Yes, Contract Negotiation Software Can Auto-Organize Your Work
“The fact that Recital can aggregate and auto-organize my contract drafts and related emails in 24 hours is amazing.”
When she said it, it took all my willpower not to shout, “Yes!” I smiled and kept something of a poker face, as this was a follow-up discovery call with a senior in-house counsel.
As a founder, when you’re building a contract negotiation software product, it can be a rollercoaster of emotions. One minute you feel bulletproof, steadfast in your conviction that what you’re building will make an impact and improve people’s lives (at least, improve their work life, in our case).
The next minute you’re wondering whether anyone will ever get value from the tool you’re toiling away on for many long hours. It can’t all be a leap of faith however, which is why we try to talk to as many potential customers as we can.
This customer research is vital to understanding the specific needs and pain points of the people we are trying to help — in our case, that means contracts professionals and in-house counsel, especially at fast-growing companies.
In a single sentence, she validated the work we were doing to simplify and accelerate the contract negotiation process. As I said, this is the whole point of these calls, but for her to sum it up so succinctly felt really, really good.
As I’ve written about before, Recital is not the first legal tech product I’ve created. This time, I felt like I had unfinished business. I see a deep need to support legal professionals with better tools for their work, so they can apply their brainpower and expertise to the highest value work.
When Brendan Mulholland and I started Recital, we knew what we were up against. We come from the world of CLM (contract lifecycle management) — our last product was acquired by a player in that space and we’ve been embedded in it for years. But we saw the opportunity for a better way.
What if a contract negotiation software tool could automatically detect and organize all of your existing contracts, both in your email AND in your cloud storage? It would save potentially months of time searching and cataloguing in-flight contracts and uploading them to a CLM. And instead of wasting so much time on finding the right version of the contract and related emails for a contract negotiation, the user can focus on what they do best, negotiating and closing the deal with all the information they need to succeed at their fingertips.
From there, we could save our users even more time with negotiations and redlining by leveraging and augmenting the tools they already use, like email and Microsoft Word. And the beauty of it all, is that the user doesn’t need to change how they work. No change management required. We knew we were onto something and that we could really help contracts professionals with their work and make their lives easier and better.
Knowing something like that to be true and then hearing it shared back to you from a customer feels fantastic. It all only takes a day. A process that still takes months and many tens of thousands of dollars of implementation and of searching and organizing in-flight contracts and uploading them to a CLM, we can solve and do in ONE day, and we can share that “aha” moment with anyone who tries the product.
If you’re reading this and you’re a contracts professional, I hope you have some skepticism. How can it be true?
I want to invite you to take our one-day challenge. We can show you a demo of Recital, then once you’ve authorized connections to your email and cloud storage, the tool works its magic, auto-organizing your in-flight contracts (and related emails).
Curious? Reach out. I’d love to show you the magic of Recital.
