Automating Legal Contracts for MSPs (EP 843)

Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, recording live at PAX 8 Beyond in Denver, Colorado. We are starting to get a little busy here, getting into day one, finished the opening sessions and you can hear the rustling of people walking by people trying to get over here into the vendor hall and, I don't know, grab some swag, which I did last night, grabbed a lot of swag. And my next guest, we're going to talk about that, Kim Simmonds  from Cloud Contract 365 is in the house.

Kim, how are you? Hi, Marv. I'm well, thanks. How are you? I am good.

So I mentioned swag. I was going to say. And we'll get that out of the way for us because the swag that I got from you guys was a Willy Wonka chocolate bar.

Did you get the golden ticket? Did you find the golden ticket inside? I did not open it up, no. You need to taste that chocolate, Marv, it's amazing. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. So we'll talk about that a little bit later.

But let's get into Cloud Contracts 365 because this is the first time that many of us have heard of you. And there's probably some good reasons for that. And I'll start with a question that comes from some olden times where people be like, you're not from around here, are you? Does my accent give it away? It's funny because actually, so I was a New York attorney to start off with before I became an English attorney.

And I lived in New York for seven years, but for some reason, I never adopted the accent. Okay. So let's get the timeframe in perspective here.

Where were you born? Where was I born? Or when? No, where? Oh, well, actually, I have a very weird sort of background, one of those, one of those. So I'm half Lebanese, half English, so I was actually born in Lebanon during the war. But yeah, my father's English, so we actually got evacuated from the war.

We left Lebanon and moved to England. So that's the whole adoption there. Yeah.

Wow. I'm not going to follow that trail. No, I know.

It's probably best not to, to be honest. Okay. And then how did you end up in New York? Yeah.

So once I finished college over in England, so obviously studied law over there, my father moved to work for an investment bank in New York. And he said, hey, do you want to come with the family? You're 21, you can do whatever you want. And I said, I'm like, why would I even think about, like, not going to New York? Like, this is an amazing opportunity.

So I packed up and followed the family to New York. So that's how it all started. All right.

Well, you didn't follow a boy, so that's a good thing, right? I didn't follow a boy, no. All right. So you, you moved to New York.

Now, obviously, you studied law over there. Yeah. So it wasn't like you just came to New York and hooked up with a firm and got started, right? No.

No. And I studied over in New York. I did a master's out there.

And then I took the New York bar exams, which were very difficult, but luckily passed. Yeah. Fine, first time.

And then I got a job offer working for a big international law firm called Sherman and Sterling, which is a very well-known law firm. It's now called A&O Sherman, working in the M&A group. So it was a very intense time of my life.

Sort of 100-hour weeks was the norm. Late nights. Yeah.

Sleeping under the desk. Yes. Facts, changes, all that sort of stuff.

And so from M&A into the tech space, because I saw in your history that you kind of got into the tech space a little early there. Yeah, I did. With a couple of firms.

Yeah. So how did you make that transition? You've done your research really well, Mark. That's really good to hear.

I try. So, you know, I've always been fascinated by tech. I've always loved it.

And when I got back to England after seven years in New York, I had a company, I was working with a firm, and they were really interested in bringing in the tech side of things, that industry. So I put my hands up and I said, can I please be involved? My very first client that I got on my own was an MSP. Actually, it was a SharePoint business that then went into MSP space.

And I worked with them for pretty much 10 years. I was their legal counsel for 10 years. So I got to know and understand that business, you know, inside and out.

I lifted the hood. I was really lucky that the people I worked with in that MSP sort of gave me the knowledge that I needed as a lawyer to really understand all of the tricky kind of issues in that business. So I could cover that off in the contracts.

So very interesting. So you worked for a couple of different firms, and then you decided to go out on your own. Yes.

2014. Exactly. Let me go ahead and ask the human side of the question.

Why would you want to go out on your own? Because I felt like I could do it better. Of course. Which is a bit of an ego, arrogant answer.

Sounds like a tech statement. Oh, my goodness. I can't even believe I just said that.

But truthfully, I did because I was always passionate about the customer. And I never felt law firms gave transparency or proper advice to clients. It was never, you know, it was almost like lawyers were there to catch as many industries as possible, to do as much work as possible, not to really focus their attention on one specific industry and have deep knowledge, not to tell them, you know, I'm trying to partner with you and do everything that I can to make your business grow.

