Deloitte’s Mark Ross Dives Deep into CLM Technology

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Hello everyone, and welcome to Pearls on Gloves Off. I'm your host, Mary o'. Carroll. Today our guest is Mark Ross, a principal at Deloitte and the co leader of the firm's legal business services practice, which leverages Deloitte's global multidisciplinary approach to provide innovative solutions to legal departments. Mark comes from 18 years of in depth practical experience. Before Deloitte, he was the head of contracts, compliance and commercial services for a global alsp, or alternative legal service provider, where he led a team of 350 people in providing tech enabled legal managed services and legal management consulting to multinational organizations. On top of all that, Marc has also considerable experience relating to the ethics of legal outsourcing. He's been interviewed by numerous publications, done quite a bit of public speaking, and he also sits on several advisory boards. Phew. That is quite a lot of background, Mark, and a lot of experience in this world. So with that, welcome.

Thank you so much for having me, Mary. I've been an avid listener of your podcast for some time now, so I'm delighted to be here with you today.

Well, thank you. It's great to have you. So tell me, we've known each other for some time. I don't even think I know because it's not in your bio, but did you start out as an attorney by background or how did you get into this world?

I did. I think of myself of having two careers. Although the first career does not represent 50% of my professional career today, it is a lifetime ago. As you can probably tell from my deep southern Texas accent, I'm not originally from the us. I qualified as a solicitor in the uk, the Court of England and Wales. I think it was in 1997, 1998. And I practiced law in the UK for eight years before emigrating to the United States and embarking on the second phase of my career. But initially, believe it or not, I was actually a personal injury lawyer back in the year back in the United Kingdom, I used to represent the coal miners and the shipbuilders who were suffering from chronic emphysema vibration, white finger, industrial deafness from working in the shipyards or in the mines of the north of England. That's where. That's where I come from. And in many ways it was a precursor, Mary, to my passion for delivering legal services more efficient, if more efficiently. Because a lot of those matters, they never went to court. They were run on case management systems and it was all about how quickly you could push a claim on behalf of a claimant. Or a plaintiff from initiation through to settlement. How could you do that as efficiently as possible? So I didn't realize at the time, but it was all about unbundling legal work. Yeah. Interesting. And so this. Yeah, so that's the first part of my career.

Okay, and then you emigrated to the US and were you planning to practice law here or what happened next?

Yeah, so I remember this like it was yesterday. It was in 2006. I had the wonderful fortune of meeting my gorgeous wife who was doing a master's degree. She's way more cultured than I am. She's doing a master's degree in museum and gallery management at City University in London. But she, she comes from Los Angeles and. And we got married. And she made it crystal clear to me that when it came to starting a family, she wanted to be in her hometown, in proximity to her parents and her friends and a support network. And I'd made it crystal clear to her that I realized I was born in the wrong climate. So moving 5,000 miles to Southern California was a win win for both of us. So moved over and I had every intention of taking the California bar, practicing law and becoming a tort lawyer in the US which was essentially what I had been doing. And on my resume, which talked about my personal injury law credentials, I had one paragraph of about unbundling this type of work because the law firm I'd been a partner at had actually, this is, by the way, Mary, before the term LPO even existed, the law firm that I'd been a partner at in London, this boutique personal injury law firm, we'd actually set up an office in South Africa to allow us to process high volume, routine fixed solicitors costs, personal injury cases with a better profit margin. And I had this one paragraph on my resume about unbundling this type of legal work. And I had set up four interviews for when I touched down in the states in November 2006. Three of them were with law firms with a view to joining as a paralegal and taking the bar exam. And one of them was with a startup legal outsourcing company. I would love to say that I gazed into my crystal ball and I foresaw the future and I realized the direction the industry was heading. That would be a bare faced lie, Mary. What I had was three job offers and only one of them did not require me sitting for the California bar. That was the determining factor. So I took the job that did not require me sitting for the California bar. And fortunately, luck, timing, serendipity, it turned out to be the best decision of my professional career. And I was suddenly immersed into the nascent world of legal process outsourcing.

