Well, first it's just a breath of fresh air. Evisort has many, many clauses already identified, so you can give it a contract and it's going to find your contract value, your renewal date, the term, all these wonderful things that you really need to look for. And so once again, that out of the box visibility is that defense shield you're going to get up real quick in terms of not missing renewals or doing reports, diving into what you need just out of the box. If you look on this slide, that's the visibility point of this slide. If you look about the savings, savings is really about being able to then teach the system something specific you're looking for. Because if there's a new clause or something you're looking for and you try to do exact word search, you're never going to build enough quotes around words, this or this or this to really find what you want.

(00:21:40):

So the way of Evisort works is you teach it. It's like machine language learning with this AI that I can do on my team. I don't need professional services, I just give it some examples of what I'm looking for. So there are actual case when we bought this tool was a quick ROI on the renewals. But then we did a campaign to look for contracts that we could get out of or change the cash flow or renegotiate that looks soft to the force majeure clauses from the pandemic. And so a day or two of teaching of Evisort, and then it came up with a list of 150 contracts.

(00:22:20):

We then spent the next three months going down that list, negotiating with those 150 vendors to find a huge amount of savings. And to get that list, you normally have to spend a lot of time to do people time, or maybe you outsourced a legal firm to go find that stuff for you, but out of the box, plus the tags or the clauses that Evisort can learn, we were able to find that in just a couple of days. So I'll just pause there because I think that's pretty significant.

Michaela Dempsey (00:22:53):

It really is. And if you look at the different areas, so immediately, as I said, in the first month you saw things, but you've realized I know it's challenging in procurement or in any organization because it's not ... Honestly procurement is so talented in saving money. So that's their bread and butter, but this allows you to work smarter and also have greater visibility so that whoever thought force majeure was going to come back and then we went to war and then in areas in the future where you are now, when you're looking at M and A, do you want to tell that story of what that looked like when you were working with another party?

Travis Somerville (00:23:45):

Yeah. So whether you're looking for a particular clause and you're training it up to go find that, I'll just give you an example, like a third thing, I don't know if the audience does a lot of acquisitions, but occasionally Keller Williams is big enough that we might decide to acquire a company. And normally when you do that, you have some consultants that look through the company that you're going to acquire and you look at their contracts and say, "Okay, once we were to purchase them or heavily partner with them, what clients of theirs will shake out?" And then erode some of that value. So you might have to go look at change of control clause or the total contract values of what this company's made of, to know after the acquisition, what they're really worth, right? And so a lot of analysis there.

(00:24:38):

And so often, we've got quite a few legal on staff, but sometimes they're not ready to take on just that special project. So we might outsource that, right? And so we did have a situation where we outsourced, looking at this whole acquisition and they came back with a list of about 35 important contracts.

(00:24:57):

So once I knew that they had done that, and my team just double checked their work using our AI tool and we found 50 contracts not 35. And so I'm trying to gently say that, I think my team helped, right? I don't know if all 15 were legit contracts that they missed, but there were good number that they said, "Oh, okay, we didn't quite see that, had whatever reason." But I'm just saying this tool is quite accurate when you use it correctly to go find those things that you want or teach it what you're looking for. So there's a lot of value there.

Michaela Dempsey (00:25:35):

Right. So you can train it for compliance, you can train it for anything, honestly, that you need to be assessing and looking at? And I think honestly-

Paul Branch (00:25:49):

I think, if I may, what occurred to me is, Travis, in your journey, how did you ensure that the accuracy of the tool was sufficient? You put a lot of weight into the output. How could you be sure that you trained it for it just a couple of days that it was going to deliver the precision and recall that you needed?

