Hi there,
When you gather in the same room with 60+ extremely talented and diverse individuals for 72 hours, you have a lot of interesting discussions.
One of them, which I had last week at our 2023 offsite in Nashville (which, by the way, was truly fantastic), was with our VP of Data & Product Growth, Jordan Weinstein.
In Jordan’s own words, he left a really great position as Global Head of Legal Technology at Goldman Sachs for PERSUIT, in large part because, compared to everything else a legal department might do:
In over 20 years implementing tech solutions for law firms and corporate legal departments, PERSUIT was the one solution he’d seen with a refreshingly low level of effort to implement — while providing measurable value almost immediately.
(If you didn’t already know, PERSUIT is a legal tech platform that fundamentally changes how in-house legal teams engage outside counsel.)
Yet, as Jordan further explained to me, the decisions he saw in-house legal teams make when selecting technology can be heart-breakingly illogical.
To summarize what Jordan told our group in Nashville...
“It’s especially interesting given that the legal industry is all about applying logic to solve hard problems.
“Consider PERSUIT. When compared to other legal technology being implemented by corporate legal departments, our platform should be an easy choice. 🥇
“It’s:
- Easy to implement. ✅
- Easy to measure value. 💵
- A technology with high ROI and a rapid time-to-value (We’ve seen 5X-30X ROI and sometimes in a matter of weeks!). ⏳
- Easy to get started and easy to test. It’s possible to get up and running within a few days. 🏎
“But when you compare PERSUIT to other technology on the market — eDiscovery, knowledge management, eSignature, document management, and contract lifecycle management — all solutions that have their place (and I have recommended/implemented them myself) — they either:
- Require exponentially more resources to implement, and/or
- Are difficult to quantify the ROI — or have a relatively small ROI compared to the investment.
“Contract lifecycle management is a good example:
- Resources to implement ➡️ 🏋️ Usually several months of work at a minimum. Often 12 to 24 months for full deployment.
- Ability to measure value? ➡️ 😑 Difficult to know for sure.
- ROI? ➡️ 🤏 Relatively slim, usually 1X to 3X and typically only after a year or more.
- Easy to get started? ➡️ 🪨 Not really. It takes a lot of work to implement, and switching vendors later is no easy task.
“When I see in-house counsel leaning towards these more resource-heavy, lower-ROI, and hard-to-value technology solutions, the only conclusion I can come to is that business decisions are rarely logical.
“That said, technology will continue to disrupt all areas of legal.
“The practical question to ask is this:
“Why not implement the technology that delivers the most wins, most quickly, in the simplest way possible FIRST — as an outside counsel management platform does?”
What are your thoughts? I’d love it if you hit “reply” and share them with me.
