In this edition of the LegalTech Soapbox series, we are highlighting Catylex, a contract analysis tool. Jamie Wodetzki, Chief Product Officer as well as being a legal tech veteran and entrepreneur with a passion for solving the complexity of contract analysis, tells us what Catylex is and how it can help your legal department. Let’s get into it!
1. Hi Jamie, tell us the story behind Catylex.
A derivatives lawyer, a hedge fund guy, and a legal-tech veteran walk into a bar… Why has nobody built a machine to translate contracts into useful data? This, by and large, is the story behind Catylex. David Rosen and Andrew Downes co-founded the company because they knew they had the right mix of legal, business, and technical skills necessary to crack this problem. Jamie Wodetzki (me) joined them because, after 20 years in the business, contract AI is the most valuable, disruptive, and (previously) unsolved piece of the CLM puzzle.
2. What are the services/products that Catylex provides?
Our mission is to transform the world’s contracts into useful data. To this end, we provide a cloud-based Contract Analytics product, powered by AI, that works out-of-the-box. Our customers simply load contracts into Catylex, for instant analysis using many thousands of legal, business and language concepts. Individual users have a consistent way to view contract summaries, portfolio-wide risks, and time-sensitive operational provisions, while structured data is available to feed other enterprise systems, like CLM, procurement and so on.
3. How does it help optimise the daily operations of a legal team?
Our value proposition to the legal team is simple: just back up the truck, and let our machine do all the hard work. Legal does not enjoy reading every page of every contract. When there’s an urgent “fire drill” enquiry from the business, legal simply doesn’t have time to read thousands of documents. At the same time, machines that only work after the legal team spends weeks or months “training” them are not going to cut it. Legal teams don’t have weeks of spare time. We get it. With Catylex, you get immediate results without any upfront work. You get data and insights without reading thousands of pages, and the business gets data and answers without breaking the bank.
4. What do you believe will be the most significant change in how legal teams use technology in the next 10 years?
We think the big change in legal tech will be less about the tech, and more about the data. With functional contract AI, for example, legal teams will have access to good quality data (without lots of hard work). With this new data, legal will be able to automate more, understand more, and demonstrate value in clear, measurable terms. Just as data and tech turned the advertising business on its head, data and tech will transform large chunks of legal for the better. We’ve elaborated on this idea here.
KorumLegal is a boutique legal consultancy committed to providing value innovation in legal service delivery. The legal services industry is continuing to change with ‘NewLaw’ – and clients are seeking more innovative and cost-effective solutions without compromise on experience and quality.
