Clause @ Legal Geek — An Intern’s Perspective
Helping lawyers draft contracts is one thing, but dealing with what happens after signature of the contract is another.
Usually, when people sign contracts, it gets shoved into a drawer and forgotten; the fact that Clause deals with the contract after signature makes it special.
As a recent Law graduate with a masters in Computer Science, who will be starting her training contract next February, I am working as an intern at Clause, a legal tech company. About a week ago, I had the opportunity to attend the Legal Geek Conference 2019, held in London on 16 October, with Matt Roberts and Adrian Fletcher, two senior level engineers on our team who have been mentoring me during my internship.
The Clause booth was located in the Startup Alley, along with 25 other legal tech startups. The startups have been classified into different categories, following the categorization in the Legal Geek Startup map (https://www.legalgeek.co/startup-map/). Clause was in the ‘Documents and Contracts’ category, which was undoubtedly the biggest category in the Startup Alley. Other categories included Finance and Operations, Transactions, and Litigation, just to name a few.
I spent most, if not all, of my time manning the Clause booth, so I wasn’t able to attend any of the talks, but here are two things I learned from the Legal Geek conference!
- Attending the conference made me feel incredibly proud to work at Clause.
As I mentioned above, there were quite a lot of startups in the Documents and Contracts category in the Startup Alley. Therefore, it was good to have a one-line headliner to describe our product:
“Clause is special because we deal with contracts post-signature with real-time data”.
A lot of participants seemed to be tired of seeing startups after startups, and seemed to be intrigued when we said that we deal with the contract even after drafting and creating the contract.
In addition, I was pleasantly surprised to see several attendees coming to the booth and saying that they’ve met us last year, and wanted to know how far we’ve come! There were some attendees who knew about the Accord Project — a non-profit legaltech initiative started by Clause — as well. Although I wasn’t working at Clause during the last Legal Geek conference, it was nice to know that our firm was drawing attention from people in this field! :D
2. Explaining what Clause does to lawyers was difficult, but it made me understand our services much better.
From other legal tech firms and solicitors from law firms, to professional services firms and startup incubators, there was a whole range of attendees who visited our booth and expressed interest. Because the level of understanding of smart legal contracts were so different, I had to elaborate on what ‘contracts post-signature’ meant, catering to different audiences.
To do this, I used examples from the Cicero Template Library (payment on signature clause, late delivery and penalty clause…) and our demo video, and tried to illustrate how Clause can assist companies in contract lifecycle management.
I especially liked using the late delivery and penalty clause as an example: “So, after the supply agreement has been signed, we monitor (in real-time) the status of the delivery. Then, when the delivery is made, and it has been 3 days late, the amount of the penalty is calculated automatically — according to the terms of the contract — and an invoice gets sent to the supplier.”
“That actually works?!”
Getting such responses from lawyers, full of awe, was probably the highlight of my day. ;)
In addition, attending the conference was really helpful in enhancing my understanding of Clause’s capabilities. I joined Clause as an intern in mid-September, about a month ago, and I have been mostly working on the Accord Project documentation. Therefore, the conference was a learning opportunity for me to see how the open-source Accord Project tools are used in conjunction with Clause to help businesses manage their contracts post-signature.
It was a very exciting day for me, as I got to meet many like-minded lawyers who are interested in the potential synergy between law and technology.
No, scrap that; the actual synergy between the two.
