
62% of general counsels use Excel and email to manage contract data: survey - CallMeAL23
https://www.artificiallawyer.com/2020/02/13/62-of-gcs-still-use-excel-sharepoint-email-to-manage-contract-data/
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vijucat
It seems to me that SQL, C++, and Excel VBA (in that order) are probably the 3
top evergreen skills that folks in the 80s or 90s are still able to utilize in
a career spanning 20+ years! JavaScript is probably the equivalent for this
generation.

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ma2rten
Out of all major programming languages, JavaScript is the language that
changed the most in recent years.

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londons_explore
I tried to teach someone new to programming javascript... I was quite
astonished at how hard it is to learn. Nearly anything you'd want to do, there
are 5 different ways to achieve it, together with 5 more
libraries/abstractions that help solve the issue, and they're all a bit
incompatible.

Have fun trying to integrate the "document.write('hello world')" example you
found from stackoverflow into a react app while being a beginner and not
really knowing why exactly they aren't compatible.

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karatestomp
The inappropriately-leaked abstraction of the event loop is another big hurdle
for newbies in JS-land. Yes we have async/await so it's somewhat less gross
now but then that's another of those "5 ways to achieve it" things.

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AzuraJergen
Excel, SharePoint and Email all have one thing in common. They are almost
universally used and have a low barrier to entry.

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pier25
Ok, but why not use Google Sheets or Airtable instead of Excel?

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kryptiskt
Privacy concerns. Why would you upload private information to a third party
for no advantage?

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pier25
There are some advantages like version control or everyone working in the same
document with the latest data.

I've seen it dozens of times. Someone shares the wrong excel file then others
keep working with outdated data. Or maybe they all share a file in Dropbox but
someone didn't sync for some reason and kept working and generating changes
over an old file.

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hateful
I have never met an application that's as easy to maintain as a spreadsheet
is. It's the only thing that feels like you're actually editing what you want
and not being hand cuffed by some constraint. It's the very definition of
WYSIWYG. There's a reason that the shared calendar of choice for my wife and I
is a Google Sheet and not Google Calendar.

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Ididntdothis
If there was only decent version control so you could go back quickly if
something goes wrong.

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alexhutcheson
Google Sheets has this:
[https://support.google.com/docs/answer/190843](https://support.google.com/docs/answer/190843)

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anodyne33
I'm in eDiscovery, we host trial databases in a really stout and intuitive
review platform. My clients can, after they've done their searching and culled
for relevance and privilege, browse through the document viewer and look at
either the text with highlighted search hits or the native rendering of all
their documents. All of their coding and tagging of documents is right there
in the side panel of the doc viewer. There's hardly a week that goes by that
an attorney or paralegal DOESN'T call and ask us for PDFs of their documents.
Until a few years ago it wasn't unusual for someone to call and ask paper
copies of hundreds of pages at a time to review.

The legal world is outstandingly slow to embrace better solutions in
technology.

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geofft
Can I access your platform / document viewer offline?

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anodyne33
No, and of course, that's the rub.

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joshspankit
Seems like a gap in the market if someone steps in with offline sync (even
just one-way) and the ability to securely access files from a next-day
delivered USB stick.

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anodyne33
We've done that for special case scenarios. The last review tool we used was
in a mixed Linux/Windows environment and we had a client in jail awaiting
trial so we built a laptop to run everything and our PM visited him weekly to
update his copy of the DB locally (no internet access in the pen). The biggest
sticking point is that it's not uncommon to get to 4-6 TB on one of our
databases and it takes a bunch of processors and memory to run the software,
but I smell a development opportunity now that you mention it.

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geofft
One, you can get an external 6 TB hard drive for like $100. At attorney levels
of money, that's entirely reasonable.

Two, clearly in the pre-computer world, attorneys were not reviewing 6
terabytes of actual data for discovery. What makes it so big? Is it that you
have scanned PDFs in image format (such that it's a reasonable number of pages
printed out), or is it that you have new types of data like electronic records
that simply wouldn't have been picked up in the old days?

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yters
My takeaway is that MS should double down on their office applications and
make them absolutely spectacular.

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jerry1979
I think that Excel is already spectacular. That being said, if a C# or similar
lived inside excel as a first class language (instead of VBA), that would make
Excel unbelievable.