Travis Somerville (00:26:16):

Yeah. Well, what's interesting, the actual story I told you where we had hired an outsource legal, and we just did a quick spot check ourselves. And so they had already put a lot of work into what the correct answer key would be with the list that they found. And we were just spot checking and we just noticed it caught what they caught, and then some extra that they just didn't quite see it first. So right there, we already knew the accuracy was quite thorough. The other way we check is just our average bread and butter, we probably do four or 500 contracts a year, that's being added to the system and I still have a quality check as those have already been done by the AI. And we're just filing them away, because there's some other little manual metadata that we got to do and we're touching the contract anyway. So my people can move very fast and just double track. But once again, they're moving fast because the AI's basically saying, "Is this correct?" And they go, "Yep. Yep, yep, yep." It's very accurate. I'd say about 95, 97%.

Paul Branch (00:27:16):

It sounds to me like it's human led machine assisted or is it truly the other way around? Is it truly machine led human assisted? Where would you put the-

Travis Somerville (00:27:33):

It's a fine line-

Michaela Dempsey (00:27:34):

Yeah. I don't think anything is really machine led machine at this point.

Paul Branch (00:27:39):

Yeah. That, I would agree with you.

Michaela Dempsey (00:27:42):

[inaudible 00:27:43] right?

Paul Branch (00:27:42):

Yeah.

Michaela Dempsey (00:27:43):

So what I do understand, Travis, is that as anyone, right? You have thousands and thousands and thousands of contracts and we all fight to make the best resources out of the contracts that we're negotiating. And then that data and that passion that legal and procurement and the stakeholders go through and the vendors, it gets trapped in this contract, but then it move onto the next one. And so one of the wonderful things about a tool like this, or a solution like this it's allowed you to look at things with more immediacy, it allows you to help the legal team as far as I understand it. So that it's not as much of a bottleneck, right? Because they're able to really analyze contracts a lot more. Is that a pretty accurate depiction, Travis?

Travis Somerville (00:28:35):

Yeah. No, it's very accurate. And there's another fallout that's interesting. We get data back from Evisort. So I can identify maybe if we need to hire another person or hire another paralegal. And so I give that as a dashboard report to the execs. Because sometimes they'll feel, we measure days to close a contract to the system and things like that. And so it's a very interesting metrics scorecard that we can get out of this to actually make hiring decisions. Something I didn't share with y'all before, but I'll just share just to bring home the point that there's ongoing value. I'm just going to be very honest. When we looked at Evisort, we thought, "Oh, what if we just put all our contracts in and we'll get them all cataloged, maybe we won't renew the next year. Maybe they'll be so sorted out, we'll be out of this mess."

(00:29:24):

But as we started to use the tool we decided we couldn't do without it, we wanted that repository that could search for those things. And every year there's always something new that's coming up that we need to go teach it to go find some new compliance thing or whatever that we're always searching for. So right now we won't give it up, right? I just wanted to be honest, we had that thought of like, "Well, if this is this smart, we'll just put it in one year and we're done." But we found that it's really needed day-to-day.

Michaela Dempsey (00:29:54):

Well, one of the things that you had shared with me was the journey of value. And I did find it really exciting because, like I said, you had the immediate, half a million dollars and you added another million or so on. And then you had things that really were about speed of understanding, and then obviously the M and A when you're working with a third party partner that's missing some of the contracts, which is critical overall when you're looking at things. So I think it's awesome. I love the quote that you gave us yesterday when we were doing the drive run. I don't know if you remember what you had shared, but your aha moment.

Travis Somerville (00:30:38):

I don't know if this is the one you're thinking of, I feel very powerful. It feels like I've got just electricity running through my veins when I'm tackling huge projects like a superhero, because time and time again, I have execs come to me with important problem that's hard to solve in a short time. And when you've got a system like this, it gets you through it very quickly. For sure.

Michaela Dempsey (00:31:04):

That's awesome. And so before we go off to Derek, two of the questions, so if you can wrap this into your presentation, how do you ensure the accuracy of the AI output and what about the correctness and accuracy? How do you ensure that overall and how in general, do people roll this out and get it to other groups and we can get back to that with Travis in the Q and A too and how you're rolling it out, but Derek, if you have any suggestions that would be great. I know we're jumping into that other area now, so take it away, Derek.

