AI Contract Analysis in Debt Collection | How Legal Teams Can Eliminate Bottlenecks | Ep. 226

Adam Parks (00:07)

Hello everybody, Adam Parks here with another episode of Receivables Podcast. Today I'm here with my new friend, Eric Nevels with TrueAccord. How you doing today, Eric?

Eric Nevels (00:18)

Very good. Thanks for having me, Adam.

Adam Parks (00:20)

I really do appreciate you coming on. I was lucky enough to be introduced to Eric by Lauren Valenzuela, who's one of my friends and, you know, a powerhouse attorney that's over there with TrueAccord. And what a great introduction it was, because as soon as we started talking, I went, my God, we got to do a podcast together. We are all talking about artificial intelligence across the space. And we've been talking about the use cases that are specific to the debt collection industry.

And those six use cases are well documented. You can find those in my webinars and discussions and other podcasts. But as soon as I got on the phone with Eric and we started having a conversation about artificial intelligence and machine learning, he was looking at it from a very different perspective. And I think there's a lot of use cases that don't necessarily fall into the six use cases for debt collection, including HR and contract management, which is really where we're going to focus our time in our discussion today.

But Eric, for anyone who has not been as lucky as me to get to know you a little bit, can you tell everyone a little bit about yourself and how you got to the seat that you're in today?

Eric Nevels (01:20)

Yeah, of course. So my name is Eric Nevels, Senior Director of Operational Support here at TrueAccord. In my role today, I lead automation, so RPA, smart automation, think agentic AI, process excellence and business process management, risk and control, content and quality assurance. I really have spent the last few years at the intersection of our operations and AI.

really working on how these emerging technologies can reshape everything from back office automations to front office automations all the way to contract lifecycle management, which we're talking about today. You know, how I got here in my seat, my background is actually in legal operations. That's how I came to TrueAccord in December of 2019. So legal operations is maybe a somewhat emerging field just in all industries.

But really like to boil it down, it's how do you kind of turn a law department, a legal department within a company or just a law firm into a business? You know, working with technologies that exist, getting away from just, you know, pen and paper that all school attorneys love to just digital transformations, right? Using the edit features on Word. I know these are small things, but like for attorneys,

Adam Parks (02:20)

Sure.

Yes.

Eric Nevels (02:39)

a future generation or past generations like this was a kind of a transition for them, right? And then, you know, helping law firms and legal departments just run a P&L. How do you start turning what is typically seen as a cost center, a legal department, to a more strategic partner to drive business outcomes? And so that's where a lot of my work previous to True Cord had been. I had a great opportunity to...

work under Kelly Nepper Stevens at TrueAccord and Tim Collins when he was at TrueAccord. They brought me on as the first legal ops manager and brought some contract lifecycle management called Ironclad to TrueAccord, helped streamline the legal department. And they got some opportunities to move throughout TrueAccord. I was the Chief of Staff for Sheila Monroe, who was the CEO at the time, then Mark Ravennessy, who's currently the CEO. And then I've moved into my role today in operations support.

So it's been a great journey. TrueAccord obviously, AI is in the DNA and machine learning of what we do. ⁓ Digital debt collections, but truly omnichannel and just continuing to push the needle for the industry as a whole.

Adam Parks (03:34)

Sure.

Fantastic. So I like our audience is going to know exactly who TrueAccord is. But for anybody who might not be familiar for the creditors watching, help us understand what is TrueAccord and what makes you special.

Eric Nevels (03:49)

yeah.

Yeah, so TrueAccord is a third party debt collection agency. We've been in business for slightly over a decade. We use a patent algorithm, machine learning, called Heartbeat to send out collections communications via email and SMS. We also do outbound dialing as well. But truly a digital first omnichannel debt collection agency. And what we have found is consumers

prefer digital, that's where they are, they're on their phones, they're in their inboxes, and have had really great results liquidating and collecting debt. I would say that the digital person using machine learning and AI, TrueAccord is a large market participant and probably about 96 % of people who pay their debts with TrueAccord don't ever actually interact with a human being.