Yeah, that's fascinating. And you've always, at least from what I can see from your background, had a sort of focus on commercial contracts as part. Was that from the very beginning or how did you sort of fall into that world? Because that's clearly not your background from your UK days.

Correct. I never practiced commercial law. Corporate law never advised organizations on the nuances of a particular complex limitation of liability clause. That was not the area of law that I was trained and practiced in. I think I was the fortunate victim of timing and circumstance, being in the right place at the right time as I joined this startup legal outsourcing company. And again, the acronyms and the lexicon, as you know, Mary, have changed over the years. I don't waste too much brain space thinking about what people call things, whether it's LPO, legal services, outsourcing, ALSPs, law.

Companies, I can't keep track.

First of all, I can't keep up with it. And secondly, I don't think clients care. I really don't think as long as.

They understand what we're talking about.

Right, Correct.

A different way of delivering legal services that is not in house and is not coming from a law firm.

Correct. I couldn't agree more. So I was fortunate in the. I've had a front row seat. I've been the beneficiary of having a front row seat as the industry has matured. Now, when I first got involved in the industry, it was predominantly a labor arbitrage play. And in fact, in the first couple of years, Mary, it was more focused on the realm of E discovery, litigation, support, document review. But as clients began to understand the art of possible, as the boutique alternative legal services providers matured, their delivery platform expanded, the skill sets of their personnel expanded. Then once you'd proven yourself in one particular area, then inevitably clients started to say, hey, what about this? And it very quickly dawned on me, me that contracts, they really touch so many parts of the enterprise in many ways, they touch everyone, but are owned by no one. And it quickly became apparent to me that this was the area where I felt alternative legal services and technology over time, because I don't think we're fully there yet, over time could make the most incredible impact to the overall enterprise. And it was probably in the late 2000s that I really started to pivot my focus into the world of contract and commercial services and transformation of the.

Commercial contracting function, which was still pretty early for the. Compared to kind of where we are now. That was. That was early days of trying to disrupt contracts. And we see you've mentioned e discovery, so many parallels, right, of what happened with litigation and unbundling and the leveraging of technology and AI in that world. And it was so ripe for disruption. It was so obvious that, you know, tech needed to come into that space. And I kind of feel like that's where we are now in the contracting in the commercial world.

I couldn't agree more. And I think, I think all parties at the table have increased their sophistication dramatically. Whether that is the legal technology players, whether that is the professional services players that advise, implement and operate those technologies, but also our buyers, our clients, their increased sophistication and maturity and understanding how to put, you know, both of our respective organizations to task. You know, tell me exactly, you know how your redlining technology works. Tell me exactly, you know how long this implementation is going to take. Where does the change management component come in? How much time and effort do we need to expend on our soy, on our side? Tell me exactly. So I think all of the parties in this ecosystem have dramatically increased their sophistication and maturity over the last decade or so.

And why. So I have some thoughts. Why do you think that's happening? What's driving all this disruption into the commercial space?

I think there is an array of interrelated and overlapping forces at play. You know, quite clearly, you know, your old gig, as Bill Maher might say, when he opens up real time, that's my old job. Your old job. The rise of legal ops as a discipline, Mary, that is unquestionably one of the key drivers. But I also think there's market forces at play. There's globalization. There is simply the passage of time. In reality, this industry is still incredibly new. You know, there was an element like there is with any new industry. And I say this with pride. If you build it, they will come. You know, in the early stages of any industry, there's prognostication around the art of the possible. And quite often the reality doesn't meet the promise for a number of years. And I genuinely think the reality is now meeting the promise of both the technology and the professional services and the expertise. There has been. There's been macro forces at play. I mean, for your world and my world in particular, I think you cannot underestimate the impact of the pandemic over the last two to three years. The turbocharging of organizations on A pathway to digitization as a direct result of them not being able to find their damn contracts when they needed to understand what was going on in their supply chain. You cannot underestimate that. You've had organizations faced with a never ever before tsunami of questions about what's in their contract portfolio. All of that overlapping, interrelated, I think has just turbocharged transformation of the contracting function.

