Do you have a legal problem?

This is a very simple question with a complex answer. The short answer would be YES if a specific matter which needed to be solved yesterday with fewer resources than it actually requires now were not solved as already mentioned in previous posts (fast and cost-effective solution).

The more complex answer takes into consideration various business, economic and legal elements with the inevitable adjacent bureaucracy and paper towers. Very often, a problem is difficult to be recognized as it is immersed in the above-mentioned elements, which makes it difficult to pinpoint it. Legal matters and procedures are an especially favorable environment for a problem to hide. 

Because everything related to legal has an aura of mandatory and binding inflexible nonbusiness-friendly issues, various problems hide in plain sight. For example, the need to make sure that a business puts in place the right legal framework to operate is not that obvious to business owners. they typically dismiss it and minimize it as being only a part of the mandatory step related to legally incorporating their business. All the other legal issues hidden in this limited view of why a legal framework is needed for a business to operate are not even considered although they make their presence and impact felt every day.

These legal issues become masked by various other operational nonlegal related problems, which compound daily in difficulty and negative business impact. 

Therefore, even if we take the longer route to offer an answer to the above generic question, the answer is still YES. 

I chose to use a legal-related example, but it can really be applied to any other industry where certain issues which are simple at first become convoluted to the extent it is extremely difficult to re-identify them. 

If you have a chance to address an issue proactively in an efficient manner, then you should do it - avoid solving a more complex issue down the line (if you are lucky at that point to identify it as the chances are that that issue is already a part of a bigger problem which does not allow fragmentation to solve it easier).

I understand that some of these things might seem a bit abstract, but if you really think about an important issue you are currently having in your organization and try to go back in time to when it was only a very small issue, the point is more clear- never let a problem go unchecked; always address it either by documenting it to see if it can be easily addressed at some point in time or it can be deferred for a later stage or is that simple that it can do at that actual point in time without delay. 

To use a practical example for which we are actually building Goodlegal, if you have a business, you have customers, you have customers, you have demand, you have demand, you have paperwork, you have paperwork, you have (initially) a small problem (and an opportunity) - how do you manage that paperwork to be efficient, customer friendly and avoid a bigger paperwork related problem (as the goal of your business is to grow legally safe- the alternative being legally unsafe)?

It does not matter if you already use certain tools such as Drive, Word, or e-signatures to avoid paperwork and work digitally; you are still captive to various different tools and the internal struggle of what needs to be prioritized and how to do it best. So you look for a way to solve this initially small issue by putting in place a process designed to make the paperwork (or digital) process efficient, customer friendly, and company viable both at this point in time but also for the future (no one likes one-off solutions on which you cannot continue to build). 

With Goodlegal, this can be achieved for both scenarios.

Goodlegal allows you today to put in place a legal infrastructure solving the small issue while tomorrow you have the foundation on which to continue to build the legal tech stack to address the company's tomorrow needs (company-wide compliance, interdepartmental work, document, and contract analytics, high-risk matters monitoring, automation, and ML models designed to ensure compliance, visibility, and predictions, etc.). 

To have a chance to build this organically, you need to start as soon as possible with setting up the foundation, which will allow for the above business outcomes. It is never too late to start, and the opportunity is everywhere you look, whether you want to improve the way the documents are maintained, stored, and accessed within the company or be able to make any document actionable without the usual dance of downloading a Word or PDF, edit, save, upload somewhere, send a link to the location or the actual document via email, or upload to an esign tool by doing the same dance. In Goodlegal, an actionable document is any document uploaded or generated through the platform which allows for the entire dance to happen within the platform without doing all the above-mentioned disjointed steps. 

Also, you may want to ensure that everyone in the company has access to all the policies and is using the latest company-approved templates in their work (such as procurement, sales, or HR teams) within one platform to which anyone has access and where the magic is happening with the level of visibility and transparency you want to be limited only by your own decision not a technical or another type of limitation. 

Or if you have a small company, you may want to conquer legal by using Goodlegal to easily deal with all things related to legal & compliance, setting up your legal infrastructure (document and policy management, collaboration, legal templates, e-signatures, and analytics) which is at the same time accessible without the need to pay huge amounts of money you do not have to lawyers but also actionable - meaning having the ability to set up everything yourself and take any actions you need directly from the platform and the relevant documents and avoid doing it as it is done today (downloading a Word or PDF, edit, save, upload somewhere, send a link to the location or the actual document via email, or upload to an ensign tool by doing the same dance).    

The current legal tech market is an obvious example of how the legal teams and their companies are not able to fully leverage the latest technology advancements due to hundreds of solutions that only solve one small part of a problem while the holistic approach is left for guesswork. If a provider sells only a Natural Language Processing (NLP) tool which a team wants to use for contract review, that team is left with a bunch of issues to figure out how to integrate that NLP tool into their 

(i) contract review process, 

(ii) existing tech stack and 

(iii) company workflows. 

This is not a singular example, as any other legal technology will give you the same headache, including e-sign or automation tools. 

AI is a fairy tale. 

Document management, document editing, collaboration and tracking, e-signature, and analytics are real. 

Real things deserve a proper foundation, while fairy tales are imagination. Only by solving the foundation can we allow ourselves to imagine how AI can be applied to our foundation to maximize legal and business outcomes so that AI is not a fairy tale. Of course, you can use a fancy AI tool to solve a specific issue or for a specific project, but that is a one-off solution to a structural problem which actually means that the structural problem is left unresolved - back to square one.

All industries and the businesses forming them depend on legal, but only good legal sets them up for success compared to competitors.

The way the businesses in these industries understand to make their operations more efficient is limited only to their imagination and for some highly regulated ones by the actual law (insurance, banking, etc.) where the law actually mandates to have in place various procedures and processes with their related bureaucracy. Even in these highly regulated industries, the way in which an organization applies the requirements of the law by leveraging technology is within its grasp. 

As long as the foundation is set, the imagination can run free, and AI to become a reality.