Derek Karpel (00:31:52):

All right. Sounds good. I don't know how to follow Travis's foot, but electricity running through his veins, but I am so excited to show everyone the AI in action. And let me just make sure I'm sharing my screen. Just confirm, thumbs up, everyone can see my screen? Awesome. So yeah, my name is Derek Karpel, product marketing manager here at Evisort. I am also a recovering attorney. So a lot of what Travis was talking about, I personally went through as an attorney having to manually read agreements and any issue that popped up was just a nightmare.

(00:32:28):

I dreaded most because that meant I had to learn a whole new body of the law that I wasn't so sure I was going to be so accurate in discerning. So let me do a quick demonstration, this is Evisort and I'm going to go ahead and just upload a quick agreement here. The neat thing about Evisort is you can sync directly with any repository that you have, but I'm just going to go ahead and manually upload an agreement. And here we are, let me pull up this agreement and you notice within just a few seconds time, we were able to extract really crucial information. And I'll just direct everyone's attention to this overview page.

(00:33:13):

Again, within those few seconds able to pull out things like title of agreement, the contract type, governing law, effective date, start date, really key, basic things that I need to action on. And Travis, this is probably something that your team just wants to know immediately. I don't necessarily need to know maybe particular nuances. I need to know renewal terms and payment terms and so on. And so we can effectively help teams to not only pull this information out of the box, but to have this displayed to them immediately. I love working at Evisort, because this is where I feel that same electricity through my veins is what happens when we upload this agreement?

(00:33:52):

What Evisort is doing is it's going beyond just the words that we're doing. This is not a control find where we're looking for certain words, it's actually going to the intent and the meaning of the language of the contract. And I'm going to actually prove that out to everyone. So I want everyone to carefully take a look at my screen. I'm going to go ahead and click on force majeure. This was the issue that Travis was most challenged by. We'll go ahead and click on it and everyone take 15 seconds. Read that highlighted section. Do you see anywhere in that text where it says force majeure? Do you see anywhere where it says the synonym acts of God? You don't see that. And as a practicing attorney, I used to have to sit there and I'm like, "Is this force majeure? Is it Acts of God? How do I know what this contract talked about?" But you'll see that the language doesn't use those terms verbatim, but it talks about neither party is responsible for delays or failures and performance resulting from acts beyond its control.

(00:34:49):

And that is a classic force majeure provision that Travis and this team is able to extract. Even if the contract doesn't again, say verbatim, force majeure or acts of God. So really effective, because it's going again to that intent rather than sitting there having to think of every permutation of, is it act of God? Is it acts of God? Is it force majeure? Do they even spell force majeure correctly? It's not just doing this word search. So very, very helpful to again, go to that intent.

(00:35:21):

And Travis, you talked about that real scary moment we all were experiencing in COVID of having to have professional services, to create AI models, to look for things for you. But we all know in particular with a force majeure situation, we don't have six months to figure things out, right? We don't have that luxury. And so with Evisort, you're actually able to quickly create AI models on your own. And as I mentioned, I'm an attorney. I have no experience in data science, but I can go ahead and take a look at this contract, and let's say supplier diversity, which may be something that's not out of the box, right? This may be specific to our business, to our industry or to our company that we need to start tracking going forward.

(00:36:09):

And so what I can do is, I can select this language, just let go of my cursor here, click on this pencil, tag this clause and name it, supplier diversity. And what this is doing is, this is initiating an AI model training to start looking for this language and synonymous language going forward. So this is exactly what Travis was talking about. I don't have six months to go through all my agreements and to try to have a professional services team, figure out what does supplier diversity mean to me or force majeure mean to me?

(00:36:44):

What's nice about Evisort, is it empowers you the user to know what your contracts need to look like or what that language extraction needs to look like. And so we can really do that very quickly. Just create an AI model right here. So that's the power that we're enabling teams to do.

