October 28, 2022

 John Croft

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It was so good to be back at Legal Geek! I remember the first-ever Legal Geek was a bit of a shock to the legal community because people were not wearing suits, ties, and black shoes! This was truly startling to the corporate legal community back in 2016 (Chris Fowler in a t-shirt and trainers?! How can this be?!). Since then, during the Covid-era, we have all had to take our armour off, both figuratively and actually.

The idea of ‘the customer’ or ‘the lawyer’ being this all-powerful person in a dark suit, formally shaking hands in a conference room was suddenly replaced by that same human being talking to you from their kitchen table, with their dog or children in the background, wearing… yes, a t-shirt and trainers. And, guess what? They were just as good at their job!

So I was pleased to realise that Legal Geek this year no longer stood out from the crowd, sartorially. And the wider win is that I see people are less keen to put their armour back on and are starting to treat each other as human beings, rather than as ‘customers’ or ‘lawyers’. More people actually hugging each other rather than shaking hands, because of what we have all been through together. I hope that this is some good that can come from the last two years.

During the conference, I was joined on stage by Clifford Chance’s Senior Legal Technology Advisor, Carissa Schiller to talk about how Clifford Chance has used our Analyse Documents software to review vast quantities of contracts in their LIBOR projects.

“When we started working with Elevate, there were two main things that we did with their Analyse Documents product. The first was to cluster the documents together into virtual stacks, not just financial products, but also the actual templates that they were based on so that we could be sure that the piles are very similar to one another and we could treat them in the same way.”  – Carissa Shiller, Clifford Chance. 

She told us that one of the biggest surprises their clients had was when she was able to show them graphical images of all their contracts in clusters. This really helped bring to life what they were doing here and how much work was involved!

“Using the Elevate tool to cluster our clients’ documents on a screen in a custom map and showing them the different piles of documents they had and how we would deal with them was really helpful.” – Carissa Shiller, Clifford Chance.

If you were unable to attend Legal Geek this year or missed Carissa and mine’s session, you can watch the on-demand recording, here.