It was very transactional. You know, come in, pay the money, see you later. Come and call me when you have a problem.

And I really wanted to just cut this and go straight to the heart of customer success and show the world that legal can be a successful route to partnership in these tech spaces. And then the MSP kind of world, it fell into my lap at that point. Did you find, and I don't know how much experience you have, you know, connecting with other technology lawyers, but when I started getting in touch with attorneys, a lot of attorneys didn't understand tech, didn't want to understand tech, and they wanted us to kind of convert our way of thinking to theirs.

Yeah, of course. And you've got to fit and be a real business. We are a real business.

We just have different needs. And I found a lot of technology lawyers weren't really technology lawyers. They just thought it would be a quick money grab.

Yeah, exactly. And the thing is, the problem with that is that you're trying to fit a round peg in a square hole, you know, and you can't do that with law. It's got to be specialized, but you've got to understand your market, how they work.

You can't just try and manipulate them to try and do the things that you know about because it's easier for you. You've got to think like they think. You've got to look at things in their way.

But also, I think there's also a level where you have to help advise them to see other things too. It's not manipulating them to your way of thinking, but it's also expressing your views and your value and the things that you've gleaned as experiences to help establish them more. All right.

So you decided to go on your own, decided to do it better. Did you completely focus on tech space in general or MSPs, or what was the thought? So we started with Microsoft Partners and then MSPs, and that's still the only industries that we serve. Okay.

Yeah. That is it, and we've been doing that for 11 years now. Okay.

Yeah. And then you decided to do yet another thing and do Cloud Contracts 365. Yeah.

Now, of course, we've known there's been a need for that. But I want to hear a little different perspective because when you and I chatted earlier, you're doing things a little differently than the folks here in the U.S. are doing. So tell us about that.

So for me, it's all about, especially when you're creating a tech product, what problem are you solving? It's not about like the glitzy, like I want to just build this for the sake of building it. What problem was it that I was trying to solve? So growing my law firm, what I found was the smaller MSPs, let's say the sub sort of 20 people MSPs, they couldn't afford the legal fees. They couldn't afford to keep coming back to the lawyer every time that they had an issue.

So I love this market, and I wanted to build something that can automate the exact things that they were coming to us for. Right. Without it costing a bomb, to be honest with you.

Okay. So that's how, that's the sort of Cloud Contract 365 birth, if you like. Right.

Was how do I automate low-hanging fruit work, to be honest with you? Because it's template work, it's, you know, first pass reviews on contracts to make sure you've got like legal analysis there. It's contract management. A lot of my clients were coming to me going, could you get this signed for me? Could you store it for me? Can you tell me when the renewals are coming up? Can you give me a summary of the terms of these contracts so I know how to tell my accounts team that we've negotiated a 45-day payment term rather than our standard 30 days? And I said, all of that can be easily automated.

And this is going back three years before like the chat GPT. I was going to say, this sounds like a job for AI. So did you start with AI in mind of trying to automate it or was it scripting? Yeah, I love this question.

So because I'm so passionate about it. I actually did a proof of concept three years ago on an NDA review. So what I did is I thought to myself, can I use AI, so machine learning in its true sense, to review an NDA? A low-hanging fruit piece of documentation, right? No one cares about NDAs, right? Well, they do and they don't.

Most of the world doesn't. Exactly. So I built this proof of concept with some data scientists and it worked amazingly.

So you put an NDA through it, it instantly reviewed it for legal analysis and risk. And it told the reader where the risk resided in the documentation and then how to push back, how to kind of mitigate that. So that worked.

And then I got grant money to do it, to build the product out more from the UK government. And we went on to doing this for MSAs, professional services agreements, SAS agreements, the whole thing. And then I went on to, okay, what else can I provide? It's not just about reviewing.

Right. It's about building. So can I build contracts like a master services agreement that has fit-for-purpose terms like NCE, like GDAP, like CEPOR, DEPOR, TEPOR? All these things are relevant.

You're saying the acronyms very well there. Hopefully people understand what I'm saying here. But this is really important to get right in your contracts.

So can I automate that for them? Can they go on the platform and within a minute create their perfect master services agreement? That was the challenge. Well, that was a problem that set me the challenge to solve it. And I've solved it.