I think that's kind of the magic of digital, allowing people meet them where they are to self-serve and make payments and create payment plans on their own.

Adam Parks (04:53)

Well, self-service technology, I think, is the wave of the future. If I learned anything from the 2024 TransUnion Debt Collection Industry Reporter that we've got three ways that we can grow. can hire more people, which we can't seem to do. We can move to BPO services, which comes with its own challenges and increase our geographic footprint, or we can start moving into these self-service technologies. I'm a big fan of all three simultaneously, but when it comes to the self-service technology, it's something that we have to do. The consumer shame.

I think is a thing of the past and the consumers, especially the younger consumers, if they've originated digitally, they want to be collected from digitally. They want that experience. And as you look at the communication preferences across the age groups and even the geographic demographics. Like my wife listens or texts with her friends very different than I do. I'm all, you know, text all the time and she's sending voicemails back and forth. I mean, I haven't checked my voicemail since like 1989. So,

Eric Nevels (05:44)

Yeah.

Adam Parks (05:45)

not a great

place to communicate with me, but I think finding those communication channels and all of that is a really impressive way to get to those consumers, to communicate with them through the channel that they're preferring. And I know that you guys have been doing some great things over there and I've been a client for years. So I definitely appreciate the work that you guys are doing. But one of the things as we started talking about

just kind of as we were having an introduction call, just getting to know each other a little bit. But the thing that kind of struck me really fast was the contract management. And part of that is because I didn't even, until you started talking about what you're doing and why you're doing it, I didn't really see the need within my own organization. And then you started talking about it, I went, my God, like, am I missing the boat here? Is there something, is there a whole other world that we're uncovering?

from a contract management standpoint, and what does that mean? Because when we talk about our contracts, that's our clients, that's our vendors, right? That's all of the different pieces and parts of our business, anybody, even those that are internally. Like our contracts with our own employees or executives. Like everything that we do is contractual, and I guess I never really took a minute to think about what those interactions actually meant, and how you could manage those in a way that was better than we sign the agreement, it goes into the...

into the filing cabinet and if there's a problem we'll go pull it out and try and remember what it said.

Eric Nevels (07:03)

Yeah, exactly. To me, contracts really, I mean, you hit it on the head, Adam. They're their operating system like of business, like every relationship you have in a business, vendors, customers, partners, employees. It's governed by those contracts. Those contracts are going to define your revenue, your obligations, deadlines, revenue, risks, your rights. But the thing is, as you think about any negotiations, we'll spend weeks, any lawyer, any business person.

spend weeks negotiating contract. And the moment that's signed, you're going to forget about it. And that's like a, that's a huge missed opportunity. Contracts historically are locked in PDFs. They're written, obviously they're contracts, they're legalese, they're dense. It's not necessarily always easy for anyone just to pick up a contract and be like, here's exactly what I'm looking for. Right. ⁓ And then depending on your size of the company you're with,

Eric Nevels (07:51)

sometimes they're not even tracked at all or they're tracked manually on an Excel spreadsheet. So I think there's a, there's just such a huge opportunity with AI and technology and automation where we're at to, to really start using contract and that data in a smart way. And also just the time to get a contract done quicker because especially if it's a sales contract, like every day that it's taking another turn that that could be revenue. That's, that's

you know, being missed. And we've all been there where contracts take way longer. And before you know it, maybe the opportunity is gone. ⁓ And so how can AI really help us improve that experience for both sides and negotiate, but also from a cost perspective, right? Because it is hard to hire more people. There's not going to be a lot of firms around say, yeah, I can hire two more attorneys just to do that. That's the opposite, right? So how do you push some of this down in the organization?

Eric Nevels (08:43)

So maybe a paralegal could do more of the work. Maybe the AI is like the paralegal. The goal isn't to replace attorneys or replace people necessarily, but augment what they're doing already and make their work quicker and their ability and their capacity to take on more, sometimes more important.

