Finally, A Legal Tech Solution That Automates High-Volume Legal Work Without Sacrificing Quality

Corporate transactional legal practice is known for generating lots of work that requires plenty of time and resources. Some of this work is highly complex and nuanced — things like bespoke agreements for mergers and acquisitions or fund formations. A bulk of the corporate work, however, involves a high volume of more routine legal contracts and processes. Companies have traditionally handled such work internally or outsourced it to a Biglaw firm — both imperfect solutions that sacrifice some combination of time, cost, or quality of output. The problem, though, is that there hasn’t been a better option.

Until now. Meet InCloudCounsel, a legal technology company that automates and enhances your routine legal processes. The brainchild of former Biglaw attorneys and private equity professionals, InCloudCounsel provides a scalable, end-to-end solution that uses only the most qualified attorneys to handle the routine work of top clients at the level of quality they’ve come to expect, with sophisticated, data-driven legal technology to boot.

InCloudCounsel even partners with some of the world’s leading law firms to handle their clients’ high-volume legal work. Clients sometimes ask their law firms to handle routine legal processes — for example, the non-disclosure agreements in connection with their investments in, or sales of, portfolio companies — but handling such work isn’t the best use of their attorneys’ time either and can create difficult-to-manage conflicts issues. So when law firms recommend InCloudCounsel’s solution to their clients as a way to automate their recurring agreements, the law firms in turn ensure that their own resources are able to stay focused on high-value work for their clients and avoid conflicts of interest — it’s a win-win scenario. 

The Answer to Routine Contract Work

InCloudCounsel is specifically designed to handle the kinds of transactional work that don’t require the breadth and scope of a large, traditional law firm — things like the management and negotiation of NDAs, joinder agreements, vendor contracts, or sales and services agreements. As opposed to other companies that offer outsourcing for one-off jobs, InCloudCounsel offers a comprehensive approach to serving every client in a way that’s built for maintaining a long-term relationship.

Every InCloudCounsel client works with a dedicated team, led by a dedicated account manager. The account managers at InCloudCounsel are corporate lawyers with backgrounds at top law firms, so they understand the needs of top clients and the kinds of transactions they handle. Based on that, they facilitate assembling a dedicated team of lawyers (more on them in a bit) to handle the client’s matters.

In addition to coordinating the team, the account managers document each client’s substantive and process preferences in custom-tailored playbooks.

InCloudCounsel has developed playbooks for all the routine contract types they handle, and each is customizable to an individual client’s preferences. Essentially, the playbook is a comprehensive roadmap that outlines the client’s preferred approach to reviewing and negotiating a given document type. The playbook is developed by obtaining documents and materials from the client to learn their preferences, like first-round markups, guidelines, and checklists that they deem exemplary. InCloudCounsel’s account managers do the work to create the initial custom drafts of these playbooks, making this aspect of the onboarding process simple and efficient from the client’s perspective.  

From that point, the attorneys on the InCloudCounsel platform take over the negotiations from start to finish and handle the review of each contract until it is finalized. The client has complete transparency throughout the process thanks to InCloudCounsel’s proprietary software platform.

Just log into your document overview dashboard, and you can see every job you’ve ever turned over to InCloudCounsel. Your dashboard functions as an organized, centralized repository, which you can sort using a variety of filters to efficiently navigate completed and ongoing documents.

For each document, you can always see the current status and track the negotiations in real time, for an extra level of comfort that things are proceeding as they should be. The platform also stores the original, final, and executed versions of an agreement as they become available.  

The Power of Data

Once a negotiation is completed, the key terms for each agreement are captured in the platform as data points, a process which is often aided by artificial intelligence. This is done by completing a “scorecard” for each finalized agreement, which collects an agreement’s key terms in a standardized data format that serves as a clean and tidy summary of the contract’s material terms.

Beyond the contract-level summary, InCloudCounsel’s application incorporates a host of useful reporting and analytics features created by its team of software and machine learning engineers specifically to meet clients’ needs.

For example, for every term in your contract, you can see how it compares to all your other contracts with a single click. Your platform generates visually appealing and fully interactive reports that allow you to navigate through your documents to identify patterns over time.

Say you’re negotiating the term of your contract. The platform can quickly tell you what percentage of your contracts have 12-month terms. The same is true for all your key provisions.

Better yet, the data isn’t limited to just the agreements negotiated by attorneys in the InCloudCounsel network — InCloudCounsel can also capture and summarize the terms of other agreements that might be relevant to your negotiations. This is particularly beneficial when you want to know the crucial terms of complex documents like credit agreements or stock purchase agreements. Once the abstracting is complete, InCloudCounsel provides a finalized scorecard like the one you’ve seen for the agreements you’ve negotiated yourself, which features invaluable links that instantly take you to the relevant terms and provisions of the underlying agreements.

Your data can be exported to Excel with a single click, and you can even generate reporting and analytics across a portfolio of agreements. The reporting functionality of InCloudCounsel means your outsourcing platform can also double as a valuable diligence tool for your law firm.

The Attorneys

There are a lot of legal process outsourcing products on the market these days, and they run the gamut when it comes to the quality of the attorneys they provide. With many of them, you might not even know who those attorneys are before you agree to turn over your important work.

InCloudCounsel really shines in this regard. As opposed to a disjointed roster of names that come and go, InCloudCounsel has cultivated a distributed network of some of the world’s best corporate freelance attorneys. The average attorney working with InCloudCounsel has 14 years of legal experience. All have law firm training, and many have relevant in-house experience as well.

The vetting process, run by former recruiters from leading law firms, puts every attorney who applies to work on the InCloudCounsel platform through rigorous screening that includes multiple interview rounds, reference checks, and even a timed contract markup test. After all that, less than 5 percent of applicants are accepted. Those who are must specialize in particular kinds of contracts, and that’s the only work they’ll do for you.

What all this means for you is that you get incredibly experienced attorneys doing your routine work. In contrast, if you were to farm this work out to a major law firm, it would typically be allocated to junior attorneys as a chance for them to learn the business. While the training is admirable, those junior attorneys, through no fault of their own, lack the experience to do the job with anywhere near the efficiency or expertise that the experts in the InCloudCounsel network can.

The attorneys who join the InCloudCounsel network have made the personal decision to leave Biglaw and hone their skills in solo practice or boutique shops. However, as any solo practitioner can tell you, the lack of predictable work is one of the biggest challenges for solo and small practices. Working on the InCloudCounsel platform helps these attorneys fill those gaps with a reliable source of work from premier clients. The platform’s flexible working arrangement is a win-win: You get the best possible legal talent working on your matters, and that talent is able to maintain the profitable freelance work arrangement that led them to branch out in the first place.

As for pricing, InCloudCounsel operates under a bill-by-the-document model, meaning that you don’t pay for anything above and beyond the per-document fee that’s quoted upfront, even for using all the additional aspects of the platform. No hourly charges, user fees, or storage costs. Just simple, straightforward, transparent pricing that comes out at a 70 percent cost savings on average over what you’d pay for your major law firm to do the same job with less experienced attorneys.

InCloudCounsel is a winning proposition for clients looking to outsource routine work to a reliable, scalable, global solution. You get high-quality legal work at a fraction of the cost, plus a wealth of valuable data while you’re at it. Think of it as legal tech meets outsourced legal services, and the result is access to some of the best freelance attorneys on the market.

It’s time to break free from routine transactional legal work. InCloudCounsel leverages expert legal talent and best-in-class technology to provide the highest quality, most efficient solution possible. It’s hard to imagine a better way to handle your recurring contracts.