(00:37:02):

And Travis, you talked about new compliance challenges. Here in California, we've got CCPA. That's going to be changing come 2023 or GDPR changes and so on. All these new regulations, particularly in data privacy, we're going to continue to evolve that we're going to all have to comply with. Again, I don't have six months to hire a professional services team to figure out what does a GDPR provision look like, because we all know I'm going to outsource that to someone and then they'll come back with results that may or may not really meet what we're looking for. And so that's really one of the beauties again, is that we can create these models for upcoming things. We could be proactive in how we're managing these.

Paul Branch (00:37:41):

So it's like having samples like the one you've just captured, how many samples would you need to be confident that within reason, it's going to find other examples? Is it 10, is it a hundred? What's what's the rule of thumb?

Derek Karpel (00:37:59):

Thank you for that question. Yeah. So actually, you can just tag it once and it will start looking for that language going forward. That said, you'll probably want to do five to seven examples of different language to start looking for that diversity of language in all your agreements. So it is not this heavy lift of having to pull out thousands or hundreds of thousands of different samples to be able to train that language. You just need a handful or two and it will be able to bring back that level of accuracy that Travis was describing.

Paul Branch (00:38:33):

Okay.

Derek Karpel (00:38:35):

So again, we've got these out of the box provisions, but we can of course create new models. And then Travis was talking about these reports and these dashboards, being able to have a holistic view of the business and dealing with the lawyers and understanding what is the governing law of our contracts and here, again, out of the box, we have these dashboards that are able us to tell us things like governing law or termination for convenience, obviously super helpful. Where can I terminate some of my agreements? And these are live, real time dashboards. So these get populated as soon as I upload a contract, I don't have to wait 24, 48 hours for these dashboards to start populating with this data. We can pull in those contracts immediately and start pulling out these dashboards.

Michaela Dempsey (00:39:26):

So Derek, one of the things I heard a month ago at our advisory board, and it really resonated after spending the last six years, working with sourcing and procurement was that the desire to have the seat at the table, these dashboards are bringing that forward for the group. So whether it be on things that are breached or payment or compliance, even. So you're looking at ESG or Schrems II that you're able to have these dashboards that the C-suite finance can look at 24/7 is just amazing. And so I find that thrilling because honestly, procurement and sourcing and supply chain saved our next during the pandemic and some may know that others may not, but they are amazing. And so it's great to be able to empower them with the tool and really keep all the goodness that they're doing up in front of the C-suite size.

Derek Karpel (00:40:41):

Yeah, 100%. I think it's giving folks a little bit more interesting things to do. Rather than just manually inserting data into a spreadsheet, they can now come to business meetings saying, "Look at the trends that we're having in our organization. Look at the health of the business by looking at these kinds of dashboards." And I'll just quickly plow through a couple more like look at our upcoming renewal notices and our upcoming expirations. And these are the kinds of things that businesses need to know in order to make sure that things are going well in the organization. Where we can save money or where we can expect expenses to occur.

(00:41:16):

And so, again, like I said, if you like to sit manually and insert data into an Excel spreadsheet, go for it. But I think having a tool that is able to do this automatically, is going to, again, give you a much bigger seat at the table.

(00:41:35):

I don't know how I'm doing on time here, but I thought I'd quickly talk about, Travis, you talked about the workflow piece in terms of compliance and governance. This is a huge, huge benefit to folks because we can indeed use Evisort for workflows. So we're requesting contracts, we're generating contracts, we're editing contracts, we're getting contracts out for review, we're sending them out for signature. Key things that we're doing with the entire life of the agreement. And I'll just show you quickly this screen here, because this is going to that level of governance that Travis, I think you and the team have brought in, which is, I'm making sure that everything that this contract is doing it is being tracked and being reviewed.

(00:42:24):

And so for example, I need the legal team to review this particular contract. And instead of just shooting out an email to Derek saying, "Hey, I need you to review this agreement." Well, what part of the agreement? Is this really my specialty? Should I be sending this to Paul to review? Maybe this is his wheelhouse. Maybe he needs to review this." And so instead of just sending these blanket, "Hey, just review this contract." We can actually embed notes in here to give people specific direction about what part of the agreements they need to review. And so this is of course going in an order that we think that is best for this agreement. So we'll have maybe a legal review, the InfoSec team, they need to review our cyber security terms. That's not something the lawyer is necessarily going to be able to do. So we need to have the IT department take a look.

