Photo: TippaPatt/Shutterstock.com

Corporate counsel John Griffin of Alliance Data Systems Corp. envisions a day soon when smart computer programs can peruse thousands of company contracts and flag when there's a problem created by changing events.

On Friday he was one of 580 tech-curious professionals—many of them in-house counsel—who attended the Conga Connect conference in Orlando, Florida, focusing on contract management. They worked in user groups, networked with other professionals, and listened to keynote speakers like the Daymond John of "Shark Tank," who welcomed "my fellow sharks" who like him, he said, are also disruptive "agents for change."

In the case of in-house counsel, they often are agents who have to deal with change. Griffin said he is one of about 50 in-house lawyers for Columbus, Ohio-based Alliance Data, with about 15 being contract attorneys.

When there is an event that could impact a company's contracts, Griffin said it seems like it would be simple to figure out that impact. "But it's complex," he told Corporate Counsel. "You must legally evaluate each clause in tens of thousands of contracts."

He said he believes "there is going to be increased [use] of machine learning and predictive analytics" to pull clauses out of contracts that are impacted by an event.

"Time is precious" in a legal department, Griffin noted. "The biggest thing is folks trying to be more adept at using technology, and seeing [new] ways we can use it."

Mason White, vice president of product management at Conga, which sponsored the tech conference, agreed. "We are going to see a lot more AI [artificial intelligence] being brought into products like ours," White said. Conga is a Colorado-based technology and services company that focuses on contract life cycle management.

When there is an event such as Brexit or loss of LIBOR or the European Union's new General Data Protection Regulation, White explained, in-house counsel need the ability to figure out how the event will impact its contracts.

"For example, when interest rates are no longer [indexed to] LIBOR, you need to know what clauses you have in contracts that alter your risk. And you want AI doing that, not an army of interns in your legal department."

White said in-house counsel will benefit because soon "they'll be able to have machine learning algorithms cruise through those contracts" and explain that a clause adds this specific value, or that particular risk.

The conference drew attendees from numerous industries and across various roles, including legal operations, in-house contract counsel, sales and sales ops.

But it was in-house lawyers like Griffin, or Patrick Anderson and Zack Chalgren of Agiliti Health Inc., who came to learn what smarter systems could do for their legal departments and their companies.

Anderson, who has been with Minneapolis-based Agiliti about a year, explained, "We want to know what we can do better. We don't know what we don't know, but they [conference programs] can tell us what we need to know and what we don't."

Agiliti services, rents and manages medical equipment nationwide. It has a "small and tight" four-lawyer legal department, they said.

Chalgren, who has been with the company for about two and a half years, said, "We are open to new ways of doing things. If there is a faster, easier, better way to automate these agreements, we want to know about that and implement it. We can provide more value to our business by turning out contracts faster."

One new technology not on their radar yet is blockchain. The attorneys all said they have not seen any practical use so far for blockchain technology in their businesses. Conga's White said he also is not seeing any demand for blockchain.

"We keep evaluating blockchain and keep looking at ways that it might be commercially pragmatic for us," he said. "But there seem to be easier and cheaper ways to achieve what it does. Customers are just not coming to us and asking for blockchain."

White said mostly he has watched other companies take on what he called blockchain vanity projects or blockchain tourism—where they take a little trip with the new technology "and then come back to the old way."