Streamlining the Routine Negotiation of Contracts—Lane Lillquist—InCloudCounsel

Richard Jacobs: Hello. This is Richard Jacobs. With the future tech podcasts and with the secrets of attorney marketing podcasts, I have Lane Lillquist the co-founder of the inCloud council. The website is in cloud council.com. So lane, thanks for coming. Are you doing today?

Lane Lillquist: I’m doing very well.

Richard Jacobs: Well good, so tell me about the inCloud council. What’s the company about?

Lane Lillquist: InCloud Council was founded to solve this specific legal problem around routinely negotiated contracts. We kind of saw two worlds that really like existed for people, you know, businesses that deal with high volume, routinely negotiated contracts that need these done, do a high quality and we saw them either kicking it up to a big law firm or doing it in house and we saw a solution that was kind of much better than both of these solutions. And thus we set off to found this company and really solve this problem well. And so I’m happy to talk about that as much as you like.

Richard Jacobs: Well, what are some of the drawbacks of doing it in house versus hiring a large law firm? And then we’ll talk about how your solution grooves on that.

Lane Lillquist: Yeah totally, so there’s like kind of a whole family of problems with both for the big law side what generally happens for these kinds of a routinely negotiated contract is they’re given to a first-year attorney. You pay by the hour and you don’t really get great visibility into the work that’s being done so you know, with kind of a lot of inefficiency in this solution and since they give this work to their first year associate, primarily they turn those people every year so you’d never build a long term relationship with who is actually doing this work for you. And then on the in house side, you generally have much more pressing, high value, important things for your business to be doing and these were routinely a negotiated contract need to get done to a high quality, but they aren’t really valued driving work that an in house legal team does for their own business and so our solution came in here to really put a lot of efficiency in this a work stream and then add a ton of value through software on top of that.

Richard Jacobs: So can you give me some details about how it works and what users will experience?

Lane Lillquist: Yeah, absolutely so you’ll start with a inCloud council, you’ll start the process of talking to us about taking over like your NDA negotiation, a work stream and what we’ll do is we build a process for how that document gets negotiated by your attorney team and we’ll set that all up for you so that we understand exactly, how to negotiate a document based on your client’s preferences and then we introduce you to a legal team to service all of your needs for this who will be there to answer any of your questions throughout this whole process.

And get a solid playbook together for how to move forward on all of these work streams and then from there, clients just simply forward us all of their NDAs to negotiate for that one type of particular legal document and then the attorney team picks that up, does the negotiation and captures all of the data and analytics around that document once it has been finalized in our system and then that is what we use to be able to provide additional value to the business teams that utilize our services and software.

Richard Jacobs:  What does it mean? How the handling of the NDA initially and then the follow up on it and the storage of it, and the excess to it and etc. Is that all different using your process?

Lane Lillquist: Yes, so you know, we are legal experts in every type of documents that we negotiate and we understand these documents to a high degree of specificity and we understand what business terms are very important out of these so we have a questionnaire that attorney’s fill out after they have negotiated a document to a final state.

And then through that questionnaire we were able to capture all of the important legal doc in terms of a document in data from and then that’s used to give the business team reporting on the status, what their spread of terms that they ended up agreeing to and gives the ability to search through all these NDAs or other types of legal documents. Based on whatever we’re doing for that client so that they can understand them from a compliance perspective, are we meeting the terms of all of these contracts that we’ve negotiated and so forth and then all of this data is stored in our proprietary software platform that we’ve built, that manages this work stream for attorneys. Attorneys come onto our platform, we set them up with an email account and walk them through some basic technology, insecurity best practices and give them training on these things and then we give them some training on our software and get them up and going and then from there they are able to keep track of the state of all of these contract negotiations based on the type of work that we’re doing. We have like specific workflows designed for the different kinds of contracts and the different kinds of customers that have these contracts negotiated for and then through that whole platform we’re able to deliver our services to our clients.

Richard Jacobs: How much workload can you handle? Is it you able to take small firms that have limited personnel and help them scale up? For instance, they have dozens or hundreds of documents that need negotiating.

Lane Lillquist:  So I mean like in terms of our clients are generally like large financial institutions or you know, these customers that have contracts that need to be repetitively negotiated and then we work with small boutique firms that have had a lot of experience in corporate law and we work with them to do all of the work on our platform. So, we have hundreds of attorneys that work all across the globe so that we can service the needs of our clients and we’ll pretty much build an attorney team to whatever size, business needs that any client has. You need a thousand engagement letters negotiated every single year. We’ll build the attorney fee that we need to be able to provide that for you and then from there, we’ll bring a handful of resumes and we’ll act as a bit of a dating service through this whole process to get them set up with their clients.