Absolutely. And that word, you know, and I couldn't agree with all of that more. Rise of legal operations, more pressure on economics, and to be doing things more efficiently to speed up revenue, to speed up hiring, to speed up buying, like all the things that are necessary to have a. I feel like there was a point in the legal ops rise where there was a lot of talk about, you know, should I hire a lawyer, should I hire a non lawyer? Because so much of the focus was really about the first phase of the nascent days of legal operations, was all about outside counsel management. You know, we weren't even talking about technology in the early days. It was all, how do you have a preferred panel, how do you deal with billing, you know, outside council management, where, you know, it makes good sense. If you come from a law firm and, you know, kind of where the bodies are buried, there's a lot of benefit to that. Whereas now I feel like the buzzword of the day that has become the catalyst for hiring your first legal. Whatever operations technology person is transformation is digital, is digital transformation. Right. And how do you get legal to modernize? And because of that, we're seeing a lot of change in the profiles of the job descriptions and the type of people they're hiring. Because the biggest priority now for almost every legal department that I talk to, and I know from our past conversations, you're seeing the same thing on your side is contracting. And how do we revolutionize and digitize and change the way that our organization does contracting from beginning to end?

Well, I loved where you were going and I thought you were going to go even further down this path when you talked about the profile. So it was interesting. Literally 3 hours ago today, I was on a call with one of my Deloitte consulting partners who was talking to me about a presentation he wants to provide. Fortune 50 Technology Co. Again, your typical presentation on trends, trends in the legal department. And he brought up this slide which showed the current makeup of this particular client's legal department split across lawyers, paralegals, legal operations professionals, administration professionals. There was probably one other category that I'm blanking on right now. And then the left hand column was some research that we have available on similarly situated Fortune 250 technology companies. What does that typical breakdown look like? And I turned around to the gentleman, I said, there's nothing on this slide that talks about the actual skill sets. You could have a paralegal in that 15% of the department are comprised of paralegals who is a 30 year paralegal who has done things the same way forever. You could have a lawyer who is brand new, embracing AI process, RE engineering, Six Sigma, Lean project management, change management. I said, I understand the point that you're trying to make here, but this is much more a skill set conversation than frankly what label we attach to a given individual or group of individuals. It happens to be that we've witnessed this rise of legal operations professionals more because of an acknowledgement of the skill sets that are needed. And this group has emerged and they happen to have the skill sets that the business needs, that the business is crying out for. So I think there needs to be a little bit more focus on that rather than whether it is X percent lawyers, Y percent legal ops professionals, Z percent been in America for too long. Z. Yeah. As to what the specific label is.

Yeah, that's right. And the other thought I had, as you're explaining, that is so much of what we do is benchmarking in this industry. And anyone who is at clock and heard me get on my soapboxes, you know, we're looking at what the Fortune 100 are doing, we're looking at what the Fortune 500 are doing. And I tell you, none of them will say that they're doing everything. Well, none of them will tell you that they've optimized their department or that their staffing's ideal. And so we, we're looking at benchmarks of companies that are all still backwards. And are we trying to look like them? Which one of them will tell us that they've got it all figured out? And so I almost encourage folks to not try to look at what everyone else is doing and to try to think differently and see what works for you and what experiments can you have, because we're still in the early days. And if you're looking at everyone else, you're probably still looking backwards.

Yeah, I could get on my soapbox about that. We all have our maturity models, Mary. We have a Deloitte Legal Business Services maturity model. There's the clock maturity model. Of course, ACC Legal Ops have their maturity models. Every single professional services organization that operates in the legal transformation space has their maturity model. And I think they are useful to appoint. But first of all, there is nobody out there that is advanced if that is your or cutting edge or leading edge across every single criteria that can be measured. Absolutely no organization that is out there. Now, I don't talk about best in class. I try and talk about what is better in class. From the journey, from your starting point, what's a realistic roadmap for your organization, keeping in mind your budget, your tolerance for change management, you know, your cost pressures, you know, the skill sets that you have internally versus externally. I think that's a much more valuable conversation than trying to arbitrarily benchmark you against a competitor or against a maturity model, even though those activities can provide some level of value.

