For the past few days, Wolters Kluwer, one of the global leaders of the legaltech ecosystem, has been announcing with a fanfare of press releases the launch of its new artificial intelligence feature built into its Legisway platform.
Reading the release, you find a string of buzzwords and other standard talking points (« NLP », « AI-driven », « efficenctly »), without learning very much.
So what does this new feature actually bring to contract management? Let us cut short the unbearable suspense: not much!
A. Confusing administrative handling with contract management
First of all, as with the other vendors, we see a classic bias among publishers of contract management SaaS: building a lawyer’s tool, for lawyers.
Yet it can never be said often enough: contract management is a discipline covering « all the activities associated with managing a contract throughout its lifecycle ».
Here, we remain with a solution that handles the administrative side of contracts, and therefore at best 20% of the vast scope of contract management.
B. Nothing new under the sun
Now that the euphoria around AI has passed, it takes more to create surprise and enthusiasm, so it was with some expectations but also some doubts that we examined these new features, to find out what revolutionary thing Wolters Kluwer had cooked up for us, and how it might help contract managers like us.
After attending a webinar run by the vendor on the subject (see the replay), and dissecting the videos, websites and other material published on it, we were left wanting more.
Once again, we are looking at the same triptych: uploading and parsing documents, categorising clauses, and querying a database. If we were feeling mischievous at Prime Conseil, we might imagine that every CLM vendor calls on the same product and AI team!
All in all, beneath this press release we found a few features that can be described as « market practice » or the bare minimum which, at best, will help legal departments save a little time (and that is far from certain!) on the administrative handling of very simple tasks and, on a more critical reading, will simply be of no use to the contract manager.
Conclusion
It seems that contract management is still a subject unknown to CLM vendors, who persist in developing features that relate more to administering a contract than to managing and optimising its lifecycle.
Once again, it is regrettable that contract management misses out on the technology lever and on the potential that AI represents across the whole contract lifecycle, whether at its inception or in its execution and management. But to see the glass as half full, we can also tell ourselves that, contrary to what we have read in the press in recent months, the contract manager’s job is still (very) far from being challenged by AI.