And we really try to build long-term relationships between the clients and the attorneys that are working on our platform for like a lot of reasons we want the clients to have a good, consistent work experience and one of the big values that we give to all the attorneys that work on our platform is that there’s this consistent work stream that’s going to be there every single month. It’s not like a billable hour that they’re trying to drum up that’s got a lot of variabilities. There might be a lot this month and not very many the next month and so forth. Out there in private practice that a bit of a volatile game sometimes so our business comes in and adds just consistency to that.

Richard Jacobs: Yeah, What about if you’re not an attorney, can you use the services? Did you need to negotiate an NDAs? So you’re sales or several of them NDAs for other things or other contracts?

Lane Lillquist:  So our in club council is primarily set up for businesses that have high volume. Nick contracts negotiated. We are set up to negotiate one NDA for somebody. We want to find businesses or that you’ll know it’ll need a hundred NDAs a year or 500 a year. There are all those kinds of legal work streams that exist where these are routinely negotiated. So that’s the kind of clients and we’d go after. And it’s really based around any kind of contract that requires, legal skill to negotiate it and has done and a high volume fashion, something that you’re doing all the time. So whether it’s a service agreement, as you’re negotiating service agreements with your customers, engagements, letters, and nondisclosure agreements if you’re in the financial world, and all sorts of things like that

Richard Jacobs: locally would include no competes, perhaps or other high volume agreements, lease maybe commercial leases.

Lane Lillquist: Yep, exactly. And there’s like even a whole another side of our business that we have where we’ll do document abstracting for our clients that have large and very complex documents. So this kind of things where maybe your private equity a shop and you have done tons of investments over the course of your businesses history and you’ve got all of these purchase agreements for these businesses that you bought and are managing, have ongoing legal responsibilities and a lot of times these documents are just sitting in some folder in some secure location and they’re not very accessible. So when somebody needs to understand a term in one of those documents, they either pay their law firm to go and read the document, find the term or get what they need or they have to sort through that all themselves.

So another service that we offer these kinds of clients is documented abstracting where we had to go through and just great detail and build out every important legal question that exists for that contract and then we will have an attorney go in there, answer all of them, and then link that information to the source text in the contract and then that way your business team, whenever they have a question, instead of paying a lawyer by the hour, they can just go in there and run a search by themselves and find the information. And we’ve seen a lot of clients really find that to be valuable, to have all of their data that exists in these contracts.

Be Free for accessibility and searching and then that way, even if they need to really understand the underlying language when they go to that question in our platform, it’ll just pull that exact relevant section in the contract up for them.

Richard Jacobs:  What’s an example of two of that?

Lane Lillquist: so I mean the one that I gave was like a purchase agreement. You know, this is a very long bespoke document that was exactly what the big law firms out there in the world are set up to do really well, 100, 200, 400 pages long, very long agreement that describes the whole situation and buying a company and in there the example, to dive in a little bit deeper is what was the purchase price? What were all the lenders that were involved, what were their names? What was our interest rates? What were the covenants for this and that was there any carb out. And we just go through the whole document and produce a very detailed summary based on these questions that we have and this is built by our attorney team that understands these documents very well. And then that summary is provided to whoever consumes that on the business side, and then they’re looking at that in our software, if they’re looking at a specific term in that summary they just click right there, pulls up the source language in the document, right side beside the summary, and then that way they can fully understand exactly whatever they’re needing to do, whether they’re wondering if they can work with this lender, if they’re just looking up past rates so that they can get better negotiation terms on their current work that they’re doing. We have gotten this rate the last four times we’ve negotiated with this lender. So why are you guys trying to push us beyond that? It gives them the power to have access to all of the information that exists in those documents.

Richard Jacobs:  What about concerns? Boilerplate agreements with normal clauses and looking for ones that are unusual. Is that part of the service?

Lane Lillquist: We have a attorneys that are dealing with these every time so there’s a whole playbook that’s designed for how these documents are negotiated just on every level, so there’s some nonstandard term, there’s going to be a path which the attorney knows how to follow to negotiate that point whether they can, they’ll understand whether they can accept it or if it’s nonstandard, they might have to get the deal teams perspective on it before they can move forward and forth.