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trobertson
Microsoft is doing basically this, except with Typescript instead of C#:
[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/office/dev/scripts/overview...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/office/dev/scripts/overview/excel)

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Alex3917
Keep in mind that their email probably doesn't look like your email. There are
literally thousands of tools that plug into email and/or build on top of it in
some way. Everything they're sending and receiving is going to be searchable
and auditable by multiple entities, both within and outside of the company,
and will stand up in court if challenged.

Just because they're "using email" doesn't mean they aren't also already using
specific tools for this purpose.

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badrabbit
This way is pretty sane. With O365,they can have azure information protection
and MFA for security and easily share with onedrive(blocking all other
filesharing and USB helps a lot with this) Outlook hosted on O365 also has AIP
to prevent confidential data leakage. As others have noted,excel is great with
managing this kind of data and if you dislike VB macros: embedded python
support will be there this year!

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_n_b_
I have spent a lot of time on contract negotiation and management for
engineering and EPC contracts. I can confirm that more or less, excel,
SharePoint, and email fits with my experience of how things are done in the
wild. (I do have some home-grown specialized tools I use for things like
claims tracking.) Every big contract is different, and tools with lots of
requirements are often not as adaptable to those nuances as a trusty excel
sheet that you've honed through the years.

However, my experience in utility EPC space is that contracts are negotiated
primarily by sales & supply chain people and reviewed by lawyers, and then
turned over to contract managers, who only get their legal departments
involved for advice or when there is an escalating problem that looks like it
might head for arbitration or court. So asking general counsels about this
seems like the wrong audience--at least out in my little segment of the real
world, it's contract managers who mange contracts, not lawyers.

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colek42
Those tools are all excellent at getting work done.

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platz
What's the alternative?

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Ididntdothis
Have an IT department take over. Have things that took five minutes to change
previously now take weeks of writing requirements plus waiting for
implementation only to be told after a year that your request has been
descoped. Now you have a “professional” Solution but also some spreadsheets
because you actually have a job to do and need these changes and Excel is the
only way to do it quickly.

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QuesnayJr
I once had a temp job where I would take data printed out from a mainframe,
and type it into a PC. I asked "Why not download it?" It turned out it was
easier to hire someone to type than to get any useful cooperation out of IT.

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gmfawcett
Putting aside whether or not this is actually a problem: The survey is only
N=50, not N=10000, in spite of the article's emphasis on the second number.
Large firms are unlikely to use different techniques for managing different
contracts.

This is a white paper report from a legal AI company, not an academic study,
so some selection bias is to be expected.

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tryitnow
What's wrong with using these products? This "study" doesn't appear to make a
distinction between using the products exclusively and using them in
conjunction with other products.

I'm betting every one of these large companies ALSO use specific contract
management software tools in addition to Excel Sharepoint and email.

I'm actually surprise MORE companies don't use this combination since almost
every large company makes use of MSFT office suite products.

I'm skeptical of any company trying to position itself as some sort of
replacement for products that have been used for decades.

I've drunk that Kool-Aid before and it never works out the way it's intended,
companies always fall back on some class Office suite products.

The sad truth is that you'll probably end up using Excel, Sharepoint, and
email in addition to whatever contract management solution you go with.

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jmull
You can see the perspective of the authors of this article by the "Leaders"
and "Laggards" lists at the bottom.

E.g., the top "Leader" point is: "Will adopt AI-based contract risk mitigation
technology in the next 12 months."

I mean, who am I to tell "GC"s not to have some fun and fluff up their resumes
at the same time? But if you want to improve your capabilities to manage
contracts, buying AI solutions is not exactly a straight line to success.

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joshspankit
My instinct says that their data structure is also a _nightmare_.

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stef-13013
KISS

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chadlavi
Only 62%?

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oldgradstudent
Only 62% admitted to use Excel in a survey.

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KineticLensman
GC = General Council, surveyed across 50 large corporate legal departments

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dragonwriter
> GC = General Council

No, General _Counsel_ (Council is a group of people who make decisions,
Counsel is an advisor, especially, as in this context, a lawyer/legal advisor,
or their advice; “counsellor” is also used for a lawyer or advisor.)

