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

In fact, I have been going with this text for some time now - it did not fit into my text in any way, which could be discussed. But, in my opinion, finally lay down.

I am not a lawyer and understand copyright as far as. I have been doing business for a very long time, sometimes successfully, sometimes very not, but I have been confronted with all kinds of papers for registering a business for more than 25 years. And went through the most different stages of attitude towards them. For example, at the beginning of perestroika, I regularly and even for money helped people formulate what they agreed among themselves in a simple colloquial language into texts suitable for placement in a contract.

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

In the legal environment there is quite a lot of debate about how 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 of thing that needs a detailed understanding, corrections and all that. To be honest, I, like most of you, quite often observe what it translates into:

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

In approximately 30% of cases, I return contract edits to the head of the company with the note “I’m 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 edits somehow disappear, and in 50%, we really part. On the circle, nothing but the harm from this "piece" approach did not work.

Can automation save me from such a turn? No, most likely it cannot, this is just an example close to the audience of Megamind. But there is a good idea in it - a piecewise approach is not necessarily useful. And sometimes it can be harmful. And mind you, even if there is an adequate lawyer on the other side, we lost TIME anyway. Sometimes quite large.

How many times did you start working before the conclusion of the 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 does not work. The oilwoman. A large company with thousands of customers. With a standard contract, which is held through the board of directors, verified, etc. The deal, which is concluded under 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 approval cycle and takes almost 3 months. And there are 96% of such transactions that do not fit into the standard contract (sic!). Because nothing can be ruled in a model contract. Only new details.

What does automation give us? It allows you to expand the scope of the situations described in the standard contract so that, according to the accelerated procedure, spend not 4%, as before, but 40%. Sixty will go the long cycle anyway, but those that manage to be wrapped in a typical one give tenfold growth in the segment and hundreds of millions of additional income. Just because automation does not allow you to make arbitrary edits, but only those that are pre-approved.

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 a collection is an applicable thing only when you are heavily cut. Well, that is, it will still have to be corrected. Why did the “oil industry” from the example above not allow even minor changes to be made to the standard? Because the edit, “small and only in one place”, very often must generate the same minor edits in 2-3 other places. Sometimes in other related papers. And to do this, you need to know and delve into. But we will not, right?

Therefore, simply downloaded a typical contract fish and it is the same, but with automated standard corrections - this is an improvement not many times, but by orders of magnitude.

Why am I writing all this?

For a year now, I have been sorting out one way or another with how to optimally sell this entire story: to whom, how, what are the 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 contracts. Well, a large banner on top. It seems clumsy to you until you know what its CTR has been for many months :-) And burnout is almost invisible.

Just two weeks ago, when I spoke at the Digital Thaw in Nizhny Novgorod, I talked about my favorite rake for Internet users and found myself thinking that most of the solutions to the problem came down to the same thing: “write it in the contract or plan it in advance”.

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

And the more I work with FreshDoc, the more I understand that we need to work more on the overall culture of the legal process. Because, for example, rational arguments do not work well. They need to be read and thought over, but for advertising this is unrealistic. But there are few emotional arguments in the contract process and clinging to them means acting inappropriately for the product. It makes no sense to drive traffic without preliminary immersion, we tried in different ways. Everything is fine with the search, although most of the people who come from it sincerely believe that it’s cheaper to lose 5-6 hours editing a free sample than to pay 250-500 rubles for properly setting it up and downloading.

And what would motivate you to refuse anything? Well, besides a frank freebie?