I almost think when you say that you’re talking about machine learning, you know, what kind of things can be done with machine learning and absolutely we incorporate machine learning into kind of everything that we can. It is a technology that is really going to continue to become more ingrained in literally every kind of thing that we do in the world. You know, there aren’t really technology businesses and then other businesses and today’s world really we’re all technology businesses or we’re going to be in the legal is by far no exception to that. Although they may be more behind than some of the other industries that are out there and machine learning as so much potential to make a lawyers job more simple, take out some of the really tedious things combing through an entire agreement for one term when you can use machine learning to just be able to highlight the most probable term that, you know, the most probable places where that term would exist in a document right from the get-go. This has the power to, to kind of greatly make attorneys more efficient. I would like to say they’re able to do more because of this if you can remove some of that busy work. So we really tried to drive efficiency and all of these processes, um, in every way, shape, and form that we can.

Richard Jacobs:  Okay, What about E-discovery or assisted either discovery or you have set up to help with that? Of course, you know, a firm has thousands or millions of documents to go through.

Lane Lillquist: Our business doesn’t really work with that kind of thing at all. There’s a ton of E-discovery players out there in the market and they’re all doing interesting things too with similar kinds of technologies to go and do these kinds of documents. But we’re really specifically focused on contracts that require negotiation by a smart human being with sophisticated parties on both ends, and so this is really like our bread and butter and to that extent, we don’t really touch that you discovery world part of the legal at all.

Richard Jacobs: Okay, Very good. What’s your report? Small firms or large firms, what do you look at the cost structure of doing it? Is it a pretty cost petition?

Lane Lillquist: Yeah, I mean this is something that’s pretty cost efficient. Like what we look to do is kind of, I mean is to partner with firms that are small, firms that are out there in the world that are usually looking to get up and running, coming out of like the big law world and so forth. And you know, we partner with these attorney teams, and it’s even different kind jurisdictions that have other countries work and so forth. So we kind of have to figure out every jurisdiction as kind of a new place. You know, doing this kind of work in the UK is a lot different than doing it here in the US and so forth, but we target individual attorneys and small teams to take on, like in cloud council work as part of their work streams so that they can really supplement their business. And then we see attorney teams that are likable to grow with us where they start to hire associates and start to really grow their practices through the work that they take on from our platform. And I mean it’s pretty awesome to see the success that the attorneys are having on our platform and the amount of a difference that it makes for them. And there’s kind of like a bunch of different kinds of buckets of types of attorneys out there in the world. You know, you’ve got the people who are out there building their practice, they want to grow something on their own and really do interesting, unique work and in that case we come in to really help them keep the lights on in their business and have a very consistent revenue stream so that they can go out and do all of the interesting things that they want to. But there’s also a whole another class of attorney that really find our platform valuable for them and that’s the kind of attorney who has another pursuit that they want to take on in their life. You know, whether that raising children or starting and on related to legal business, they want to pursue all of these things in life that are not available to them if they’re a corporate attorney. I mean the corporate attorney model is pretty long hours and very dedicated life to that practice and it doesn’t leave much for flexibility. So we’re really trying to remove the geographic constraints of doing, high value, interesting work with respectable clients and we want to remove all of the barriers for people to be able to do that kind of work and that’s in a big way what in cloud counselors set up to do.

Richard Jacobs:  These specific comments you’ve gotten from some of these clients that you have that you thought were interesting?

Lane Lillquist: Yeah, I mean it’s, it’s awesome to see this really work well and for this kind of work its more along the lines of when you’re doing it really well, you know, it’s quiet. So in a certain way when the machine works everything is quiet and Hunky Dory and running smoothly and then, you know, clients kind of only really get invested if there’s like an issue which you know, those do come up from time to time and we’re well set up to handle any of those as well.

But, had clients come to us be like, oh my God, can you do this for this new kind of directory numbers?

But I’m like, I’ve never heard of that before. Let’s see what we can figure out, and you know, sure enough, that turns into whole new lines of business for us, which is pretty awesome.

Richard Jacobs:  That’s great! So what’s the best way for people to reach out and ask questions and find out more about the products?

Lane Lillquist: Yeah, I mean, the best way to learn more about us and get in touch with us as go to our website inCloud council.com and from there you can really get a good idea of who we are and what we’re about, And drop us a line, we’d love to talk to you whether you’re interested in offloading one of your legal work streams to us, or if you’re an attorney out there looking for, you know, interesting high value work with very sophisticated clients and looking to grow your practice.

Richard Jacobs: Very good, well lane, thanks for coming on the podcast, I appreciate it.

Lane Lillquist: Thank you very much for having me, I really appreciate it as well.