Adam Parks (08:57)

And the retention capabilities, because you can't remember everything that was in all of these minute contracts. So how do you create a reference guide, so to speak, of what have we agreed to? And are we meeting the obligations and are our vendors meeting the obligations that they have to us?

Eric Nevels (09:14)

Exactly. And I think that consistency is a really great point. If you have a, you even just three attorneys, like they may interpret the same contract slightly differently, or they may think, Oh, I need this clause or I don't need this clause. And so you start losing some consistency there where AI can really help you and you can get those playbooks. Also, you can run that against, you know, have an LLM running against your policies and procedures anyways, to ensure that nothing in this contract is a

is a flag or against what our policies are. And if they are flag that, let me know. And then that's where the human can really come in. And that's where the attorney comes in and can make those decisions. So AI, know, at the end of the day, is not going to make these legal decisions, but it's going to help you get there. It's going to tee it up. And then that the person for your organization outside counsel, whoever that may be to make that decision, allows them to actually just focus on that and say, do I need to make an adjustment here? Is this okay? Or do I need a red line? This is in.

Adam Parks (10:10)

It's the exception reporting that's become so key as we've looked at different ways to leverage artificial intelligence across our businesses. And I would liken it to listening to calls, right? The compliance tools that are listening to the calls ultimately are kicking out the exceptions that require human intervention, that human oversight for a particular item. And then what does that mean? It sounds like you're doing something pretty similar. You're just doing it in a different area of the business. That is

just as mission critical.

Eric Nevels (10:39)

Yeah, exactly. These tools 100 % like are you're going to have what's called a clause libraries. Like here's all my different clauses for different areas of the contract. So maybe a vendor sends in an agreement that contains an indemnity clause that isn't approved, isn't something we approve. like AI is going to, that's that exception that you're talking about. Like AI is going to highlight that. Let's take a look at that. And then the bonus points are of course, if the system can not only flag that, but Hey, here's some suggested preferred language to place maybe that risky clause.

Eric Nevels (11:07)

And so that's just right there, instant benefit for that exception right there.

Adam Parks (11:13)

Can you give me an example of how you would need to go back and review contracts in bulk? Because the time that it takes to go back through and identify things can be pretty significant. But can you give me an example of needing to go into this bulk of documents and try to understand how you're gonna navigate going forward as an organization?

Eric Nevels (11:33)

Yeah,

so I think that's a big key to this too. And, you know, we had talked about, you know, the pandemic really kind of started showing why the ability to bulk look at your contracts may be really important because with, you know, certain clauses or, like I need to terminate this clause because, you know, this pandemic occurred. Like this is something that

Eric Nevels (11:57)

we didn't plan for, has those, or maybe who of our clients may have those clauses that might be wanting to pull out of the business because of it, right? The ability to search, if you have hundreds of contracts, the amount of time that it would take to hire legal professionals, hey, I gotta pull every single contract, read the 40-some pages. That would take days, if not weeks, depending on the size of your shop. With AI, it's three clicks, perhaps? I mean, you start kind of thinking about,

Adam Parks (12:03)

Yeah.

Eric Nevels (12:22)

you know, Open AI and ChatGPT. Like it's a search functionality, like, hey, you know, which give me all the contracts that have this clause in it. And instantaneously, here's the output. Now I can review that. And so legal research becomes easier when there is a deal, mergers and acquisitions very, you know, a big in the industry when, when you're doing some due diligence on a client or having due diligence done.

a lot easier to pull out all that data, the metadata that you need, you know, just searching, and in a natural language way. I think that's like the beauty of LLMs and what I really enjoy about, you know, the Gemini and ChatGPT is that it's conversational too. So it's also going to spit it out to someone who maybe isn't even an attorney. Like you could push that down the org, like here's what this means, here's your data, and run with that.

Adam Parks (12:50)

And give somebody else an opportunity, maybe a less expensive employee. Somebody whose time is less expensive to start working through that, identify those exceptions and start kicking it up. Because even from an AI filter level, we always talk about human in the loop. Do you need a human in the loop? Don't you need a human in the loop? And I think the ethical dilemma is that we're all responsible for the output of our AI. Whatever it is that outputs. The input, the output, like that's our responsibility. And how are we going to treat that?