I agree with that. I agree with that. Okay, so another question that I just want to go back a little bit of. We went on a little bit of a tangent, but we were talking about the focus on contracting, right? And the disruption that's happening. And from, you know, if you and I have this conversation, it seems so obvious that everyone should modernize their contracts and all the benefits that come along with it. But most companies and most departments that I talk to are still really challenged about making a business case, about convincing the leadership team to invest in something like this and to demonstrate the roi. To me, you know, it's obvious there's speeding up the business. It's, you know, risk, it's control, it's, it's all the things, you know, dollar savings. I know that you and the Deloitte team talk about this quite a bit. What, what are some of your pointers on, you know, what advice would you give to someone who's like, I really want to do this, but I need to convince the rest of our leadership?

Well, first of all, there is data out there. You can look at industry reports, you can look at case studies of some successful CLM implementations and transformations, but you need data. You need to understand how long it takes from a contract request to a contract draft to, to a contract being negotiated to a contract being executed, to a contract being stored, how long and easy or hard it is to pull terms from contracts. You need to have some basic data points. You need to understand your particular organization.

That's the benefit of the system. Because most people will say, I can't tell you if it takes us 10 days or 100 days right now because I don't have a system. So they don't have the baseline to be able to say we're going to accelerate it by four days. They don't know.

Yeah, of course. So you need to do some form of information request, Mary, to, you know, speaking to key stakeholders. It's also limiting if you focus just on legal. Yeah, if you think about it, you know, contracting, you know, I used the sound bite before, you know, touches everybody, owned by nobody. You know, let's peel that back just, just a little bit more. You know, contracts are strategic business assets. You know, they, they serve multiple interests, they serve multiple purposes. If you just think through the stakeholders in the organization who touch contracts, procurement, executive sales, legal, sourcing it, compliance, supply chain operations. And what you'll find is oftentimes those groups have different priorities, they have different needs. You know, some view contracts. A sales organization may view contracts as a tool for generating revenue. Legal will view contracts as a tool for risk prevention and ensuring that they're not signing the organization up to anything untoward and that they are in compliance with regulatory issues and guidance. You know, procurement, again, something else. It. Something else, compliance, something else. So I think there needs to be an information request, there needs to be workshops, there needs to be fact finding about the contracting process, how contracts touch different parts of the organization, how they are requested, how they are created, and how they flow through the contracting lifecycle. I think once you have that information, you can start ascribing some cost to different activities and then there are some of the more readily available data points to pick up. You know, how many templates do we have? You know, how many different people in legal are touching contracts, how much time are they spending per day? So there's an information gathering. Once you've got that, then it is a question of making some assumptions backed up by industry available data around how much time you may be able to save from the contracting process through more improved governance, better policies, and of course, automation as well. I would also say, Mary, that in addition to the benefits of automation, there are benefits from simplifying the entire process, simplifying the language in your contract templates, removing some of the legalese, making the contracts themselves easier for the business to handle, rather than say the legal department and highly paid lawyers or highly paid contract management professionals to handle. Can you drive some of that down to the business to handle all of that? You can help paint a picture of the potential roi. And then the final piece of that puzzle is, of course, in theory, the biggest bang for the buck is is the savings achievable from a more effective contracting process, actually post signature once the contract is executed, ensuring that the organization is getting what it's contracted for Discounts, most favored nation volume discounts and the like, all of that can drive tremendous value to the organization through transformation of the contracting function.

