Using New Law for Old Contracts: How to Efficiently and Cost-Effectively Analyze and Remediate Outdated Agreements

William Bremner is the Senior Director of the Law Department Management at Consilio. With 24 years’ experience with global software and technology services organizations that specialize in providing enterprise technology solutions to large, global F500 companies in a wide range of industries.

Laura van Wyngaarden is an entrepreneur and expert in artificial intelligence and legal technology. She’s the COO of Diligen, a leading artificial intelligence (AI) company transforming the way lawyers review contracts and a pioneer in the Legal Tech space.

Laura is passionate about the connection between technology and human work, seeking to identify and explore innovative ways to reduce time and improve the accuracy of human tasks.

Prior to founding Diligen, Laura was the Managing Director of Distility. Laura holds undergraduate and honors degrees from the University of Cape Town and a Masters from Oxford University. She tweets as @lauravanwyn about legal technology, artificial intelligence and the future of work.

Kiamesha focuses her practice in the areas of real estate transactions (acquisitions, dispositions, development, leasing, sale leaseback transactions, and real estate municipality work), real estate lending and commercial finance transactions, and related business transactions.

Kiamesha helps developers, corporate real estate departments, municipalities, tenants, and landlords achieve their real estate goals related to development projects, drafting and negotiating of lease documents, negotiating transfer documents, and ultimately getting the deal done.

Kiamesha has closed numerous SBA, USDA, and conventional commercial loans for commercial lenders and borrowers related to real estate, equipment, machinery, and C&I lending. She also co-manages the firm's LIBOR remediation work.

Kiamesha's extensive base of knowledge covers an array of commercial loan types, including government guaranteed lending, asset based line of credits, term loans, syndicated loan transactions, real estate and asset based transactions, and construction loans. Additionally, she has assisted banks with recovery of yearly financial documents, past due funds, liquidation, and government guaranteed purchasing processes.

Kiamesha also assists minority, women, veteran, and disabled owned businesses with attaining state and city certifications.

She is also the chair of the SBA Task Force, and a member of both Taft's CARES Act Title IV Task Force and Inclusion Task Force.

Robin Snasdell is Managing Director at Consilio. Chris Dale, of the eDisclosure Information Project, interviewed him recently, and asked him to explain what contract management is and why companies would go to Consilio for help with it.

Robin Snasdell says that companies engaged in some kind of contract management technology implementation look for opportunities to do more with the technology and get more value from its use.

There are big opportunities to take legacy contracts and move them into the technology, to extract data and metadata from them and use the resulting information to enhance the business.

An example might be an M&A transaction where a company, whether buyer or seller, is trying to understand what data exists within the company’s contracts, perhaps as part of due diligence exercise.

This is most obviously a search for risk buried within the contracts, but it is also an opportunity to seek out hidden value and opportunities which are being missed. One part of the business might not know, for example, that beneficial terms may have been negotiated by another department.

As a result, the company may be able to develop new templates and new clause libraries while perhaps finding others which they would rather not use and would like to be rid of across all their contracts. There is a continuing value in this after the initial exercise as the company is enabled to monitor and audit the use of particular contract terms.

Consilio uses a mixture of technology and human review. The technology may, for example, be set to look for certain clauses but it may be necessary to use human eyes and skills to decide what to do about them.

Robin Snasdell emphasizes that Consilio has an existing eDiscovery infrastructure with technical locations around the world and a significant review capacity which can be applied as necessary. In addition, Consilio is well known for its ability to handle a very wide range of languages.