So how were you looking at the kind of that natural language process and saying, you're not just translating from a computer speak to a computer speak, this is translating legalese to, it's called business speak. And those two languages don't always cross. So are you leveraging the AI to help with that translation between those two worlds or is it more about identifying those risks or benefits within the documentation?

Eric Nevels (14:08)

I think it's a little bit of both, right? So I think for the in-house counsel or legal department, they know that they speak that right. And so I think there's an audience for them where it is pulling out those exceptions. They understand that they're attorney, they're paralegal, they're in that world. But I think beyond just the legal departments, there's so many other users of contracts. Sales being the number one.

Adam Parks (14:32)

Sure.

Eric Nevels (14:32)

And

there's so many times, I think we've all been on calls where it's a sales call and you have to bring legal on because now they have to actually translate for everyone else on the call, the business folks like, what does this mean? And I think by providing tools via AI that's built into your contract management system, here's all my contracts, here's the sources of truth, but output this. So if I'm a salesperson trying to do a deal and I'm getting asked this question or I want to be ahead of it, I should be able to talk, but it should translate and say, like,

this is the termination period. This is how this works in a way that makes a lot of sense and I don't have to figure that out. So I think it depends on the user. And I think that's true of all of you. Who is that end user in mind? And building models, You know, Adam, you can train these models, say, hey, here's the voice I want you to speak in. Here is kind of your persona. We just built one, or we're working on building one for our collectors based on our knowledge base, right? And we're giving a persona as a trainer.

in a training kind of voice in a way. So they can just search, you know.

via Slack, right, or whatever kind of messaging system in a conversational way. And it's going to speak to them like a trainer would via Slack and based on like here is actual or information and feed it to them in a way that resonates with them. And I think that's true of contracts too, to train these models and to train the AI, the agent, know, the agentic AI, maybe behind it to provide that in a, this is a sales guy. So give them kind of that sales language, you know, that talks to him.

Adam Parks (16:00)

So it sounds like there's a couple of different things that are happening here. When I hear what you're saying, I hear it as we found the best ways to communicate with the consumers. And now you're trying to identify those best ways to communicate these value attributes to those staff members. And our staff and our team are also consumers. So like we're talking about the same people wearing different hats at different times. That's a very interesting approach to it.

and not something that I had really considered before from a learning management system perspective. And how do you make that learning management available to them through the chat system? Like we're on Google Chat versus Slack, and does that mean that Gemini should be assisting in responding to some of these or that they should have that learning management that allows them to ask questions about the policies and procedures and help drive their knowledge forward? Now sounds like you chose a really specific

a contract management platform for your purposes. What were some of the features that you went like, this is the platform for me? How did you make that decision? And like, what criteria were you using to say this is the right one for us?

Eric Nevels (17:04)

Yeah.

Yeah, so I mean, there's a whole subset in the legal operations world of just contract lifecycle management. There's professions that and consultants that this is where they do. And there's a lot of options out there. There's some really big, there's some bigger players and there's some smaller players just like any tech. You know, when you're looking at contracts, the one thing that you're trying to do is you don't want your legal team to be the bottom.

because I think anytime any legal department internally that you work in and you go out and you do kind of an internal customer survey, it's always the time to get something done. They're seen as a bottleneck. And it's also hard to get a lot of investment. It's also seen as a cost center. And so really looking for workflows in ways that

Any user can have these templates. Because most contracts, I would say probably 90 % of contracts in most businesses, everyone's using boilerplate. Here's our paper, here's the other party's paper. You're gonna use somebody's paper. Ideally, you wanna use your own paper when it's on your site, because it's gonna go a lot quicker for your hours and your resources. So it starts with that. What are the templates? How many can I have? Because what are my different use cases?

