It’s an oft repeated event: a legal department buys new software expecting it to solve capacity issues and bottlenecks, only to find that a “black box” solution can’t fix a broken workflow.
In a recent episode of the Technically Legal podcast, Percipient founder Chad Main explored this scenario with Akshay Verma, COO of SpotDraft, a contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform, and former Director of Legal Operations for Facebook and Coinbase.
From billing 2,600 hours a year in Big Law to leading legal tech innovation for both large enterprises and software companies, Akshay’s career trajectory has given him a unique perspective on why “substance over software” is the only way forward.
Below is a Q&A from Chad and Akshay’s conversation (edited for length and clarity) about how legal teams can use attorney-led judgment and smarter processes to scale with efficiency rather than just throwing tech at a problem and hoping for the best.
Process First, Tech Second
CM: You’ve seen the practice of law from Big Law, legal service providers, and major tech companies. If there’s one thing you see most often that companies aren’t doing right, what is it?
AV: I’ll give you my top three. And this is a product of data and experience.
- Contract Repository: Most companies don’t even have all their contracts in one place. But it’s just table stakes. Just having some kind of repository where all of your contracts are stored and some standardized nomenclature is a massive win for many companies.
- Contract Review: For contracts, why are you reviewing and negotiating NDAs? Show me the percentage of significant litigation or risk that has resulted from an NDA. It’s going to be minuscule. Why are you wasting your time with this stuff. Put it on a portal, put good terms in there, and make people sign it. Unless we’re going into a joint venture that’s highly confidential, then you’ll negotiate that. But how often are you doing that? Meanwhile, you’ve got all this high-volume work that lawyers are doing. Just get it off your plate.
- Process First: Very often, you don’t have good processes built in. You don’t have templates for basic agreements. You don’t have a good process for where the contract goes when you need it. What are the thresholds? What are the approval workflows? By the way, I haven’t said one thing about technology yet. So many of these problems in contracting have nothing to do with technology.
One of my pet peeves is that technology providers get blamed when the real problem is actually lack of process, or lack of adherence to processes internally. So, get your process right, and you’re going to be in a great position to drive efficiency out of your contracting workflows.
Talent as the “Puppet Masters” Making Technology Work
CM: You’ve mentioned before that “talent and structure win.” What about talent? Where does that fit into all of this?
AV: I’m the son of an engineer. I’ve been around technology forever, and I can reflect on that now given all of the massive advances in technology in the last 10–15 years, and specifically in the last five to seven years with legal tech, and in the last two years with AI.
There is one consistent theme that cuts across all of that: technology does not exist without humans. We are the triggers. We’re like the puppet masters that make the technology work. So you have to find the right talent to make sure that the technology is developed properly, is adopted properly, and that it evolves properly. You have to have that.
Legal Ops and Selling a New Way
CM: You helped build out Facebook’s legal operations function. How does that experience inform how you look at legal departments now?
AV: You have to understand the law firm model and law firm economics to solve the pain point. In legal ops, you’re trying to sell a new way of doing things. You have to be a salesperson to do it. It’s not something we talk about as lawyers, and certainly not as in-house lawyers. You need to get an entire legal department behind an idea. It requires a business mindset, and it’s a critical component of legal operations.
The Tech Stack “Holy Trifecta”
CM: For a legal department looking to modernize, what tools should it start with?
AV: I have my “holy trifecta” of tools that every legal department should have:
- CLM: Your contract life cycle management tool — you’ve got to have one. Everybody’s got to manage their contracts. So that’s a no-brainer.
- Spend Management: Beyond a certain level of external spend, you need a spend management tool to manage how law firms get engaged, how you set up those matters, and the cutting of invoices. As your portfolio of law firms gets more diverse and increases, you need to manage those relationships from an economic perspective.
- Workflow Tools: Particularly in the age of AI, you need some type of agentic tool that helps you with workflows. Maybe it’s knowledge management for your legal team, maybe it’s building out workflows that connect to your CLM, maybe it’s a legal intake tool for the business to engage with. An agentic workflow tool can really help you compartmentalize.
The Bottom Line
At Percipient, we agree with Akshay’s “process-first” mentality. We put process first and use human-led judgment enhanced by AI-enabled scale. Whether it’s managing subpoena compliance, streamlining your document review process or lending a hand with contract workflows, our goal is to fit in your existing workflows and give your team time back to focus on high value tasks.
