SpeedLegal today announced that Factiva is rolling out SmartPrecedent, SpeedLegal's enterprise document automation solution.
Factiva's Legal Department will use the system to deliver tailored first drafts of sales contracts to its global sales team and then on to Factiva's customers.
"When it's time to close a deal, you want the contract yesterday, not in two weeks. We built this system to deliver tailored contracts very quickly, without the risks of last minute cut and paste," said Jamie Wodetzki, SpeedLegal CEO.
The XML-based system lets business users generate their own draft contracts without having to wait in line for legal sign-off. From anywhere in the world, a sales executive can simply answer some questions -- Where are you? Which products are being sold? What pricing was agreed? -- and the system will immediately deliver a draft contract with all the right clauses for the deal.
"Business users are happy because they can quickly create contracts for a wide range of deals. The lawyers are happy, because they have more time to focus on negotiating the customer's response to the automated draft, the big deals, contract compliance and other strategic issues. It's a clear win-win," said Mr. Wodetzki.
"The SpeedLegal solution helps corporate legal departments like ours to manage an increasing workload without excessive legal costs. Our sales force simply answers a few questions that our Legal team has drafted, and based on their responses the SpeedLegal software selects the appropriate clauses for the first draft of the contract," said Claude Green, deputy CEO, Factiva.
"I estimate that our salespeople will be able to get a first draft to the customer within a half-hour after agreeing terms, no matter where in the world they are located, no matter whether the lawyer normally assigned to them happens to be otherwise engaged. This makes it easier for customers to work with Factiva, while improving risk management and internal workflow at the same time," added Mr. Green.
Factiva selected the SpeedLegal solution because it supported global delivery via a standard web browser and offered the flexibility of delivering documents in different formats. The XML foundation of the SpeedLegal system allows users both to edit contracts in Microsoft Word and to generate contracts as a read-only PDF. The SpeedLegal system will also allow Factiva to share contract data with other enterprise systems, such as customer relationship management and billing.