you know, do I need vendor contracts? I probably need client contracts. I probably need NDAs and whatever else I need. So how many different templates can I have? That's kind of step one. Like that, that's sort of the heart of it. And then how many users can add? They need an easy way to submit their request to legal and ideally fill out as much as possible in that form. Right. So I think that's baseline of a contract management system. Here's all my templates. Here's a form for my business user, whether it's a salesperson,

whether it's just someone who wants to get a vendor that they can fill it out, self-serve on their own, that gets it submitted and gets that kicked off to your internal legal team or your procurement team or whoever's reviewing your contracts, right? Once you have that, now what I'm looking for is like the ease of use for the attorneys or the people who are going to be marking up the red lines, right?

was looking for something that has the ability to have clause libraries. So hey, these are the different clauses that I have for the different sections. So if it's lacking, if it's on someone else's paper, I need to add that in, I can just kind of drag and drop it in. Boom, it's done. Here's our standard language, right? But then on top of that, you're looking for something that does have some intelligence with it. So I want something that is going to take that first step and read my contract. Just take a look at it.

Flag those exceptions right away from the get-go. there anything that the attorney needs to be flagged? What do I need to look at? And are there any issues I need redlined? Now, more happens with someone else's paper because you don't know what's on there, right? But even internally, once it takes a redline turn and it gets sent back, that's where that becomes really, really important. So having AI be able to do that, because now maybe I can hand that to a

Adam Parks (19:53)

Sure.

Eric Nevels (20:06)

And I don't need my attorney to do that. Maybe that person's able to do a lot more of this back and forth. The other piece that gets a little bit underutilized, but good contract management systems have this is to avoid that loop of emailing that document back and forth and that version control, right? Which version are we on?

Adam Parks (20:25)

I talked to me about

this. This is my biggest pet peeve. This is literally why I'm on the Google platform. Like I love real time collaboration. So talk to me about how this platform is removing the document versions, because that's my largest pet peeve in life.

Eric Nevels (20:32)

Exactly.

Yeah, so

yeah, it is. And version control when it comes to contracts is the biggest, biggest problem since email, right? So some people still like to work and then a good contract system will be able to kind of plug in those and into that workflow automatically. And so you're working out of the system, right? But what the system we use is called ironclad, but many others have this is the ability to share. it's almost like, think of it like a Google doc, right?

It's like, hey, I'm gonna share this with you, this link, and you're actually gonna come into our system. And so we're actually gonna be able to redline and comment right here in my system. So I shouldn't have to email back and forth. It's truly collaborative. So, you know, the opposing counsel is gonna write their notes and redline and put their comments. And you can completely avoid that back and forth. Just let's collaborate real time in my system. That makes things go really quick. Also, like, can you imagine, like, just the attorneys being able to comment at each other within that document as opposed to...

this email back and forth and most attorneys I know that I've ever had the pleasure of working with seem to be always behind on their emails. They get lots of emails and just, know, what's, is that top of mind for them or is it, you know, in a subject line that popped out to them, it's like, this is my red line reviews. I need to hop on this right away. So being native in there where you can bring someone from the outside in and just collaborate right there is huge.

But the other really cool thing with lot of these systems is because there are unique IDs attached to it, when you do email back and forth, it captures that. So if someone responds back, as long as they reply all, which is always part of it, it's automatically going to go back into our system and it's going to say, here's the new version. if they, what we really like about this system is if they titled the document something else that worked for them, it actually comes back and it's going to retitle it for R.

Adam Parks (22:08)

Always the challenge, right?

Eric Nevels (22:23)

naming convention as well and say version five, version six, whatever. And so it's very easy to kind of keep those changes and know where you're at on there. So it's a really great system. The other nice thing when you can email back forth is actually it will embed the email into the system itself. So any conversations back and forth out of a curvy email is part of your record. So it really is, I mean, use the, it is kind of CRM-esque only just specifically for the contract, right?

