Notes from a phenologist, marketing adviser, and the meaning of automation in unusual segments

In fact, I have been going with this text for some time now - it didn’t fit into my text that could be discussed. But, in my opinion, finally lay down.



I am not a lawyer and I understand in copyright insofar as. I have been doing business for a long time, sometimes successfully, sometimes I don’t, but I have been constantly faced with all kinds of papers for business registration for more than 25 years. And passed the most different stages of the attitude towards them. For example, at the beginning of perestroika, I regularly and even for money helped people formulate what they agreed on among themselves in a simple spoken-abusive language into texts suitable for placement in a contract. .

')

Then for many years I was already a client for lawyers. And already lawyers helped me to wrap what I wanted to see in the contract in a legally correct form. And so, a year ago, I returned to their side, starting to work with freshdoc.ru , getting into my hands a project that approached a question from a third party.



In the legal environment, there is a lot of controversy over how much the legal process is subject to automation in general. Most lawyers give a rather specific answer "no" to this question. From their point of view, any contract is a piece that needs detailed understanding, editing and all that. To be honest, I, like most of you, quite often observe what this means:



The studio or programmer office has its own standard contract. Ideally - written by a good lawyer and much in advance. And here we send it to the customer, who in a couple of days sends us the edits. 80% of these edits are of no benefit. It is simply a change of language to synonymous. Some of them are strange demands of a lawyer who sincerely believes that you want this money so much, that you are ready to sign anything without reading.



In about 30% of cases, I return the contract edits to the head of the company with the note “I am very sorry that we will not be able to work together, but I consider your lawyer’s approach unacceptable for a civilized business.” In 50% of cases, these changes somehow disappear, and in 50% - we really break up. On the circle, nothing but harm from this "piece" approach failed.



Can automation save from such a turn? No, most likely it cannot, it is just an example close to the audience of Megamind. But there is a practical thought in it - the piece approach is not necessarily useful. And sometimes it can be harmful. And notice, even if there is an adequate lawyer on that side, we have lost TIME anyway. Sometimes quite large.



How many times did you start working before entering into a contract, because the counterparty told you that this is a big problem, the contract department is very slow, and the results are needed tomorrow? Almost always?



Or another example, not about the Internet. About where to do something without a contract will not work. Neftyanka. Large company with thousands of customers. With a standard contract, which is conducted through the board of directors, verified, etc. The deal, which is concluded on it, is executed according to the accelerated procedure for a week. And if it does not fit into a standard contract without amendments, then it goes through a full cycle of approval and takes almost 3 months. And there are 96% of such transactions, which are a little bit awesome, do not fit into a standard contract (sic!). Because in the standard contract it is impossible to rule ANYTHING. Only new details.



What does automation give us? It allows you to broaden the scope of the situations described in the standard contract, so that the accelerated procedure is carried out not 4%, as before, but 40%. Sixty will still go on a long cycle, but also those that manage to be wrapped in the standard give a tenfold increase in the segment and hundreds of millions of additional income. Only because automation does not allow making arbitrary edits, but only those that have been approved in advance.



This is about internal automation. My client does it perfectly for the order. But external automation is also a working thing. A flat model contract from the collection is applicable only when you cut a lot. Well, that is, you still have to edit it. Why did the “oil industry” from the example above prevent me from making even minor changes to the standard one? Because editing, “small and only in one place,” very often must be followed by generating the same minor changes in 2-3 other places. Sometimes in other related papers. And to do this, you need to know and delve into. And we will not, right?



Therefore, simply downloaded standard contract fish and the same, but with automated model edits, is an improvement not by times, but by orders of magnitude.



I actually why all this writing?



For a year now, as one way or another, I have figured out how to optimally sell this entire story: to whom, how, what selection criteria. We try quite different things. For example, here is this blog. If suddenly this is the first or second text that you are reading here, then, looking at it retrospectively, you will see a crowd of articles about copyright and almost nothing about treaties. Well, a large banner on top. It seems clumsy to you, until you know what its CTR is for many months :-) And the burnout is almost invisible.



Literally two weeks ago, at a speech at Digital Thaw in Nizhny Novgorod, I talked about my favorite Internet rake and caught myself thinking that I had reduced most of the problem solutions to the same thing: “write it in a contract or plan it in advance”.



You know that there will be processing? Write in the contract: so many hours of processing free of charge, all of the following - at this rate. “Free” is in the sense that you have already included their cost in the contract price :-)



And the more I work with FreshDoc, the more I understand that we need to work more on the general culture of the legal process. Because, for example, rational arguments work poorly. They need to grasp and ponder, and for advertising it is unreal. And the emotional arguments in the contractual process are few and clinging to them is not to act organically to the product. It is senseless to drive traffic without preliminary immersion, we tried differently. With the search, everything is fine, although most of the people who come from him sincerely believe that it is cheaper to lose 5-6 hours, governing a free sample than pay 250-500 rubles to set it up and download it properly.



And what would have prompted you to give up something? Well, except for frank freebies?