Like many industries, the legal field has seen drastic change in recent years. The role of in-house teams particularly are experiencing an overwhelming transformation as pressures jump-started by the pandemic led many legal teams to pursue increased process automation, despite the industry’s long- standing resistance to change in this area. Rapid adoption of digital services and tools across the board is leading to basic task automation, providing an opportunity for teams to focus more on pressing business needs. In fact, it’s estimated that legal departments will automate over 50% of legal work for key business transactions by 2024.

No longer bogged down by administrative tasks, legal teams are free to take on more strategic roles within an enterprise. With greater focus on business intelligence, artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics, these teams are able to advise executives to make better decisions and help grow the business most effectively. With this shift, however, comes new challenges. Legal practitioners have transitioned from risk managers to top-line enablers and drivers of efficiency, resulting in more work with fewer resources for more than 90% of legal teams. Shifting a company’s external spend in-house can further magnify the resource crunch, and leaders are struggling to manage their teams’ increasing and changing workload. Teams today navigate many fragmented, single-use products on top of traditional spreadsheets and email. These siloed technology stacks limit legal departments’ ability to fully understand, manage and prioritize workstreams, making it difficult for leaders to quantify the work of their legal teams to other executives or advocate for solutions for their teams’.

At Myriad, we’re dedicated to accelerating disruptive change, whether that’s through software, AI or other deeptech avenues. We look for intelligent tools that merge the physical and digital workplaces and support solutions that better enable key business functions so companies can focus on their most important tasks. This is why the legal technology space is so enticing to us — and why we think LinkSquares, provider of an AI-powered contract lifecycle management and analysis tool, is poised to come out on top.

Automating Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM)

One of the most common pain points, and perhaps the area in most need of automation, is contract management. For too long, the process has been manual and unnecessarily time-consuming for all parties involved. For example, deals can stall due to the back-and-forth nature of contract negotiation or onboarding new team members can potentially be delayed because of the headache of signing a physical contract. Thankfully, legal departments’ adoption of a new breed of CLM platforms is at an all-time high. This technology has come a long way, in part due to solutions provided by companies like LinkSquares that deliver on the promise of automating tedious tasks.

LinkSquares’ end-to-end platform leverages the power of AI to automate contract management and provide uniquely intelligent term analysis with never-before-seen efficiency and accuracy. With the ability to analyze and compare thousands of contracts and embedded information, LinkSquares’ solutions can save countless hours of time in contract preparation and reporting. LinkSquares is unique because it uses specialized AI and machine learning (ML) to provide insights, speed and better collaboration, making every aspect of contract management faster and more efficient. Technology-forward legal departments are starting to tap into their full potential by building out defined legal operations driven by data. These critical processes enabled by LinkSquares’ end-to-end legal operating system stack include understanding key metrics the team can leverage, from financial management to technical expertise, to better assist their colleagues throughout the business.

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Why Myriad Invested (Twice!) in LinkSquares

In line with our focus on defining the future of business solutions, Myriad recently became a two-time investor in LinkSquares, participating in the company’s Series B and C financings. LinkSquares is helping transform an industry that has a horizontal problem. With this latest financing, LinkSquares is poised to expand its product offerings, which will provide customers with even more ROI on LinkSquares’ solutions. The company has iterated on and enhanced its product line several times throughout its lifecycle, continuously building tools to help automate the next step in the legal administration process.

First, LinkSquares entered the market with Analyze, which automatically imports completed contracts for secure storage, eliminating the burden of transferring documents manually, and integrates with the most popular online document storage system and e-signature tools. The company then launched Finalize, enabling customers to easily draft agreements from pre- approved templates, tailored drafting workflows and a centralized Clause Library with vetted standard clauses. Finalize also features a real-time status tracker for every contract, a detailed history of every step undertaken for each contract and a customized Dashboard of actionable reports. Most recently, LinkSquares debuted Sign, an e-signature tool built right into the existing product suite for seamless end-to-end contract management. Sign enables general counsels and legal teams to create, sign and manage contracts all in one spot, eliminating the hassle and risk of jumping between different systems. This latest advancement shows LinkSquares’ imminent potential to scale to full-service legal operating system.

What’s Next

As demonstrated by our ongoing collaboration with LinkSquares, Myriad is committed to supporting our portfolio companies through all stages of their funding lifecycle, from early-stage through high growth stage. When it comes to digitization, CLM and legal operating system innovation, we believe people should work not only where they want (like the cloud), but also how they want (e.g., natively in Word). People deserve the flexibility and native work ability afforded to them by LinkSquares’ solutions. We are proud to back one of the legal operating system industry’s foremost innovators and are confident LinkSquares will continue to make the lives of legal teams everywhere easier and more efficient.