And then it can connect to the other thing you're looking for is contracts get amended. How do I now, because we've all seen those are, Hey, new SOWs keep getting added to the MSA. How do I keep that chain? Yeah. This will then connect those. So you say, Hey, these are, this is the whole thing. These all connect and have a timeline. And so I can connect these things together. Even the NDA, like you kind of forget, but it's like, that's important all the way through. Like this is the whole deal. And here's the connection of anything that comes off of that because

Adam Parks (22:59)

all these addendums and

Eric Nevels (23:17)

You know, it's going well, hopefully you have multiple SOWs that are getting attached to that MSA and amendments and it makes it easier. As new regulations come out, right, we had a project a few years background data where we needed to get data amendments added to a bunch of client contracts. This is a great example where AI would really, really have helped back then because, which ones are lacking this?

Give those to me and how can I send them out in bulk in a way that, and get those signed really quickly and add them back in just right here so boom, it's done.

Adam Parks (23:46)

This is all fantastic. So let me ask you the killer question. I got a personal question here really. But my question is more related to, let's assume that myself or somebody watching has decided like, my God, like Eric has figured out the next step that I need to take in my business in order to get myself truly organized. And let's not even forget to mention how important this is from a mergers and acquisitions standpoint, because having all of your...

All of your documentation together and all of these contracts together is a major part of due diligence from mergers and acquisition standpoint and having all of this together can materially impact the valuation of a business. So let's pretend for a minute that we have identified a need within our organization to deploy something like this. What's that first step look like in a journey of 1000 miles?

Eric Nevels (24:35)

Yes, it is a journey. think, I'm, I think you first of all, need to get with all like the right stakeholders internally, right? And get the buy-in. So it's always a misstep to not talk to your tech team, your product team, your IT team, just to make sure we're getting the right, the right tooling set. Right. So getting your internal stakeholders is kind of a small working groups, you know, step one, just to make sure, Hey, there's buy-in, make sure that you know,

Also what you're chasing, what are the success metrics look like? And then contract management, it's like, what does that look like? You know, and so part of what we did when we brought on the contract systems, like, Hey, here's currently like how long from the first time Leo got the contract to when it was signed, like here's the amount of days, right? And then this is so therefore, so a creditor than this days exactly, exactly days. Like, cause you are talking days here. Yeah. It's not a

Adam Parks (25:20)

Notice you didn't say minutes, you said days. Here's the amount of days. ⁓

Eric Nevels (25:26)

minutes thing, it's days. And so if I can cut off days off of this and get that revenue in the door earlier, like that, could be a success metric. It could be the amount of hours that you're in, in house council is spending, right? Like that could be a metric. Or if you don't have an house council and you're always going outside council, like, could I reduce the amount of outside council spend? Because maybe by having a contract system like this, we can do more of the heavy lifting and then have them sort of do the final review, legal review and sign off.

It's a lot easier for them to be editors than like an author, right? So knowing like what you want to drive will also help you then in your selection of contract management systems. once you know what you want to achieve, I think the next step, it really depends on who is leading this charge. If you're lucky enough to have a legal department that has like a legal ops person, then you're really lucky and that's the person who should be leading the charge, right?

Adam Parks (26:21)

leading the

charge here.

Eric Nevels (26:23)

And so that's the best person, but a lot, that's kind of a luxury, I would argue still at this point, especially in the receivables industry where there's not like huge like companies where it's like, oh, I have 20 lawyers, I need a legal ops person. It's just, that's not how it works. It's more mom and pops, smaller shops. So you probably don't have a legal ops person. So then who on your side should be running it? I've worked with, I, know, Lauren Valenzuela is one, Katie Neal here, TrueAccord, Kelly Nepper-Stevens, like are all more tech savvy attorneys.

I'll say over the course of time working with attorneys, they're not always the most tech savvy, tech forward folks. There's more and more. It's actually really impressive to see how much it's getting embraced. But an attorney is probably not the right person to drive something like this. So finding the organization who owns the project and who should be driving this. This is a tech project. This is a finance project. Who should be running the project? After that, you can do your due diligence on your own. But there are a lot of legal department

consulting, that's actually my background that are out there that are specific for this that can help you do evaluations, do an RFP, compare, contrast, be on there with the demos who also kind of know what they're looking for, right? Because you should look at probably three to four. What is that? What are we looking for? And what's the best fit for us? I think those dollars actually could be really valuable, not so expensive. And then they could help with the implementation. And so once you select, the implementation part.