Okay. So I'm going to take a step back because something you said there really, I'm not going to say triggered me, but caught my attention. You're talking about building contracts on the platform.

Yeah. Because as far as I know, and I'll be honest, I don't know all of them, but most of the ones are templated. Yeah.

And you, of course, are adding answers on the fly, but you're not actually building it in the platform. So when you talk about using that AI portion to discover the risk and stuff, is that something that's being done during that build process as well? Or do you build it and then let AI evaluate it and retool it? So when you build it, the back end is all of the templates that you would need. But you're building it through the questions that we set.

So you're customizing it through the questions that we set. So that's how you build it. You don't need to review after because they're pretty watertight contracts.

The reviewer is, think about it like you have a vendor contract and you want to know, let's say CrowdStrike, whoever it could be, you want to know what legal risk is there in this contract that I'm taking on without knowing about it. That's what that reviewer bit does. You put it in and it tells you.

All right. Now on the platform, let's talk about the logistics there. So you're building your contracts.

I'm assuming you're storing the contracts. Yep. I'm assuming there's a multi-tenancy aspect where you can have your clients and all their contracts in one area.

Yeah, it's all stored in one place. Is it a possibility that people can go in and say, okay, I've got another client. It's just like this other client.

Can I duplicate that and then change all the names? Exactly. Once you build your MSA, you can save it as your template forever and you just go and change the customer name and then you send it through the platform to get signed. There's unlimited e-signatures on the platform.

So you can retire Adobe Sign, you can retire any kind of signature repository that you're using and use it time and time again. But the beautiful thing, Mark, is that it also has automatic renewal reminders. And I can't tell you why this is so important because MSPs forget, a lot of my clients forget about the automatic renewals.

So they leave money on the table because it's lost revenue. Why not do the price increase? If you're rolling into an auto-renewal, you can't go and have that conversation until the next renewal. So if you're armed and prepped, you know it's six months, three months, one month on the day that you're going to get that renewal, then you know how to do something about it.

Absolutely nice. All right. What other things are unique to your platform? Because, you know, the question always with new vendors that we meet is, why are you better than everybody else that we've been using? Yeah.

I mean, I think, you know, everyone has different needs. And I think that's really important to categorize. You know, it's great to see more legal innovation for MSPs as well.

I think the reason why this platform might sing to them, to some people more than others, is if they want the exact same experience that they're going to go get from a lawyer, a specialized lawyer who understands MSPs, but they have it through the platform without the need of a lawyer. So they want to go and do it themselves for cheaper cost. Of course.

And that's really kind of what's going to appeal to them. Okay. Now let me ask this question in a way that I'm going to try to ease into it.

So your law firm is based in the UK, right? Yeah. Even though you studied law in New York. Yeah.

Most of the MSPs in the United States or Canada are going to ask the question, is this really going to work for me in, you know, Asheville, North Carolina or Fort Lauderdale, Florida and stuff. So how does that work? So we have agreements for every single state in the United States. So you go and select your jurisdiction when you get on the platform, and it builds it from your jurisdiction.

Okay. Yeah. So let's say Colorado.

You just go select Colorado, and then you select the contract type you want to build, let's say a master service agreement or professional services. You select that, and then you go in and you build the contract that way. Okay.

And how is the platform with keeping up with changes? Like there are certain states that are now trying to put in, you know, legal requirements for MSPs and stuff like that. Yeah. There are, you know, you've got the different frameworks that we're trying to build into our contracts.

So as those frameworks change and stuff, it's a platform. I mean, that's a lot of work to keep up with, right? It's not really. We have lawyers that work with us, so they're always updating the contract templates as and when there's like a legislation change or Microsoft change or anything that sort of affects MSPs.

So there is always that, and we signpost the changes. So we don't just change it on the platform. We tell you when there's a change, and we also hold your hand throughout that change because a lot of times you need to then know, well, what do I need to do for the clients if there's a change? Right.

Do I need to go back in time? Do I need to, you know, give them letters? Well, yeah. Do we have to re-sign? Okay. So there's a lot of hand-holding.

