ClauseMatch CEO Evgeny Likhoded remembers what it used to be like to negotiate contracts. As a former employee of Morgan Stanley, and before that Gazprom, he was on teams that would negotiate contracts and agreements around financial products and the trading of physical commodities.
While technology has evolved in many parts of the enterprise, Likhoded says that financial, legal, risk-related and other compliance-heavy organizations would still overwhelmingly rely on Microsoft Word for creating and editing documents, and email for distributing those documents to everyone who would need to make changes or give approval.
“In large institutions, and the way people work in legal departments… whenever there is a document involved… several stakeholders comment, add changes, or provide approvals on that document. You would send that to 10 or 20 parties, get 20 documents back, then get 10 different copies of that document you would then have to put that back together,” Likhoded told me.
The problem got more complex the more parties were involved… for…