Canadian Lawyer InHouse

february 2015 26 INHOUSE own contract lifecycle management prod- ucts. You may start to see some degree of integration around that with their other products," he says. "I don't see those niche vendors disappearing, though, because they tend to have superior functionality. They look at this area and design this from the perspective of counsel as opposed to more of a technology perspective." There is, however, an opportunity for more startups to enter the market, Bartels says, and offer lower-priced, on-demand of- ferings, challenging the more established, expensive players. A good example of this might be Contrac- tual.ly. Based in Vancouver, it was founded by Martin Ertl, a lawyer who left private practice several years ago to create software for the oil sector. He says the idea behind Contractual.ly is to take a common business process — managing sales and procure- ment contracts — and do with them what vendors in so many other areas have done: move it into "the cloud." In other words, have the software run on servers outside the customer's walls but allow them to ac- cess contracts or other files wherever em- ployees happen to be. "We try to think deeply about what's important for businesses and their lawyers. We want to enable collaboration with in- house legal and outside counsel. We see our product being of key value to in-house legal groups," Ertl says. At the moment, though, Contractual.ly may be more likely to deal with a sales team than the legal team, be- cause it's their workflow that may be the real pain point for the organization. This is another factor lawyers may not ex- pect: their peers in other departments may end up acquiring software for their own pur- poses, and then it gets extended into other areas of the business, including legal. "What makes it interesting is you've got a lot of internal stakeholders who are inter- ested in things like contracts," Bartels says. "But the general counsel are very important and critical to those functions, and they need to stay involved in those discussions." room for improvement Of course, anyone can offer legal software in the cloud, and the existing vendors are all moving that direction. Legal Suite's Fischer says between 70 and 80 per cent of the deals he's done in the past year have been cloud- based, despite security and compliance con- cerns, and Eclipse offers a hosted version of Proclaim as well. Mobile computing might be the next frontier for competition. While most ven- dors say they can offer their products for use on a tablet, there aren't a lot of tools to manage in-house work from an iPhone, even though there are customer relation- ship management tools that are now avail- able as apps. CONNECT WITH IN-HOUSE COUNSEL COLLEAGUES AT LEXPERT.CA/CCCA Check out in-house counsel's best networking tool! The 2014/15 Lexpert CCCA/ACCJE Directory & Yearbook online edition is a user- friendly, outstanding key resource for all in-house counsel. Along with immediate access to more than 4,000 listees at more than 1,900 organizations, you'll DOVR´QGIUHVKHGLWRULDOFRQWHQW information on deals and links to important resources. Directory listees and CCCA members can also receive log-in credentials for access to detailed contact information to be able to connect with colleagues or research the in-house bar. ANYWHERE. ANYTIME. ON ANY DEVICE. COMING SOON Untitled-1 1 2014-12-04 1:05 PM

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