Clarilis’ CEO and Co-founder James Quinn chats to Artificial Lawyer on the company’s innovation journey.
The interview discusses how James and his brother Kevin co-founded Clarilis and why they decided to build their own legal document automation solution after trying to licence this type of software themselves.
The team at Clarilis saw that despite the potential of document automation, the industry was littered with failed automation projects. Further investigation found that that traditional approaches to automation placed a heavy burden on internal resources to make the technology work as automation involves not only deciding what to automate in terms of documents, it requires learning the automation programming language, determining the logic that sits behind the alternative provisions in the document and then implementing this logic. It also requires factoring in the maintenance required to ensure you keep the automated documents and templates up-to-date or you run the risk of lawyers reverting back to manual drafting. Clarilis found that lawyers are often too busy to have to spend time designing, testing, implementing and maintaining automated precedents themselves, so the idea of providing a managed service was born!