Absolutely. So that's fantastic. That probably is the number one question I hear about how to get started. The other question I'd love your perspective on is, Mary, I get why we need this. Trust me, everyone in legal wants this. But it's owned by nobody. As you say, we've got a thousand stakeholders and nobody owns this. So how do I even embark on such a project at my company when I don't know who the decision makers are? How do you sort of advise people to get started. Started on that conversation?

It's a tremendous organization and it's like, sorry, it's a tremendous question and it really does differ from organization to organization. You know, I've dealt with clients where legal owned clm. I've dealt with clients where procurement owns clm, I've dealt with clients where legal own these types of contracts and everything beneath a certain value is driven down to procurement or driven down to the business. And there are clients where the personnel and the activities per se involved in the contracting function may be owned in legal and procurement, but the technology that underpins it is owned by it. Any and all of those scenarios you know, I've encountered, and I have no doubt you've encountered it as well, I do think that you need an executive champion. Now that executive champion, it could be the clo, it could be the cpo, it could be the cto, but you need executive buy in. Certainly if this is going to be an enterprise wide initiative, you know, on the other hand, there are engagements with we have them, you have them, where the solution that we are bringing to the table is specifically focused on the legal department or the procurement function or the sales function. In those situations it might be an easier conversation. There is a key executive who you need buy in. When it is cross functional, then you do need more of a collective, you need more of consensus, but you certainly need that executive buy in at the highest levels of the organization. And in every single engagement that I have seen success in. There is an information request, there is a business requirements gathering, there is a business requirements document, there is a coming to mind, there is a meeting of minds across those different functions. What is important for for you? Procurement. What is important for you? Sales. Now the difficult thing is it's easy to then boil the ocean. If you go around every group asking them what's important for you, you come back with war and peace from a functionality, from a metadata Tagging and searchability perspective. So there needs to be a very discriminatory lens through which you look at all of those requirements gathered and look at what is truly must have versus nice to have versus this is something Bill in it thought, saw this on a webinar once and thought that would be a great idea. So I do think you need that consensus, you need that executive buy and you need somebody who will ultimately sign off. But then you need a really discriminatory lens through which you look at all of those requirements have been gathered.

Let's dig into this a little because I think this is the key to success or failure. Actually there's a lot of keys to success or failure. But one of the things that you definitely want to figure out before you embark on such a project is what I would say is executive buy in. But part of what you said, I might disagree with the fact that you need total alignment. So I think those are two separate things.

Yeah, agree. Yeah, right.

You need, you need the stakeholders to agree that there is an opportunity to do things better than we are currently doing and that they're open minded enough to explore the opportunity to leverage a tool or to change their process or do something different. What that ends up ultimately being hopefully is an open minded point of view where if you start to go around as you said, and get everyone's business requirements and put that into a big list, you, you, like you said, you're going to get this huge bloat of a project that you know, sales says I absolutely will not talk about anything unless it does X, Y and Z. And procurement says here's my X, Y and Z that I. These are non starters, you know, and the likelihood of you pleasing everyone is little to none. Right?

Correct, correct.

And so yeah, a lot of the approach that I've seen work is to find a group that's willing to experiment, have success with them and to sort of expand from there. What are your thoughts on that, on the term? I guess CLM readiness, you know, how much work needs to go into it up front because I'll just put it out there. I know that a lot of folks that I talk to get a little bit frustrated by consultants that come in and say we've got to do a 14 point readiness assessment that's going to take one year before you can even start thinking about technology and that's going to be all this money and they're ready to just get started. You know, there's tension on both sides because I agree you've got to do some work in house before you're ready to buy technology. But at the same time, what is too much?