(00:43:13):

And then finally we can have our final procurement review to make sure that everything looks kosher so to speak, prior to execution. And all the while every step along this way, and I'll just collapse these just to show it a little bit more. We've got a legal review, information secure review, procurement review, all that is being logged in an activity log. So there's no more having to email Travis, "Hey, Travis, where's this contract, is it getting signed? Who's reviewing it at what point?" I can just go in and see exactly what's happening with this contract.

(00:43:45):

And finally, other dashboards that also incorporate that workflow information I can now see as a procurement leader say, "Okay, what contracts do we have open tickets? Who is submitting the kinds of contracts? Who are these tickets been assigned to? How long have these tickets been open for? Why are we having 91 days to six months of contracts just sitting out there? Maybe we need to create some better efficiencies. Maybe we need to run a search in Evisort to find out, or we're using particular language. It seems to bottleneck our contracts for signature. Maybe we need to modify some of those contracts." And that's the data that Travis's team, I would suspect, is really using this for. It's really to get that health of the business to make sure that we are realizing revenue faster and saving where we can. And lastly-

Paul Branch (00:44:36):

Sorry. Just a quick question on that. If Travis wanted to do a different graphic here, is this something that Travis can do using your tools or would they need to come to Evisort to do the [inaudible 00:44:49]?

Derek Karpel (00:44:49):

Yeah. So right now, these are some of our out of the box ones. I suspect, in the coming months, I don't have the exact date, but we will hopefully have folks be able to create their own dashboards. That's not the gospel, so don't hold me to that. But that said, of course, Travis can go in and use our analyzer functionality or he can build his own reports and take all that information and basically report it to his team. And so we can get pretty granular in the things that he can report on, whether it's any general information like governing law or text quality, whether a contract's been executed on, along with the provision types that we talked about earlier.

(00:45:31):

And what's so neat about these reports and this ability that I'm showing here in analyzers, once Travis is tagged, say it's supplier diversity or CCPA or force majeure, whatever's not out of the box. It can then be incorporated into the analyzer search fields along of course, with the stuff that is already out of the box. So all he needs to do is tag something one time, it then becomes a field that he can then further report on.

Paul Branch (00:45:55):

Yeah. Got it. One further question if I may, clearly, a lot of data here within the CLM tool itself, are there opportunities to pull in data from other parts of the business ecosystem, the business system stack? We had a question earlier about Salesforce integration into the CRM or the ERP systems. Is that something possible?

Derek Karpel (00:46:25):

Yeah, it's a great question. It's one of the reasons why actually I love working at Evisort is because that process of bringing all those contracts into Evisort is pretty seamless actually. We have out of the box integrations with Salesforce, Dropbox, SharePoint, and other tools where, I think it maybe takes 15 to 20 minutes or so to create an API link with these native integrations, to bring all these contracts directly into a centralized repository within Evisort. So you don't have to then sit and worry about, "Oh, I've got to bring thousands of contracts in. That's going to require professional services team. They're going to have to manually review everything and then bring it into a file." We can integrate it directly. All those contracts get basically brought into Evisort and then it becomes completely available to analyze on and to populate those dashboards. That's one of the huge benefits of working with Evisort indeed.

Paul Branch (00:47:23):

Very good. Interesting. Thank you.

Derek Karpel (00:47:25):

Thank you.

Michaela Dempsey (00:47:26):

So we have a bunch of questions from the audience that I thought we could jump to. So, Travis, what advice would you have when onboarding the other business units? I know you've still got a few more to go, but what was your strategy there and what would you advise others to do?

