As general counsel at Amelia (IPsoft), Jerry Levine successfully implemented the contract lifecycle platform ContractPodAi as part of efforts to enhance his legal team’s efficiency and boost compliance.

This first-hand experience gave him the comfort level and excitement to join ContractPodAi as its chief evangelist and general counsel in early 2021.

Since taking the position, Levine has worked to promote the company’s technology offerings and served as an internal voice of the client to support product development.

He says his dual role has also provided him an opportunity to broadly emphasize the importance of technology in the legal world.

“I want the legal profession and our allied professionals to become more interested and more knowledgeable about what they can do through the use of technology and how it can improve how we practice,” Levine told Legal Dive.

Interacting with customers

Levine said one of the most enjoyable parts of his job is interacting with ContractPodAi customers and potential new ones.

He gets to engage in this way in part through manning booths in conference exhibit halls, such as the one at the Association of Corporate Counsel’s 2022 annual meeting in Las Vegas.

Levine said he will often ask customers what is working and what is not with ContractPodAi.

“If there's something you don't like, I want to know because ultimately if you're not telling us, we can't improve,” he said. “And if there's something you do like, I want to know as well, because I want to make sure we continue to continuously improve that.”

Levine’s experience as a GC who uses ContractPodAi frequently comes in handy when discussing the contract lifecycle management (CLM) system with members of the legal community, as many ask him how involved lawyers are in developing the platform

Levine responds that he and his legal team consistently field product and workflow questions from internal colleagues and share their perspective as lawyers that use the system.

"I'm not just the GC,” Levine said he will tell people. “I'm also a customer.”  

Demonstrating technology’s value

Another part of Levine’s job is tracking trends in the legal and technology spaces, and then sharing those insights with his ContractPodAi colleagues.

One shift he has noticed in recent years is that while in-house legal teams continue to turn to technology for efficiency gains, they also want to be more effective in their work.

For some companies, that could mean getting more contracts on their own paper, while others desire deeper insights regarding their agreements.

“From a product standpoint, I’m hearing more questions about, ‘How can you help me deliver value to my company?’” Levine said.

One key way ContractPodAi provides value beyond efficiency, Levine said, is its Contract Risk & Compliance solution. 

The AI-powered platform performs risk determinations about agreements by reviewing whether the documents contain key legal obligations based on the contract type. 

Building new connections

Levine is also working to help ContractPodAi expand its offerings beyond contract lifecycle management to develop what it calls “One Legal Platform.”

The company’s work in this regard includes building internal applications for legal intake, corporate governance and IP management. The legal intake application was publicly released in September. 

Additionally, ContractPodAi allows customers to build their own functional applications without writing a line of code through its Legal Application Launcher.

“We are aggressively expanding what we're offering within the platform because what we're seeing is CLM is not the end-all of an in-house legal department,” Levine said.

As part of its expansion efforts, ContractPodAi is working to build connections with other companies. For example, the company announced a partnership with Cloud Business earlier this year.

Levine said there are vendors doing great work in areas where ContractPodAi is not active, so the tech business hopes to provide additional connections to outside apps in its platform and looks forward to announcing more partnerships next year. 

“There is so much potential out there to make this profession much better, but the only way we can do it is by working together,” Levine said.