Eric Nevels (27:47)

What we found is it's actually not a huge tech lift, generally, internally. It's just getting it on, probably getting your SSO signed up. Everything's on cloud right now. No one's on-prem anymore.

Adam Parks (28:00)

Sure, you're doing a single sign on access,

so everybody's logging in through a pre-existing login, and that way you're not creating another layer of, let's call it technology or security management. You're kind of consolidating that in different ways.

Eric Nevels (28:15)

Exactly. Once you get that infrastructure, that's where you're going to probably need your IT team and folks InfoSec to help set up. But at that point, a lot of these are kind of low code type of setups. So a lot of times most of these contract management will say, OK, part of the onboarding is we will help implement it. We will give you the tools. We will give you the training to kind of set up your first few workflows. And then it's sort of.

train-the-trainer type of activity where you just have to know who is that person my organization who owns this a lot of it's not set it and forget it because as your business gets more complicated or as you need to add new Template types or you need to make tweaks like someone needs to own that internally like and that's how you'd want it You wouldn't want to hey, I need to email my contract management provider every single time I need to make a change you want the Low code I want to own it and just make sure you have that

I think that that's a high, high level of how you get there. And it is a long journey. And I think you kind of piecemeal it. What is the most important contracts initially? And you go from there to set up. And ideally, for us, like, NDAs is like a really nice place to start. Because it's probably the contracts that fly around the most ⁓ internally. they're like, no, exactly.

Adam Parks (29:25)

Yes. Well, before you even have a sales conversation, you're signing an NDA, right? So it's just part of

the process.

Eric Nevels (29:31)

part of. And so on those,

like you really don't want attorneys involved with NDAs. Like those are, should be so standard that those are like the easy quick hits. now, like anyone can send this out as long as this, like this is the criteria and this is where these systems can help just run it. Like the sales person should be able to just sign it. Right.

Adam Parks (29:48)

that a lot. It sounds like you have looked at the various aspects of the contractual process within your organization, found those opportunities to digitize it with a focus on the ability to recall information. And that's where I think it really starts to get valuable is you work with the same client for 10 years, you don't remember what that contract was, and how do you maintain the the updates to those clauses that you're applying to other new contracts and

that contract management process, I think often gets forgotten until you go to sell your business and somebody's finally going through all the contracts to cross the T's and dot the I's and realizes that like, hey, well, we don't have clause X for this agreement or clause Y for that agreement. And what does that ultimately mean as an organization? Now I'm going to have to go back at a point where I need something versus proactively managing those changes, whether it be on an annual basis or whatever.

whatever your organization's flavor is. But that's a really interesting approach. Is there anything else that we should really be considering as we look at contract management as a function of our business and rather as a function of our business than as a byproduct of the other things that we're doing?

Eric Nevels (31:04)

Yeah, I do think it's a function of the business. I think the other thing that, you know, we haven't talked a lot about is like just like then the data within the contract, like the deadline tracking alerts, because, you know, we we've all probably signed up for apps or services like I need to cancel that. Right. Well, contracts and like companies are the same like, my notice period 60 days. Like if you miss that period, like you might be just signed up for another year. You might have. Yeah. And so like

Adam Parks (31:15)

You're gonna have to pay him for nothing. Yeah.

Eric Nevels (31:31)

I think those outputs are really, really important. Like what lives in the data and like, what can I extract from that? Cause there's some interesting like metrics in there. It also could help you with some risk profile as well. And you know, true cord, we, we announced last week the acquisition of Century Credit, right? And so you get a new set of contracts that we probably need to analyze, but you also have a, perhaps with our vendors,

We had a few of these that we actually owed it. We need to notify them. And again, another example of like where you can quickly like search these things and find those out where otherwise are you reading through, you know, a hundred contracts.