Travis Somerville (00:47:50):

Well, if it's in your control, definitely get an excellent executive sponsor, number one. Number two, I don't want to reveal too much, but you probably should put a contracting policy in place. If you can go to your chief legal officer and get that as something they have to do, that's one way. That said, we've taken a sweet honey approach to bring them in. Basically, it's I go talk to a leader, I have a value prop slide of how it helps me, and I have a value prop slide of how it helps them. Because all too often, they can't remember what a director that left two years ago, why they selected something. So just offering to be the historian. And the only way we're going to get that is if that little section you saw on the ticket, where people are putting their thoughts and their approvals, and you can add concepts there that you search for later, that's a big draw, this visibility that you're going to give them later.

(00:48:52):

And then if you're talking to an audience like your CFO, right? If they've ever experienced it, things somehow get signed without them seeing it, or they see it at the last minute, you can go to your CFO and say, "Hey, we're going to have a governance process that you're going to see it in step two. And we're just going to get that out of the way. And we're going to make sure this aligns with something that won't surprise you at dinner over the weekend." So there's just a lot of angles. You could go to sell each constituent on why it's good. But the end result it's so easy that it's just worth doing a process like this.

Michaela Dempsey (00:49:35):

That's great. And I can add that overall, you guys are now looking at managing all of the spend for Keller Williams, except for anything that's under $500, which is tremendous. I know you believe you're only in stage two of maturing your procurement process. But I would say that you're farther along with some of the data access that you have, being able to look at your compliance, look at all these other areas and having so much underspend and really having the business bought onto this and being able to use it in areas like M and A and getting constant ROI is amazing. So going to the next question, does Keller Williams use the tool for both a buy and sell side contracts?

Travis Somerville (00:50:36):

We use it for buy side. We have another tool that's legacy for the selling of our ads at our events. So we're very much into the buy side. I couldn't speak much to the sell side on this.

Michaela Dempsey (00:50:56):

And then, let's see, what help would be regarding redlining or is there ... I'm sorry. Evisort related benefits has Keller Williams experienced to drafting and negotiations. Okay, I'm merging to questions.

Travis Somerville (00:51:19):

Yeah, I think I've got the question what's funny in our early RFP, this Evisort tool was up against other providers that had more mature redlining features like some bells and whistles, but we realized the AI piece is what really saves us time. So at the time we made the decision for Evisort, they didn't even have redlining. You just use it as a contract tool, you bring it down, you red line in word, and you go back up within this last year, Evisort introduced a redlining and we're really happy with that. The reason why I'm happy about it is because it keeps my legal in the tool longer. Some legal still brings it down to word and headlines it that way and puts it back up. But now there's a collaborative feature, just like you would in word where you've got the contract in front of you and you can put the little note bubbles and start to have that dialogue, that feature right there really, really, really helpful.

(00:52:16):

And then there's a compare tool. If a vendor gives you a document back and they forgot to redline, or just, I don't know why they wouldn't have it on, but it happens in the real world where you get a contract back and you need to do a diff. Evisort has the diff of versions where when you bring a vendor changes in, it can redline those for you and point out what they actually changed. So all of that keeps us in the tool really nicely.

Michaela Dempsey (00:52:48):

That's great. I think that's it for our questions.

Paul Branch (00:52:59):

I think I see one other question actually Michaela, if I may. We talked about onboarding of your business units and the fact that in, I think it was in '21, you brought in a large chunk of them, over half of your business unit. And then the challenge remained in '22 to bring the rest of them in. So can you talk a little bit about that? What advice would you give for folks trying to onboard doing this crawl, walk, run, deployment process of onboarding your own business units? What would your advice be there, Travis?

Travis Somerville (00:53:37):

I think the main advice, once again, get executive sponsorship and decide if you just have a blanket contracting policy.

Paul Branch (00:53:45):

Yeah.

Travis Somerville (00:53:45):

But let's say even the exec says, "Do it." The chief legal officer says, "You have to do it. Here's the policy." There's still this one interesting thing, within my 20 departments, not all of them work the same. So when you think about the governance process, you have to create a workflow, right? You have to orchestrate, what is going to happen for that department? So my advice is be willing like any implementation, to think outside the box, how you've been doing your process and maybe simplify it. So here's what I mean. So we came up with a main workflow that's just a general request to get a contract done, and that helped half of the departments, but there's some other departments that are specialty like our coaching department and the university department, the events, like hotels, they have a different need for when they say they need a contract.

