Robert Ambrogi Blog
Does the corporate legal market need yet another contract lifecycle management product? Well, Bloomberg Law thinks it does.
Last month, Bloomberg Law released a survey it conducted with legal news and information company ALM that found that nearly 75% of in-house counsel said that their contract workflow technology did not meet their needs, even though contracts-related tasks make up at least half the daily work of 43 percent of corporate counsel.
Why is this? Bloomberg Law says it is because existing contract solutions are difficult to deploy, difficult to use, and not designed for attorney workflows.
“It’s clear that there’s a need for a solution designed for in-house counsel – one that’s easy to implement and use and solves their most pressing workflow challenges,” said Bloomberg Law President Joe Breda at the time. “We’ve been hard at work on developing this technology and we’re excited to soon be releasing it.”
Now, the company is delivering on that promise, as it announces Bloomberg Law Contract Solutions, an AI-powered product for storing, searching, drafting, and negotiating contracts.
The product will be formally introduced during a launch event on Thursday, May 11, at 1 p.m. ET.
Bloomberg Law says that the product was developed in close consultation with corporate legal teams and with feedback from hundreds of in-house attorneys and legal professionals. Its features include:
- A secure, centralized repository, including a database of automatically extracted clauses to deliver an organized single source of truth that can be filtered, sorted, and searched, with little to no data entry.
- Integration with Microsoft Word, allowing users to access their contract repository and clause library directly from within a document, to make it easier to draft and revise contracts.
- Advanced analysis tools for reviewing draft agreements and allowing users to identify and incorporate preferred language to ensure favorable terms.
- AI-powered extraction of key contractual terms, providing greater visibility into final agreements to help identify and flag potential risks and obligations.
These features overcome the problems presented by other contract products, Bloomberg Law says, by making Contract Solutions easy to deploy and easy to use. Users can be up and running on it within a day, with little effort or training required, the company says, and it works within Microsoft Word, where attorneys already work.
“Contracts are a pain point for every corporate legal department, whether they manage 10 or 10,000 agreements,” Breda said in a statement provided by the company. “We’re committed to helping legal teams operate more efficiently so they can spend their time on more high-value work.”