Back in February, in London’s sprawling financial district known as Canary Wharf, a group of us huddled together for an innovation workshop. I had flown into the cold and rainy city, along with several of my Thomson Reuters Legal colleagues from the Labs group, the Legal Managed Services business, and the Contract Express Document Automation team.
Our mission: to explore an integration and partnership with a tech company called synergist.io, a contracting automation platform.
Over two days, the room became littered with the usual innovation-y features: coffee cups, Post-it Notes on whiteboards, diagrams and business model canvases, and customer journey maps taped to the wall. Different people walked in and out of the room, a client came in to advise us, and in parallel, teams worked on connecting data through APIs. A UX designer mocked up wireframes with buttons that prototyped a visual workflow.
Fast forward eight months to this week: the integration with Contract Express and synergist.io has been announced to the public. Initial clients have already signed on, and several more are lining up.
I got some time with Edward Taylor, co-founder and CEO of synergist.io. Ed has never been a lawyer, but he spent many years in sales at long stops with SAP and IBM. He shared his view on it all with me.
Ed Sohn: What is synergist.io? What’s the elevator pitch for the product?
Edward Taylor: synergist.io is a contracting automation platform. We enable clients to send, negotiate, and sign of high volumes of recurring contracts. Users are guided step-by-step through the process and empowered to negotiate where necessary, within safe boundaries, and using terms that have been pre-approved by their legal team.
ES: Why is this partnership important? What does it signify for our clients?
ET: It’s a strong signal that clients want to apply automation beyond drafting. It also signifies that major vendors like Thomson Reuters are choosing to collaborate with startups more and more to solve new problems, rather than building things from scratch. Clients can extend the value of their investments in Contract Express from a document assembly tool to include the sending, negotiation and execution of documents. All of this is available by clicking a single button in the Contract Express interface (“Send to synergist.io“) thanks to the deep integration we’ve built between the platforms.
ES: Negotiation portals have faced some resistance, primarily around adoption. How do you approach the problem of adoption?
ET: We work with clients running high-volume contracting projects where they have leverage to enforce their template be used and their process be followed, so adoption is rarely an issue here. We’ve also built a powerful document conversion engine to convert Word documents into structured data. This means a client’s documents in synergist will appear visually identical to the original Word versions which is essential to drive adoption for clients, especially when they’re also negotiating contracts received from their counterparties (i.e., “third-party paper”) via synergist.io.
ES: Where do you see contract negotiation going into the future?
ET: Contract negotiation will become more and more data-driven. While data is already being used to suggest the most relevant playbook positions in a given situation, we see that over time there will be enough data to have synergist.io run the back-and-forth in negotiations autonomously, using pre-approved fallback positions and a risk-scoring system to prevent misuse.
ES: Tell us about your own story — how did you get into this, what did you do before, what helped you make the decisions you made to end up here?
ET: After a career building enterprise sales and partnerships with IBM and SAP, I quit my job and went to Kenya. I walked into an old church to find 15 kids sitting at computers… and a goat. This was a remote school in Kenya teaching kids how to code, but they needed more support to grow the program. I brokered agreement from a social impact fund, government department, university and NGO to help. We all shared a common goal to create digital jobs in Kenya.
But it didn’t take off. We negotiated clauses for weeks but couldn’t figure it out, and ultimately, only one partner signed up. I swore to never see deals like this fail again so made it my mission and started synergist.io to help people reach agreement digitally with contracts that negotiate themselves over time.
It gives me meaning. It’s why I show up for work every day.
ES: What advice to you have for others who have an idea for how technology could solve a legal problem?
ET: Forget your idea and focus on understanding the problems your target audience experience. Choose the one that is the most underserved, where few good alternatives exist, and go and build a solution to solve that problem.
ES: Thanks for the time, and best of luck!
Ed Sohn is VP, Product Management and Partnerships, for Thomson Reuters Legal Managed Services. After more than five years as a Biglaw litigation associate, Ed spent two years in New Delhi, India, overseeing and innovating legal process outsourcing services in litigation. Ed now focuses on delivering new e-discovery solutions with technology managed services. You can contact Ed about ediscovery, legal managed services, expat living in India, theology, chess, ST:TNG, or the Chicago Bulls at edward.sohn@thomsonreuters.com or via Twitter (@edsohn80). (The views expressed in his columns are his own and do not reflect those of his employer, Thomson Reuters.)
