At echo.legal, we want to bring legal technology to a wider audience by showing how we work with our clients using document automation to create business results.
We recently worked with international legal practice Osborne Clarke to expand its use of Contract Express in its Corporate and Banking teams. This enabled Osborne Clarke to focus on expanding its use across the wider business.
A law firm leader in legal technology
Osborne Clarke has long been recognised for its investment in legal technology. Since 2017, Contract Express has been firmly embedded in Osborne Clarke’s business and the firm continues to maximise its use of this technology across the organisation. High levels of collaboration between Knowledge, IT and the legal teams have enabled Osborne Clarke to automate well over 100 templates and suites of documents, speeding up the drafting process, whilst embedding technical excellence into its documents from the outset.
Augmenting internal capabilities with echo.legal
Key to Osborne Clarke’s success in rolling out Contract Express has been embedding much of their coding expertise within the Knowledge team itself, complementing the central coding expertise and best practice delivered by IT. Some fee earners have also been involved in the automation process, either coding their precedents directly or ‘soft coding’ by indicating where clauses need to be pulled in. This resourcing model and collaboration between teams has considerably quickened the development time of automated documents.
In 2021, Osborne Clarke faced a large volume of automation projects, with new templates planned for France, Belgium, Germany and the US. The firm needed extra bandwidth to support their internal capabilities.
Having had a positive referral about echo.legal’s automation expertise and quality of work, they asked echo.legal to provide experienced legal document automators who could augment their team and operate independently to drive projects forward whilst not disrupting internal plans.
Project management and coding expertise
echo.legal hit the ground running with a Banking project, automating an assignment of subordinated debt precedent. Since then, the team has worked on several other projects including a leveraged finance facility agreement for their Banking team and a vendor SPA for their Corporate team.
Osborne Clarke commented:
“echo.legal played a strong project management role, setting milestones and ensuring everything stayed on schedule for various projects. They’ve been a pleasure to work with, enabling us to push ahead with automation for other areas of our business. Their coding is also very clear, and we’ve been able to learn from it for other documents.”
Will Sumners from echo.legal said:
“Working as an extension of our client’s team is core to what we do at echo.legal. We invested time up front in getting to know Osborne Clarke’s internal team, styles and processes. Everything has gone smoothly and we have been pleased to play a role in supporting the team in delivering on its roadmap.”
It’s always great to hear of the good relationships with outcomes achieved when partnering with our customers. Here’s to working on more projects in 2023.
If you are a law firm looking for support with your legal technology and document automation projects, from Contract Express to HighQ to Avvoka, Contact Us to see how we are able to partner with you.