(00:54:41):

It doesn't quite follow through. Even with all the smart logic that I can put to handle half of the 20 departments, I simplified all of them and there's this nice one button they can click and get a contract and get things done. These other departments are needing specialized flows. And so I have some really good help from your team when we have a question, but basically, I have a person on my team that can create specialized workflows that are really deserved to bring in some of these other departments and that's what they're needing. So that's one reason it's taking a little longer this year is to get with them and to create a miniature project and say, "I don't want to reinvent your wheel, but we don't need to do everything like you normally do because some of it's legacy, how can we streamline your requests?" Another example of that is the NDA. NDA widget, we have a simple NDA flow, it's got way less questions. You just need an NDA. It's four or five questions on it and you're through with the process.

Paul Branch (00:55:43):

Sure. Do you find it necessary to do any retraining to raise the skill level of the folks in the teams or is the technology supportive sufficiently?

Travis Somerville (00:55:53):

Well, ironically, we just have this one little email we send out and it's like, we just talk to them on the phone for five minutes. We give them an email, they follow the instructions and they're basically able to just start doing tickets. So each person that we meet, we just five minutes and an email, it takes longer for me to convince the executive over a certain division that this is going to be a change that they want than it does for me to actually train the people using it.

Paul Branch (00:56:22):

Really interesting.

Michaela Dempsey (00:56:26):

So I wanted to jump in here because I did see one question. What is interesting for me, I'm new at Evisort, but we have a thing called the Evisort challenge and what it allows you to do as any company, basically for free, take your contracts and throw them into our system and test it out. And we were calling it don't trust us, try us. But as a marketer, I was like, "We don't really want to lead with don't trust us. So I'm saying, try us. Don't just trust what we're saying, right?" So I'm just flipping this sentence around a little bit, but ultimately, there are a lot of solutions out there. I know that. And it's confusing when you're buying technology. And may I also add that through the years you've made decisions and bought things and those were great decisions at the time you bought them. But technology has changed.

(00:57:27):

Here's my phone I used to have as we all did a camera, a thing that I'd listen to music on everything's right here now. This technology is different, it's changed, it gets rid of all that manual searching. We have a way to build custom clauses. We have ways to train the system with training system tools. And it allows you to find what you need all the time, every time. And that's critical because if you look at it, the democratic access to the world has changed, and once people had desktops and laptops and Excel and email and all these things, we are now working remotely, we need access all the time, anytime, and the executive team especially needs that access. And so this allows you, it allows legal operations, procurement, finance, everyone, the stakeholder, to have that visibility of what the contract is.

(00:58:31):

Are there rebates in the contract? Is it coming up for renewal? Are there ESG rules? Is there something to do with ... Are you inside of modern slavery, outside of it? Any of these compliance issues, any common term that you're looking for or uncommon term? We have media companies using us in a way where they can search for things that they have put in terms for their talent, right? So any industry can use it in any way. So test us out.

Paul Branch (00:59:06):

Great way to end the session today. Guys, where did that hour go? I always say that, but this is fascinating conversation. Travis, clearly an expert in this field, thank you so much for sharing your experiences today. Evisort team, great to partner with you yet again. Michaela, Derek, thank you so much for your engagement today. Really exciting engaging conversation. But most importantly, thank you to our audience. Great questions, great engagement, and I strongly hope that you took away some learning points from what we have been able to share today. So you will most definitely get a link to the recording and a copy of the slides. And if you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out to either to Michaela or to Derek. Guys-

Michaela Dempsey (00:59:57):

Or to Travis. So he's welcome to answer things too.

Paul Branch (01:00:00):

Travis too.

Michaela Dempsey (01:00:01):

Yeah. So thank you Travis so much for sharing your story and thank you everyone for attending and till next time.

Paul Branch (01:00:10):

Thank you guys. Take care. Bye-bye now.

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