As corporate legal departments struggle with the costs and management of legal technology, managed legal service providers have been stepping in to offer alternative options for in-house tech deployment. And as the market for these services grow, such companies are seeking to differentiate by providing targeted legal expertise and more comprehensive offerings.

Among those providers is Yerra Solutions, which this week announced the release of its managed services offering Yerra Clearly. With its launch, the company hopes to provide a new level of service that essentially allows legal departments to outsource all their legal operations.

What it is: Yerra Clearly is a suite of managed services covering contract management, legal request intake, e-billing, and knowledge management (KM). Clients can chose to deploy each service individually or leverage them all in a full suite called Clearly Legal Ops.

Aditya Prakash, chief innovation officer and head of client services at Yerra Solutions, said that the new offering is an evolution of Clearly 1.0, which was a service focused specifically on managing e-billing for Yerra's European clients.

Yerra, however, soon realized that this managed services approach “really resonates” with legal departments, and “can be applied to many more use cases than just e-billing and invoice management,” he said.

How it works: Yerra Clearly provides legal departments with teams of legal and technology experts to handle all their administrative and data-intensive tasks.

For example, the Clearly Contracts service provides a team to manage potentially everything from contract intake and organization to contract drafting and key clause extraction, depending on what a client specifically requests.

Similarly, the Clearly Spend for Legal and Clearly Spend for IP service teams manage the intake, organization and coding of all an organization's legal invoices. “The end result is that clients get 100 percent of the global invoices in one systems with deep analytics behind it,” Prakash said.

Likewise, Clearly KM manages the intake and organization of knowledge assets, while Clearly Demand acts as a middle man to triage and manage requests that come in to the legal department.

In many cases, Clearly service teams use their own proprietary technology, but can also use the technology clients already have in place. Legal departments can choose for only Clearly teams to interface and manage the technology or can choose to interface with the technology themselves.

Bring in the AI: In many cases, Clearly teams will use the data it obtains from the legal departments to train machine learning tools that eventually will allow them to work faster and more efficiently.

In performing contracts tasks, for example, Clearly teams continuously run the contracts through a machine learning system. This allows the system to eventually create benchmark data, such as what terms are standard in the legal department's contracts, and leverage that toward tasks like quickly finding anomalies with new contracts.

Eventually, the goal is to introduce a high level of automation into legal service like contract analytics. “We start with 80/20 start of premise, where 80 percent of that work is being handled by the service team and 20 is being handed by the system. And as more data gets into the systems, the paradigm starts shifting to basically where we expect it to be 80/20 the other way,” Prakash said.

Competition: With Clearly, Yerra enters an increasingly crowded legal technology managed services market. The company will have to compete with others like FTI Consulting, Elevate Services, Pramata and Riverview Law, all of whom deploy artificial intelligence in one way or another.

Prakash, however, believes Yerra's Clearly stands out because it is a “services wrapped around technology” offering, including a team of highly specialized legal experts.

“We bring in legal experts specifically to industries and specific to regions,” he said, adding that the legal teams are well versed in all the legal, regulatory and technology issues their clients face.

Given their expertise, Prakash noted that such teams will come into the engagement without having to be trained or managed extensively by the legal department. So while Clearly teams do “ask for guidance” in terms of how they should proceed with certain legal services, “it's not like we come in with a blank slate,” he said.

As corporate legal departments struggle with the costs and management of legal technology, managed legal service providers have been stepping in to offer alternative options for in-house tech deployment. And as the market for these services grow, such companies are seeking to differentiate by providing targeted legal expertise and more comprehensive offerings.

Among those providers is Yerra Solutions, which this week announced the release of its managed services offering Yerra Clearly. With its launch, the company hopes to provide a new level of service that essentially allows legal departments to outsource all their legal operations.

What it is: Yerra Clearly is a suite of managed services covering contract management, legal request intake, e-billing, and knowledge management (KM). Clients can chose to deploy each service individually or leverage them all in a full suite called Clearly Legal Ops.

Aditya Prakash, chief innovation officer and head of client services at Yerra Solutions, said that the new offering is an evolution of Clearly 1.0, which was a service focused specifically on managing e-billing for Yerra's European clients.

Yerra, however, soon realized that this managed services approach “really resonates” with legal departments, and “can be applied to many more use cases than just e-billing and invoice management,” he said.

How it works: Yerra Clearly provides legal departments with teams of legal and technology experts to handle all their administrative and data-intensive tasks.

For example, the Clearly Contracts service provides a team to manage potentially everything from contract intake and organization to contract drafting and key clause extraction, depending on what a client specifically requests.

Similarly, the Clearly Spend for Legal and Clearly Spend for IP service teams manage the intake, organization and coding of all an organization's legal invoices. “The end result is that clients get 100 percent of the global invoices in one systems with deep analytics behind it,” Prakash said.

Likewise, Clearly KM manages the intake and organization of knowledge assets, while Clearly Demand acts as a middle man to triage and manage requests that come in to the legal department.

In many cases, Clearly service teams use their own proprietary technology, but can also use the technology clients already have in place. Legal departments can choose for only Clearly teams to interface and manage the technology or can choose to interface with the technology themselves.

Bring in the AI: In many cases, Clearly teams will use the data it obtains from the legal departments to train machine learning tools that eventually will allow them to work faster and more efficiently.

In performing contracts tasks, for example, Clearly teams continuously run the contracts through a machine learning system. This allows the system to eventually create benchmark data, such as what terms are standard in the legal department's contracts, and leverage that toward tasks like quickly finding anomalies with new contracts.

Eventually, the goal is to introduce a high level of automation into legal service like contract analytics. “We start with 80/20 start of premise, where 80 percent of that work is being handled by the service team and 20 is being handed by the system. And as more data gets into the systems, the paradigm starts shifting to basically where we expect it to be 80/20 the other way,” Prakash said.

Competition: With Clearly, Yerra enters an increasingly crowded legal technology managed services market. The company will have to compete with others like FTI Consulting, Elevate Services, Pramata and Riverview Law, all of whom deploy artificial intelligence in one way or another.

Prakash, however, believes Yerra's Clearly stands out because it is a “services wrapped around technology” offering, including a team of highly specialized legal experts.

“We bring in legal experts specifically to industries and specific to regions,” he said, adding that the legal teams are well versed in all the legal, regulatory and technology issues their clients face.

Given their expertise, Prakash noted that such teams will come into the engagement without having to be trained or managed extensively by the legal department. So while Clearly teams do “ask for guidance” in terms of how they should proceed with certain legal services, “it's not like we come in with a blank slate,” he said.