Adam Parks (32:15)

And are you spending money that you don't need to spend now you're paying for things that are going to be handled by the mothership versus the sub entities and what does that ultimately mean and how do do that at a fast pace? Because the speed of a of an M&A is directly related to the value of that transaction.

Eric Nevels (32:32)

Yes, exactly. mean, it's just so valuable. And I think the takeaway are like, as you think about AI and just contracts, I mean, we've just spent so long in contracts. I contracts law is very old, know, decades using contracts to kind of define work. like, AI isn't a place where it's finally helping us like manage and act on that as well. I think that's what's really important. And how do you make this a strategic

place, how could you make your sales contract turnaround time super quick? Because that becomes a strategic advantage. Also just quite frankly, if know, third party debt collection, you say like we're a vendor to folks. And so if we're just like easier to work with, because we have our stuff together, that gives you some sort of advantage. Like it just does. It is.

Adam Parks (33:16)

It's a competitive advantage. I would argue that

is a straight up competitive advantage, right? It makes you different. It's sustainable. And that's a pretty big differentiator.

Eric Nevels (33:25)

It is. Yeah, exactly. And so I think, you know, it's it's such a niche kind of part of business, but it's just every business deals with this. There's contracts flying around everywhere. And so it's just such a nice way to to use the technology. it's in its contracts are perfect. Again, they're PDF, they're OCR generally like it's perfect for a height to read these things and translate. I mean, it's just such a perfect it's teed up in the best way. Like how often you get like here's this beautiful written thing that has everything you need to know. And everything about this relationship is contained

Adam Parks (33:43)

Yeah.

Eric Nevels (33:54)

More or less in this document, what a powerful tool like AI can be to help us quickly figure that out. And more and more contracts I'm seeing, you 100 page long, that's hours of not cheap labor when you're talking about attorneys reading that.

Adam Parks (34:11)

not only the amount of time that it takes, but what are you actually able to retain when you read in that volume? So as I sit here and I read a hundred pages of legalese, am I really only pulling out a handful of items that my brain is capable of remembering throughout the process, or what does that really look like? And that's why it's not just the time that it takes to read a hundred pages, it's the time it takes to retain what is happening within all of these documents and then being able to reuse them.

Eric Nevels (34:38)

I mean, you just think about like a finance. mean, because there's so many people who want to look at these contracts. I got finance team could get a digestible summary of payment terms and for that they just need for forecasting or whatever. Like that's all I need. I just need like these three things, but I don't want to read a 47 page document. Like this is where like it just perfect for bullet point summaries or however you want to set it up for whatever teams you need. Like it's just a perfect, perfect tool and a perfect time to, really kind of invest in this. think.

Adam Parks (35:07)

Eric, this is amazing. Every time that I have a conversation with you, I feel like I walk out of it not only energized, but understanding some new ways in which I can approach not only my own business, but the business of those around me as I put on my consulting hat. So I really thank you so much for coming on and joining me today and sharing your insights and your knowledge. Clearly, this is an area where you have a lot of knowledge and quite frankly, a lot of passion.

Eric Nevels (35:34)

Thank you so much, Adam, is a great conversation and I hope we can do it again.

Adam Parks (35:38)

I very much look forward to finding some other

opportunities for us to do another session together and talk about some of the other incredible things that you're working on over there at TrueAccord. For those of you that are watching, if you have additional questions you'd like to ask Erica myself, you can leave those in the comments on LinkedIn and YouTube and we'll be responding to those. Or if you have additional topics you'd like to see us discuss, now that I've got this legal operations expert within my ecosystem.

Eric Nevels (35:47)

Thanks so much.

Adam Parks (36:01)

to have these discussions, you can leave those in the comments below as well. And I bet you I can get Eric coming back at least one more time to help me continue to create great content for a great industry. But until next time, Eric, thank you so much for coming on and sharing today. This has been fantastic. And for those of you watching, thank you so much for your time and attention today. I really do appreciate you and we'll see you all again soon. Bye everyone.

Eric Nevels (36:16)

Thanks so much.