ContractPodAI has launched a new application to automate the legal request process. The Legal Intake application will ingest requests sent by a web form, email, or ContractPodAi Cloud’s dashboard and route the request to the appropriate person within the legal department or firms. Requests are automatically prioritised by need and priority, reducing the administration time and costs taken up with this process. Email support is provided for Outlook and Gmail, the latter using a Google add-on.
Anurag Malik, CTO of ContractPodAi, commented: “This offering is a game-changer for legal teams looking for ways to reduce the time around processing legal requests and to provide more value quickly to their entire business. Legal Intake is propelling legal departments forward and removing silos in organizations by allowing all users to see the progress of requests in real-time while leveraging technology to eliminate the need for manual entry and human error that often follows, ultimately bridging the gap between core enterprise functions and legal teams.”
Legal Intake eliminates manual tasks
Typically legal requests are made to legal teams via email or web form. Once received, there is a flurry of calls, emails, and chat messages around the department to determine where the request lands. This is usually tracked within a spreadsheet to record the request and ensure its final destination and responsibility are recorded.
Legal Intake helps automate this process by centralising any request into the ContractPodAI Smart Repository. Having all the data and progress captured in a single location allows the ContractPodAi solution to analyse and provide information about the volume and type of requests made. It can also track progress and ensures the auditability of the whole process. General Counsel can get a measure of the work and how the team is managing the workload, enabling them to take action where issues arise.
ContractPodAi notes the advantages to both the business and legal users for Legal Intake. For legal teams, the solution helps them:
- Spend more time on legal ‘work’ and less time managing requests
- Drive performance by extending legal services to the enterprise
- Reduce risk by automating, centralizing, and tracking enterprise legal requests
For business users it:
- Simplifies access to legal services through online self-service applications, Outlook, and Gmail
- Provides real-time insight into the status of a request and where it is at in the process
- Streamline communication and collaboration with legal teams
More about the solution
Enterprise Times asked Deirdre Leone, SVP Commercial, Global at ContractPodAi, about some of the functionality of the new applications. Does it have integration with Teams, Slack or other platforms?
Leone answered: “We have a suite of integrations available, including Teams, Slack, Outlook, and Salesforce, so that we meet the company where they are already working.”
What wasn’t clear is if Legal Intake itself supports these integrations for new requests or whether it supplements them. It was also unclear how Legal Intake determines the need and priority of each request. Enterprise Times asked Leone what prioritises the need and priority for each legal request. Leone answered: “We have priority fields that can be configured on the company’s particular needs during implementation.”
When emails are received with attached items, what happens to these? Leone replied: “All attachments are fully searchable in the system.”
Is there a price attached for this add-on? Leone replied: “Yes, there is a price for Legal Intake, which can be purchased as an add-on to CLM to realize increasing strategic impact of our One Legal Platform, or as a stand-alone product.”
Pricing is not visible on the website, and one assumes it is available on request. What is in the roadmap for improvements for this solution?
Leone answered: “This is an active area of investment for CPAI to identify further automation opportunities and build feature sets to address that.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Anything that frees up time for legal teams to focus on legal rather than administrative work is valuable with the cost of legal time. With the average hourly cost (in 2021) between £126-£512, it is clear that it wouldn’t take long to get a return on investment for a solution that can save minutes every day.
Legal Intake is the latest application within the One Legal Platform, Legal Cloud, provided by ContractPodAI. Having the Contract Lifecycle Management solution and Legal Intake on the same platform enables legal teams to use a single system across case management, whether contract work or other. Does this mean that ContractPodAI is extending its use cases to other areas of the legal teams and potentially moving close to the legal team’s requirements rather wider CLM in the business?
