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Speed to closing always matters, some solid article links and why it is worth it to explore the path less traveled!
Happy Monday and hope everyone is enjoying the summer!
In this edition we think about how to apply legal tech to speed up time to closing and I include some reflections from my time traveling through Canada this summer with my family. Article links include a great summary of the state of GenAI in the legal market, a thought-provoking piece on non-billable hours and several other great reads.
Hopefully you find it useful and fun. Please feel free to share with anyone that may be interested and have a great weekend!
Matt Basile
If you find this content valuable, please connect with me on LinkedIn.
🕰️Time Kills Deals and Speed Always Matters
I once closed a complicated sale transaction with seller financing in under seven days from beginning to end and there were probably 20 lawyers involved from multiple offices. That was a strange situation with an urgent deadline and the legal bill was astronomical. At the end of the deal the client asked - "How much did it cost to rent the entire real estate group at your firm for a week?" 💰💰
That transaction was an outlier and there are always a handful of non-legal items that can drive closing timeline, but in a perfect world the business teams on both sides of the transaction will always want to close as quickly as possible.
Time kills deals and speed to closing is always important, even if there is no deadline.🚀🚀
Adoption of technology by lawyers is still relatively slow despite the availability of new apps that can help legal teams close faster, so there is a great opportunity for tech forward practices to impress clients and jump ahead of their competitors. Below are a few ways that legal teams can leverage technology to close faster:
🖥️ Leverage document automation to generate first drafts of documents. If you can get documents out within 3 days of kickoff instead of 10 days then that can save a week in the closing timeline.
🧠 Use AI powered drafting tools that help to find precedent clauses and turn documents back to the other side quickly after receiving their comments. Review time on both sides adds up and the faster documents are finalized the faster you can close.
👬 Rely on transaction management platforms to stay organized and completely automate tasks like generating signature packages, assembling documents and updating dates and information in documents. This functionality all exists now and can save hours off many painful tasks.
😎 Look for new niche AI powered apps that can perform specific time-consuming tasks like reviewing documents or summarizing information.
Every minute counts. If you can get something done today, not tomorrow, that gets it back to the other side to react. It is all about reducing the waiting times in between each step.
Clients want to work with lawyers that can close deals quickly and without friction because their clients (the borrowers in lending transactions) want the transaction to get done without too much legal distraction or cost. In the best-case scenario, the lawyers should be waiting on the business team to get to closing! ⌚⏱️
Articles and News
🙇 GenAI in Legal - Deep Dive
This is a must-read deep dive by D. Casey Flaherty and the Lex Fusion team on the state of AI in legal. It is long but worth at least a skim (if at least just for the images and cartoons - one pasted below). I am optimistic that some awesome solutions will be built using this new technology and agree that the key will be the "thick wrapper" that results in the user barely knowing they are using AI. This will take hard work and collaboration between tech folks and legal teams with subject matter knowledge of the problems being solved.
⏳ No Such Thing as Non-Billable Hours
This is another great article by Jordon Furlong that dives in to why law firms should ditch non-billable hours and treat everything as billable because those efforts should result in revenue for the firm in one way or another. I think this is great and another piece to the puzzle of figuring out how to change the compensation model in law. His most recent post is also great and digs into how AI could change what work is actually done by lawyers in the future.
📉 Role for GenAI in Document Automation
Checkout this article by James Quinn that digs in to what GenAI is good at, why document automation is still the best solution for complex documents where templates exist and how GenAI can help to speed up document automation. I think there are great use cases around using LLMs to read term sheets to feed document automation and other ways to make document automation easier.
🤗Hugging Face Launches New Legal Community
Thanks to Charles Uniman and Josh Kubicki for sharing the news of the new legal community created on the legal tech community Hugging Face. Should be some great collaboration here for those in the legal community interested in use cases for GenAI and open source legal specific LLMs.
⛰️It's Always Worth It
Each summer my wife and I hit the road with our four boys and one of our core family activities is hiking. There is nothing better than getting everyone outside with nothing else to do but be in nature, explore and work toward completing a shared challenge. With little kids (and even us adults at some times), there is a natural instinct to complain or want to turn back when things get hard.
My love for travel started right after college when I spent a summer driving around the US with a couple of good friends. On a tough ascent during a hike up Mount Washburn (the tallest mountain in Yellowstone), I asked a guy who was on the way down if it was worth it. He quickly replied - "It's always worth it." That quick exchange has become a cornerstone of so many parts of my life. Hard things are always worth it. 🚶♀️➡️🚶♂️➡️
This year we took a road trip across western Canada and some of our most memorable hikes were the most difficult ones. Whether it was a mosquito filled hike in the pouring rain up to a grove of thousand-year-old cedars or a grueling death march up a mountain to a viewpoint of a glacier, when I ask everyone their favorite parts of the trip, the hard ones always come up.
What was even better was seeing how my kids drove me to explore and go further than I might have because young folks have an awesome unfiltered sense of adventure and exploration. On one hike I was tired but followed them past the end point up a huge boulder field with my two-year-old on my head just to touch some snow. We had a nice snowball fight and we were also rewarded with amazing views that no one else could see from the bottom of the hill.
My lesson from this is to try to always embrace the love for finding new paths and innovation that comes naturally to kids in all parts of my adult and work life. Sometimes the natural instinct is to stop at the familiar end point, but often good things come by pushing further into unknown areas. The extra exploration, hard work and curiosity is always worth it. 🏅🏅
