The Inescapable Truths: How Summize is Shaking up Contracts

In today’s fast-paced world, businesses are under increasing pressure to deliver quick and efficient services at a cost-effective price. However, trying to change the traditional way of working in any organisation is never smooth sailing. Companies are often met with resistance, both internally and externally, and implementing new tools can be a daunting task. Change in any environment can feel unnatural, but what do you do when your ways of working are outdated and a drain on your resources?

Previously, businesses had to manually wade through pages and pages of contracts, with no other alternative. But now, software powered by artificial intelligence (AI), like Summize, can be used to upload, summarise, and review contracts in a matter of minutes instead of hours. Contractual queries and due diligence won’t have to disrupt regular workloads. And, by storing all contracts and information in one place, it simplifies previously complex filing systems and leads to faster response times for internal teams and clients

But how do we achieve this in the first place? At Summize, to create a great platform, we had to identify the ‘Inescapable Truths’ about the teams we help. This boils down to identifying each possible use-case, exploring the enemies to adoption and creating a tailored solution. By identifying and solving these problems with our product, users can then streamline processes, maximise potential revenue, and directly improve employee-satisfaction; creating a happy and productive workplace.

The Barriers to a Quicker Contract Review Process

Automation

Bringing in any kind of automation is likely to meet some initial resistance. And it’s important to remember that these objections or barriers to adoption always differ from business to business, and across each sector and size. To make automation work, you have to eliminate the traditional ‘one size fits all’ approach and look at making it fit within a pre-existing workflow.

Summize is therefore designed to work alongside legal teams and take on their low value, time-consuming tasks. With little to no implementation required, Summize can be slotted into daily life without any friction. The goal is simply to provide a cost-effective and easy-to-use solution that ultimately helps businesses and legal teams to make contract reviews and the contract lifecycle faster and simpler.

The fight or flight mentality

When it comes to improving the contract lifecycle with software or tech, AI and machine learning are often considered big ‘taboos’. The belief is that they exist to change how a company or person works or replace them. In most people, this triggers the ‘fight or flight’ mentality and blocks businesses from tackling their ‘enemies to change’, which in turn stops them from reaching their full potential.

However, with Summize, we use small steps to improve the way you work without the need for dramatic change. Our whole company philosophy is centred around Kaizen. The Kaizen mentality suggests that by taking small steps you can continuously improve the way you work and live, whilst overriding that fight or flight mentality. Therefore, Summize is there, not to replace legal teams or change how they work, but to improve the old ways of working and make contracts quicker and easier to manage.

The Inescapable Truths – Private Practice, In-House, and SMEs

Private Practice

Within Private Practice Law Firms, market competition dictates that service providers must differentiate to succeed, and the winners will be those who provide the most customer-centric, high-value services. Legal technology can and should assist in this, but traditional ways of working can often conflict with technology and result in a lack of adoption,

By using Summize and generating instant summaries of every contract, lawyers can now spend less time reviewing and managing contracts and more time on their customers. And the platform doesn’t force them to change how they work. This allows service providers to meet client expectations and truly differentiate their offering, while also removing low-value tasks. Minimising those tasks, in turn, also saves the business money and resources.

Additionally, using the Summize Partner Program, law firms can even generate a new source of revenue, while making contract reviews and management cost-effective. Clients will even have access to their own lightweight contract platform, improving their overall experience and making sure that they come back year after year.

In-House

For In-House Legal Teams, there is an increased expectation for them to provide additional value beyond their basic role. They are expected to be business leaders and not just legal advisors. However, a lack of time, budget and relevant technology often means legal teams are left having to take on too much, reducing the amount of time they can spend providing additional support to the wider business.

By utilising a platform like Summize, which removes time spent on low-value tasks and increases internal engagement (using features such as shareable links), in-house legal teams don’t have to spend all of their time on contract reviews or management. Contractual queries can also be answered instantly with Summize using the Contract Insights capability, and auto-renewals won’t be missed using the Contract Calendar.  

Unlike many other heavy AI contract review platforms, Summize believes that improving the contract lifecycle shouldn’t use up your whole budget. Huge costs for unknown tech often play a factor in many organisations resisting the automation adoption process. So, Summize provides user-friendly cost-efficient options that are flexible for your team.

SME’s

Businesses run on contracts, and small and medium-sized businesses must be able to understand and action contracts quickly.

But, with many lacking in-house counsels or traditional legal services, the task of navigating complex contracts is frequently left to self-employed and small business owners without significant legal knowledge or backgrounds.

With legal obligations and liabilities hidden within the small print, some businesses may fail to pick out the right information or could miss important renewal and termination dates. These are costly mistakes that can often be even more expensive and time-consuming to rectify in the long term.

Summize helps SMEs to instantly understand and manage all their contracts in one cost-effective platform. With features such as the Word Add-In, SMEs can find explanations for key terms and phrases, and navigating long contracts becomes a much less stressful, quicker task. This small step can have a significant positive impact on any SME.

Why Summize is Different

Summize summarises contracts intelligently; identifying and managing the key terms while offering users the ability to create bespoke clauses and contract types, add comments and red flags, and share the summaries with their clients or team members.

Our platform accelerates the contract review process by up to 85% by providing firms with an immediate contract summary containing clauses and terms, making a previously onerous task much slicker.  

As a platform, Summize also doesn’t require any implementation – it can be used straight away and offers instant value. Unlike other solutions, the AI behind our software doesn’t require ‘training’, which means it can be used immediately from the moment you sign up. This also makes Summize more cost-effective and allows us to offer multiple subscription packages to suit every team. It has been designed with several pricing tiers and user levels to help teams be as flexible as they need to be.

Summize is also the only product that exists both as a Microsoft Word Add-In and as a web application, making it uniquely relevant to both pre-and post-signature contracts.

Your Future and Summize

By identifying their inescapable truths, any company big or small can start the journey into handling their contracts more efficiently; taking small and manageable steps with Summize to become more time-efficient and cost-effective.