How might we make contracts efficient for early-stage startups?

UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM

Startups are inherently chaotic. With limited resources and new challenges arising at every step, it's only natural for some parts of a business to be relatively neglected until they become a serious issue. Oftentimes, the legal aspects are ignored by the startups mainly because the team is busy dealing with product, service or business-related matters. I set out to address this issue by focusing on the key pain points of the user persona. I came up with a few questions that helped me explore the problem further. Some include: How can startups save time on creating standard contracts? How can they manage and store them in one place? How can they analyse risk? How can they stay on top of what's happening with their legal agreements? Lots of questions…

UNDERSTANDING THE LANDSCAPE

I conducted structured user interviews with lawyers who had worked with startups as well as startup owners to understand the problem space and main issues with the existing contract lifecycle management softwares. To further explore the problem area, I conducted a competitive analysis of existing products to see how they were solving these problems and to identify vulnerabilities in the market. I sourced a dataset of reviews from online software reviews platforms and analysed it using natural language processing (NLP) techniques. Some of these reviews can be seen below. The main usability issue I noticed among competitors was incredibly clunky interfaces, filled with pages and pages of dense fields. I knew people wanted to be able to capture the necessary information about each contract – but there had to be a better way.

SETTING UP THE STRUCTURE

I sketched a rough outline of what the new contract management software might look like, including the features that were critical and the ones that were ‘nice to have’ but out of scope for the first version. The customer journey map (not shown here) and the information architecture (shown below) helped me get a bird’s-eye view of the platform features that had to be designed and developed. Since I was the only one designing and developing the product, shipping features was comparatively faster (than it would be for a team). This was mainly because the evidence-based decision-making process was quicker.

KEY WORKFLOWS

ContractAwesome lets users upload scanned contracts or generate new ones. The platform uses OCR to read the text and then extracts important information from the contract. I worked on an NLP algorithm to mark ‘important’ or ‘risky’ clauses that need immediate attention. Besides this, the platform lets users manage tasks relevant to the contracts, track the progress of each contract, integrate with Zapier to export and import data, create automations, collaborate, get digital signatures and view high-level insights.

MOBILE PATTERNS

One of the challenges of this project was to create an app that stayed true to its experience while respecting the platform design guidelines. I identified various navigation patterns while remaining consistent with branding and content hierarchy. During this exercise, I realised that the risk assessment feature was useful, not only to startups but to individual users as well. Since contracts are everywhere, it would be easier to read them if the risky or important clauses are highlighted. ContractAwesome’s mobile application (powered by a well-trained neural net) takes care of it. Users can capture photos of all pages of a contract and the app highlights the most important or risky clauses. The mobile app was later appropriated by individual users to manage contracts.

ContractAwesome, including all its assets was acquired by a legal firm and used for managing the client contracts.