Keep CALM and Contract On™

In the 1930’s, the British government created the now ubiquitous poster that reads, “Keep Calm and Carry On,” as a motivational message for the people of Great Britain as they were preparing to enter World War II.  Today, you can find riffs of that original poster in every tourist stop and shopping mall across the world.

When Cimplifi launched its contract analytics and lifecycle management practice, we abbreviated the words to an acronym we used internally at Cimplifi, called CALM^TM. Naturally, it didn’t take very long for our team to start using the phrase, Keep CALM and Contract On^TM.

Charles Post, the head of our CALM practice, has been a legal technology authority for over a decade on utilizing emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to tackle the legal industry’s most complex contract data issues. His unique experience is anchored in advising businesses on practically implementing contract analytics and contract lifecycle management projects and standing up digital capabilities including other technologies such as blockchain and smart contracts.

Charles is known for many things but being calm is not one of them. So, it was ironic and a bit of an inside joke to name our business offering CALM because 1) Charles is not, and 2) most importantly, CALM really encapsulates the current trend, the convergence of contract analytics and lifecycle management into a single discipline.  These two contract digitization solutions, “pre-signature” contract lifecycle management and “post-signature” contract analytics are no longer independent capabilities.  Sure, the concept of contract lifecycle management — managing your contracts from initiation through renewal — has been around since the stone ages, but the idea of applying AI and analytics to contracts has not. There are numerous CLM vendors and contract repository databases and there are needs for basic CLM implementations, but there are not many who up the ante with analytics for contracts. In this report we commissioned for the legal operations community, we confirmed that there is an increasing market need and desire to automate contracting and we believe that process can be accelerated through the similarities to eDiscovery, including workflows, analytics, and playbooks.

We’ve been talking about this for some time, but the market is really coming around to acknowledging that contract analytics and lifecycle management are two halves of a full circle, and we formed the CALM practice because of this market opportunity.

“Keep CALM and Contract On” is a great mood setter to keep our team calm and well balanced, it’s fun to say, and it seems to be spreading thanks to our client, Julian Tsisin at Meta, who was quoted in this article featured on Artificial Lawyer following CLOC where he referred to CALM.  The article continued, “The predicted next move in the CLM space is a combination of contract analytics and the lifecycle management – to offer a single tool that combines lifecycle coverage with the ability of a data analytics platform. Julian Tsisin at Meta referred to this as a CALM, contract analytics and lifecycle management.” Thanks to Julian for giving us credit in a later social post found here.

To learn more about the CALM^TM practice at Cimplifi and our expertise in contract analytics and lifecycle management, click here. To read our blog on the contract revolution, click here.  #keepCALMandcontracton