So it's a great question. I don't profess having the perfect answer. Let me make a couple of comments. My earlier comments about consensus you could predicate that on an enterprise transformation. So if the organization is committed to procuring CLM technology for the entire enterprise, end to end life cycle global deployment, then you will have multiple functions, multiple stakeholders. And while you don't need to be aligned on everything, you don't need every function to agree. You better make certain when it comes to the functionality that the tool is professing capability to be able to perform and the cost and duration of the professional services implementation that you are prescriptive in what you are saying you can do. Otherwise you will end up with an unsatisfied client. So I prefaced my comments earlier around that context. In terms of readiness, I agree with you that it can be incredibly frustrating for any client if you turn around to them and you advocate for a multi million dollar multi year readiness assessment before you can do anything. I do not think that is necessary. Just to be crystal clear, is it however important to understand where contracts reside in the organization? Is it important to have a handle on how many templates are in existence? Is it important to understand how heavily negotiated your organization's contracts are? Is it important to understand the percentage of time you're dealing with your paper or third party paper? And more importantly than anything else, before you start contemplating even a narrow implementation, do you need to understand how contracts flow through the organization? Unquestionably yes. That does not need to be a year long, multi year, multimillion dollar readiness assessment. Do I advocate for some form of readiness assessment prior to pulling the trigger on a technology implementation? And I'll make one other comment. Any professional services organization that quotes a fee for a CLM or frankly any system implementation, without having some of the basic building blocks of information that you would uncover in a simple readiness assessment is really putting their finger in the air. Yeah, they may well be basing it on prior engagements that they've delivered. They may have a reasonable understanding based on prior engagements. But unless you do get some basic information actually quoting for an implementation, how many integrations, what systems are you going to be integrating with? You do need some of that basic information to be able to provide your client with an accurate estimate as to the cost of the implementation.

I agree completely. So the way that I would sort of define readiness is executive buy in and understanding of the current State and sort of an understanding, at least directionally, of where you want to go with this. So that's fantastic. I think I just learned a lot and you covered a great overview of kind of how to get started. Then let's say when you are ready to jump in, what are some of the things that you tell folks to look for when they're evaluating tools and technology? Because there's a lot out there.

There is a lot out there. There's also a lot of resources out there for organizations to benefit from. You have industry reports, whether it is the gardeners, the foresters of this world. You know, you could look at the various case studies that exist in the marketplace. What I would suggest is, you know, speaking to other similarly situated organizations, you know, availing themselves of message boards and stories from peers in similarly situated organizations and industries. You know, you go on the clock message board, you know, every week or so, and there's always, you know, an organization talking about their experiences with this tool or that tool. But there is data out there. You know, find out what other organizations have done. You know, I don't think you should necessarily boil the ocean. You know, I also think, you know, again, I, I do think we've reached a point in the industry where the technology companies offering CLM services, CLM technology, CLM functionality, have reached a level of maturity that we can be incredibly honest. They're not all created equal.

Mm.

You know, there are, whether it's 7, 10, whatever the number is, there are a number of leading CLM technologies in the marketplace and everybody could regale those companies to one another. You look at the reports, they're out there for everybody to see. That does not mean. Mary, they are all the best at everything. Agree. There may be some tools that are more focused on attacking the legal department. There may be more to.

They don't all do it. They don't all do everything.

Sure, there may be some tools that are laser focused on supporting the legal department. There may be some tools that are laser focused on supporting procurement. There'll be tools that have invested incredibly heavily in post signature obligation management. There'll be other tools that have an incredible user interface and intake and triage functionality. I think really understanding how to dig behind the curtain with each of the leading CLM technologies that are out there understanding what is the best fit for your use case. And it may well be. It may well be that for your organization, what you actually need, you already have. It's plausible that you could have a series of technologies and you need a point solution that is aimed at one particular pillar of the end to end contracting life cycle, whether it is redlining, negotiation, AI driven technology. So I think use the resources that are out there, speak to experts, speak to your peers and understand what your key use cases are and then tailor your, tailor your rfp, tailor your proof of concept demo according to your specific use cases.

Yeah, I agree. And you said the most important thing to me, which is the community and talking to others who are in the same situation and you know, something that's successful for somebody else may not be successful for you. So really ask the questions about how they're using it, how are they set up internally, what kind of support do they need, you know, what kind of external resources do they have tending to it, etc. So there's a lot of good insights that I think you can get from talking to others that especially if you're new and this is your first time doing it, you don't necessarily think to ask. So talking to others will sort of surface some of the things that you should be looking for, be aware of.

