Implementing Contract Playbooks and Keeping Them Updated

Contract negotiation playbooks are a great idea in theory.

A playbook can help legal teams redline and negotiate contracts more efficiently by following a standardized roadmap. You can develop playbooks for different types of contracts, ensuring that everyone involved in redlining is working from the same baseline reference.

Of course, using playbooks in practice is a different matter entirely.

We all aim to get everyone on the same page and use the right playbook during contract negotiations. However, asking all contract stakeholders to put pen to paper and apply data presents its own challenges. If a playbook isn’t accurate or easy to use, there’s a good chance that it gets tossed aside or forgotten altogether.

This is where legal engineering comes into play.

How Legal Engineers Develop Useful Playbooks

Legal engineers are brought into organizations to apply a scientific approach to solving legal challenges. They straddle the line between the law and technological design. At their core, a legal engineer’s job is to design systems within an organization to help the law work better.

One of the things legal engineers can do is develop playbooks for legal teams. In the contract world, particularly when it comes to drafting and editing playbooks, legal engineers aren’t just a “nice-to-have” role–they’re critical members of the legal team, and more often than not, you likely have someone on your team today that holds this de-facto role.

Here are some things legal engineers can do involving playbooks.

1. Develop a baseline of a company’s negotiations and positions

Legal engineers can study contract markups and policies thoroughly to determine the company’s baseline for negotiations and positions. They can do this using Excel or another database product. This should be done during or soon after onboarding to optimize a client’s success.

2. Figure out where time is being spent

Legal engineers can drill down the data to determine where, exactly, time is being spent and determine what time is being wasted. They can do this first by interviewing contract professionals to get a better idea of how they spend their time.

Legal engineers can use specialized contract review tools to reveal vital information about even more detailed data, such as how much time is spent on specific clauses or other parts of the contract.

3. Focus on user experience (UX)

A playbook is only helpful if it’s easy to understand and implement. So, for example, a legal engineer can use good UX in the playbook to ensure that it’s easy for both business and legal users to step in and use.

Building an effective playbook is often about knowing your audience, which means playbooks may look different from one customer to the next.

Bonus: Knowing how to write keyword searches and train AI systems

It’s an added bonus for your legal engineer to understand the key terms and connectors that form the basis for triggers and actions within a playbook. This will require the legal engineer to take a deep dive into your company to understand its values. It will also require them to have an understanding of legal research.

A Peek Into How DocJuris Uses Legal Engineers

Of course, any existing person on a team can take over the above responsibilities for drafting and implementing a playbook. However, a legal engineer is the most suitable person to put in charge of playbooks because they are specifically responsible for merging processes with the law.

While they do not practice law themselves, legal engineers work alongside legal service providers and lawyers to find ways to improve how the law works. They are particularly adept at combining the law with emerging technology. That’s why there has been a growing need for full-time legal engineering at legal tech companies, large companies, and law firms.

The most critical time to deploy a legal engineer is during customer onboarding to ensure customer success. Here at DocJuris, we deploy legal engineers during the onboarding process to ensure a smooth transition of company policies and procedures into the setup of the DocJuris playbook engine. In addition, our legal engineers leverage low-code automation from DocJuris to move processes forward for customers.

It’s not enough to simply know how to set up a playbook. Legal engineers need to be well-versed in your organization’s values along with those of your customers so they can most effectively develop and implement playbooks that work for both parties.

Ready to Optimize Your Contract Review? Check Out DocJuris

Whether you already have a team of legal engineers or are just starting to think about forming one, DocJuris can help. Check out our existing playbooks, which can be customized for your organization and used to streamline the contract review and negotiation process.

If you’d like to learn more about how DocJuris software works to determine if it can benefit your organization, we’d love to chat! Get in touch with us to get started.

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