The whole point of this is, you know, like I said, my whole mission, well, I didn't tell you this actually, but I probably should. My mission in life is to democratize legal, to make it accessible to MSPs, right? To allow them to be able, no matter the size of the business, to get good legal contracting processes so that they can gain the valuation in their business, protect their business, but also so that they can meet their insurance requirements as well because a lot of them don't realize they're falling foul of their insurance policies and not going to get insured if someone does sue them. That's my mission, and I'm hoping that this platform enables them to get exactly that on an everyday basis.

It's not a now and then. All right. I'm going to skip my next question and go back to why is that your mission? How did that come about? Because I'm a bit like medicine.

I think that legal has always been seen as something that is very expensive to have, and only the elite can have it. Only those that can afford it should be able to have it, and the MSP community, especially the ones that are sort of 20 people less, you know, they need as much help as anybody else. They need to have access to this stuff so that they can grow their business and become the business that they want to be tomorrow.

You hear Scott today in PAX 8's Beyond Keynote. He's talking about the future being AI, driving that within the MSP community, not just internally and externally, but the most important thing for them is adoption and have these processes properly gearing them up for growth because the next few years is going to be a growth year. It's going to be huge.

Huge. Huge. All right, so now let's talk about the fact that we talked about where you're from and how you're getting started, Cloud Contracts 365.

It's less than two years old? It's less than two years old, yes. So is this considered a debut here in the U.S.? It is a debut, yeah. We launched with PAX 8 on Friday.

We're actually already getting a lot of potential customers. Like Inc. signed on Friday? Like Inc. 

signed on Friday, so it was very, like, short notice with the launch. But you knew you were coming here. Yeah, absolutely.

So that was all. We've been working this relationship for a year, so it's been in the works for a whole year, launching the app with them for the last year. And they're a massive believer in what we're doing, which is brilliant.

So obviously you'll be in the PAX 8 marketplace. We are in the PAX 8 marketplace already, yeah, absolutely. And PAX 8 members get 10% discount, I think, on that marketplace as well.

Okay. Anything else you want to announce while we're here? No, just that it's been an absolute amazing – I just love the American market. They're very open.

They love change. I think they are really thinking ahead about how to grow their business safely and protect their business. I was having a breakfast this morning with some MSPs that were saying how they don't even have contracts.

A lot don't because it costs a lot of money to do that. And if you don't have an attorney that you trust to look over it, or you did mention something where a lot of times we feel like our partners and our attorneys and stuff really don't have our best interest in mind. It's really not a partnership.

Luckily, I found someone that most of the time feels like a partner. Yeah, that's good. But, yeah, I'd like it to be more of a partnership from start to finish.

Yeah, that's so important. And it's very hard to find people who understand this community, this market, and this industry back to front and have their needs in mind first and foremost. And that's what I hope that we're delivering.

Okay. All right. So, Kim Simmonds  with Cloud Contracts 365.

Thank you very much for stopping by. And are you enjoying Colorado? Absolutely loving it. And I haven't suffered from altitude sickness so far, so I'm good.

I'm happy. Well, you haven't been out hiking yet, have you? I did go to the Red Rocks. Oh, okay.

It's not really hiking, but I did go there. The taxi driver said to me, are you feeling okay? And I said, yeah, why? He goes, because most people have altitude sickness. I was like, really? I didn't feel anything.

But it's a touch wood. I'm all okay. Very nice.

Now, this is my own personal question. I don't know why it came up, but are you still spending most of your time in the U.K.? And when people do sign up for here in the U.S., how is that support going to go? Do we have U.S.-based support? Yes. So, there's a button, actually, in the platform that's called Legal Support, and it takes you directly to the U.S. lawyers.

So, you have direct link into people who care about your business. Their mission is customer success. It's really important for me to drive that, and I'm doing that globally.

So, when we go to Australia, when we go to all of the different regions around the world, they will have access to the right lawyers in those regions as well. So, in other words, I probably won't be seeing you again after this trip, right? I'll definitely be coming back to PAX 8 time and time again. Okay.

We'll see you next year, wherever we are. All right. Well, Kim, thank you for stopping by.

Nice to meet you. Good luck with everything and get some better swag. I know.

Thank you. Oh, I have to get better swag. You love that swag.

Wait till you taste it. All right. We'll see.

Taste it and let me know. Better melt in my mouth. Thank you, Moff, so much.

Thank you very much, folks. We'll be back with more from PAX 8 Beyond here in Denver and see you soon. Holla!