I agree. What I would say as well is that in my experience to date, very rarely has a horror story from the world of CLM been predicated on the lack of or poor performance of a given functionality. Most of the mistakes, most of the bad experiences, it's a change management, it's a user adoption, it is an over promise under delivering perhaps in the sales process rather than the core functionality of a given platform not working. So I think you need to be incredibly diligent when it comes to the sales process, understanding what it is you are being promised and digging in to issues like change management, like user adoption, like the time and effort. Once you've gone live, what happens then?

Right?

Right. What happens once you flick that switch and you've gone live? What level of support is still going to be available? What level of support do you need? What level of going back to what we said at the beginning rather than the titles of individuals? Mary, what skill sets do we need internally, externally, through our professional services provider, through, through our software provider to ensure that we get user adoption, global rollout and that we actually see the ROI on this investment that we made the business case to our executive before plunging in the pool?

The only thing that I would say is that I don't think it's always the customer or the client's team that is the problem, like they weren't ready or their change management wasn't good enough. I do think that there's a responsibility and an onus that sits upon the system and the software company as well. I mean it's part of reason I, I joined Ironclad. You can't expect just because the functionality is there, if the user experience is not great, you're not going to have adoption. And a lot of these systems fail like you said, not because of a feature but really because of adoption and people not using it or not wanting to use it. And so that piece, you know, I do think there is responsibility that the software companies should have on you know, some of the adoption is on you to make it easy, to make your walkup usable, to make it so that training isn't difficult and you don't have to have 50 clicks to figure it out. Right.

And oh, couldn't agree more.

See it and you know you want to use it versus let me work on a change management program to beat people over the head to tell them why they have to go through this terrible process.

Sorry. Just to be crystal clear, 1000% agreement that user adoption, that change management, that training that is on the shoulders of all three parties at the table.

Exactly.

The technology, the in house and the professional services partner. Unquestionably.

Yeah. Great. And then just a final kind of question to wrap it up. I'm curious and you can tell me if you don't have a perspective on this, what is your view on what's happening around the world and globally compared to, you know, I really see spend a lot of time with the US market. I was just in London so I heard a lot about what's happening in emea. But what are you seeing on, you know, some of the trends on this space in what's happening around the world?

I could probably just say esg. Esg ESG as being the hottest button issue in town. And I think that that permeates through everything to do with an organization's supply chain and how one contracts and how one audits our organization's supply chain. But there are, you know, there are other issues at play of course, data privacy being a key issue today. And I think those two issues alone, Mary, really do permeate through an organization's commercial contracting function. You know, how is an organization vetting its third party suppliers? What terms exist in its contracts? How can AI, how can CLM technology help mine that information? Audit that information, you know, ensuring that an organization's customers ensuring that an organization's suppliers are meeting the ESG standards and guidance of the particular client organization. That is probably the hottest trend that we're seeing right now. I don't profess that all of the professional services organizations have solved that conundrum yet, but it's certainly something that we're working hand in hand with our clients on today. Another key trend, this is not exclusive to the U.S. or the rest of the world. I do think organizations are increasingly starting to view their contracts as strategic business assets. I do think that that is a trend that, quite rightly, organizations are viewing these. They're not documents.

Yes, that's right.

I think thinking of a contract as a document is a legacy antiquated perspective that we have going back to law school. It is not. It's just frequently been memorialized in a document historically. It is a strategic business asset. I go back to my earlier comments. It's a framework for revenue generation. It's a tool for risk management. It's a compliance tool. It is a procurement framework. And I think organizations are starting to accept that, to embrace that and seeing what data they can mine from their contracts through that lens to enable the business to move better, faster, more strategically.

That's fantastic. Mark, that's a great note to end on. I feel like I learned so much from this conversation and just want to say thank you for being here and till next time, look forward to it.

I'll wear my pearls next time. Mary.

Yes, I insist. You should.

Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. Take care.

Bye.