Jul 27, 2026 · 22 min · 11 segments
What if the biggest risk in a legal tech project is not the software you choose, but the operational groundwork you skipped before you bought it? In this episode of In-House Matters by Lawcadia, we…
Jane PlattGuest
Sasha KirkHost
One of the things that really stood out for me when we first spoke was your view that teams cannot simply throw technology at a process they do not understand.
Can you explain that and also share why understanding processes is so important? Sure.
So this is going to be mostly in the context of contract management, but it's true of any kind of legal tech.
I discovered that when one of the companies I worked at didn't have anything, we didn't have any money.
So I worked with somebody on IT, on Oracle's Application Express, and then they started asking questions right away.
I don't know what the workflow should be, right? Who is involved? When are they involved? And so that was really helpful because I had to answer all those questions internally first.
And then what data do I want? If we're capturing data, what? And so you have to think forward to what does that look like at discovery for litigation? What does it look like when FDA shows up? What do I want to have ready at that point? And so if you don't have that, you're not going to collect it.
Delve a little bit deeper and understand what is it that you're trying to solve and what are the processes that sit around that?
So think about if you had a new hire who was helping you with this, how do you describe it? What are you trying to tell them? And I think that shows up really quickly.
How would you tell a new startup what that process is or how things work? That goes back to something that I think is undervalued standard operating procedures.
I worked with a CFO one time who said it's impossible to be consistently excellent without a process.
And the process needs to be consistent, right? Because if everybody's doing their own thing, that's not a process anymore.
One of the things that really stood out for me when we first spoke was your view that teams cannot simply throw technology at a process they do not understand.
Can you explain that and also share why understanding processes is so important? Sure.
So this is going to be mostly in the context of contract management, but it's true of any kind of legal tech.
I discovered that when one of the companies I worked at didn't have anything, we didn't have any money.
So I worked with somebody on IT, on Oracle's Application Express, and then they started asking questions right away.
I don't know what the workflow should be, right? Who is involved? When are they involved? And so that was really helpful because I had to answer all those questions internally first.
And then what data do I want? If we're capturing data, what? And so you have to think forward to what does that look like at discovery for litigation? What does it look like when FDA shows up? What do I want to have ready at that point? And so if you don't have that, you're not going to collect it.
Delve a little bit deeper and understand what is it that you're trying to solve and what are the processes that sit around that?
So think about if you had a new hire who was helping you with this, how do you describe it? What are you trying to tell them? And I think that shows up really quickly.
How would you tell a new startup what that process is or how things work? That goes back to something that I think is undervalued standard operating procedures.
I worked with a CFO one time who said it's impossible to be consistently excellent without a process.
And the process needs to be consistent, right? Because if everybody's doing their own thing, that's not a process anymore.
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