We're diving in again to the ever-expanding contract management space this week, looking at a piece of software that straddles the murky waters between procuretech and legaltech.

Redlining and amending contracts is a boring and tedious process to most procurement professionals, but a necessary evil that comes with the territory for commercial contract negotiations post-sourcing and award.

My guest this week to break down how technology can get us to our destination faster is Dan Broderick, CEO and Co-Founder of Washington DC-based legaltech start-up BlackBoiler.
Utilising AI to speed up and simplify your contract clause redlining process
I start off by asking Dan about who he typically sees as being the customer's job title in the roles that they sell to, with this being a more legal-focused solution, and to what extent Procurement features in this. We then move on to some of the key features that BlackBoiler offers to set the scene of what it can actually do to aid us as procurement professionals to speed up an otherwise cumbersome and tedious task.
What is Black Boiler's sweet spot?
There's a lot of contract management software now on the market and it's becoming an increasingly crowded space.

Dan sees BlackBoiler's sweet spot as being a contract negotiation automation software that helps customer and supplier get to the point of a mutually acceptable negotiated position on contracts, through the use of automation on changes to standard contract copy.

This can be applied on both native contracts and third party documents.

Both Legal and Procurement alike are seen to Dan as being potential "buyers" in this space. Also Sales to some extent are involved in the conversation because they're often struggling to conclude contracts fast enough to satisfy customer expectations.
What inspired Dan to found BlackBoiler?
As a lawyer, he found that he was often tasked with negotiating contracts that were very similar, and was responding to very similar counter-party positions and redline in these documents.

After getting the feeling that his work felt more than a touch robotic, it made him realise that a significant part of his job could potentially be automated to free up time and to speed up the process.
Are the must-have features different when viewed from a sales, procurement or legal perspective?
YES!

Dan explains that the key challenges tend to be:

Self-empowering Sales to avoid them having to go to legal and potentially lose a sale due to the bottleneck.
Enabling Legal do their work faster, and looking at how can they make their work less repetitive.
Procurement is working with a business need for them to purchase something. As the gatekeeper, speeding up the end-to-end Source-to-Contract process is key.

How to bridge the gap between AI, and the professional expertise of the lawyer?
Dan explains that BlackBoiler (or indeed any AI-powered solution for that matter) is not designed to work on its own. The objective is to speed up the process and enable arrival at the destination faster, not to eliminate Legal from the process completely.

Helping the legal counsel to become more efficient and free up their resources to work more strategically is the overarching objective. By enabling them to not be actively involved in fairly routine higher volume, lower risk agreements will add value to both Procurement and Legal alike.

Dan likens this to using a junior counsel rather than a highly experienced legal professional for more routine agreements.
What about greenfield or decentralised procurement with no standard contract templates?
This is an area where it's difficult to apply the typical solution that BlackBoiler would go in and solve. Dan mentions that they're currently working on building something that will enable new or less structured procurement teams to go in and generate some...