Barhead and Microsoft Power Lawyers' Future | LPI
Barhead Solutions have launched Consensus, an end-to-end contract lifecycle and matter management platform for legal, procurement and contracting teams brought to life with Microsoft technologies.
Legal and Procurement
Legal and Procurement teams have an increasing mandate to digitise and automate their processes, capture data, and enable data-driven decisions. ‘Companies lose around five to 20% of deal value, or 9% of deal revenue, because of inefficient processes, and that’s why there’s such a demand right now for organisation-wide contract lifecycle management or CLM software,’ said Amanda Fajerman, Engagement Manager, Consensus. As the previous Head of Legal Technology at LOD and a lawyer herself for the past 15 years, Amanda occupies a unique position as an expert in designing and implementing legal tech solutions, with her thorough understanding of the challenges legal teams face.
‘Lawyers are often the guardians of a company’s non-financial information and face common challenges. For one, they deal with a vast amount of information that they need to be able to find, access, manage and maintain easily,’ said Amanda. ‘They have key responsibilities to the organisation across the contract lifecycle such as advising on legal risks during contract negotiation, reporting on trends, and managing contractual obligations following execution.’
Consensus maximises Microsoft’s low-code to no-code capabilities. ‘I think one of the great things about the technology we chose to build Consensus upon, is it allows us to achieve an immense amount of capability with an almost impossibly short time frame,’ said Luke Kelly, Product Manager, Consensus. ‘We’re leveraging off that speed to scale, competing with the most prominent platforms out there that have had many years and millions of dollars of investment.’
Microsoft’s Power Platform
Microsoft’s Power Platform democratises app building, data intelligence, chatbot deployment, and workflow automation with its four product offerings. Like other apps built on Power Platform, Consensus is easy to deploy but completely adaptable, making it the safe and ideal choice for solving challenges now and scaling later. ‘Something that is demonstrated very clearly across many different Power Platform apps in the past is that it unlocks, expects and accommodates company growth,’ said Luke, who looks after the short- and long-term roadmap for Consensus, including product strategy, design and direction. ‘Building on bespoke solutions akin to solutions provided by small businesses, we are really changing the game by building on Power Platform, building on an enterprise-grade platform that is built to scale.’
According to Microsoft, 97% of Fortune 500 companies rely on Microsoft Power Platform to digitise their processes, with nearly 16 million monthly active users. In addition, the future of the CLM market is expected to double over $3 billion in the next five years. Aside from the strength of Microsoft technology, why consider Barhead?
‘Barhead is passionate about accelerating the take up of Microsoft technologies in legal teams. With the addition of our new Legal Tech team, Barhead brings a massive depth of experience to this space. In a major technology play, we are building another center of excellence on top of our existing technology expertise by specialising in legal solutions alongside industry-specific solutions,’ said Doug Maloney, Head of Product and IP, Barhead Solutions.
From an enablement point-of-view, lawyers spend 90% of their time working in Word, Outlook and other Microsoft products. In any platform, user adoption is crucial. ‘Because our solution is so tightly integrated with Microsoft 365, it gives a degree of familiarity. This high user adoption results in gains for functionality and change management,’ Amanda adds.
Consensus Launch Event
Barhead will be introducing Consensus at a Launch Event on 1st September, showcasing its features and capabilities. Participants will see how Consensus seamlessly integrates with Office 365, Teams, SharePoint and Dynamics 365 for a holistic approach to data and digital strategy and hear directly from Microsoft how the Power Platform can transform business and what makes Consensus interesting to legal and contracting teams.
About Barhead
Barhead is a specialised consulting firm focused on delivering business solutions leveraging the strategic value of Microsoft Business Applications through Dynamics 365 and Power Platform.
Also Read: Custom legal technology? You can do it with no code
