Lexion Surveys Hundreds of In-House Legal and Sales Professionals, Revealing How Delays in Contract Execution Impacts Sales Cycles and End-of-Year Quotas
The leading complaint from sales is that contracts are not returned quickly enough – slowing negotiations and resulting in lost revenue – but AI offers a path forward
SEATTLE, December 7, 2023 (Newswire.com) - Today Lexion, an AI-powered contract management system, announced the results of its second annual survey of legal professionals on the current state of technology adoption. Results were published in the report ‘The State of Legal Technology: Accelerated Contract Management Leads to Increase Sales,’ and respondents surfaced a number of unexpected insights into how legal tech and AI adoption is impacting sales cycles.
“Last year our survey offered insight into macro trends in technology adoption as companies were grappling with economic headwinds,” said Gaurav Oberoi, cofounder and CEO, Lexion. “This year – while AI adoption continues to accelerate – the most intriguing finding is an apparent divide between legal and sales departments. Contract review remains tedious, slow and costly as organizations grapple with approval processes that take far longer than they should. To alleviate this pain point, and with recent advances in AI, legal and sales professionals increasingly turn to tech to close deals faster while also mitigating risk.”
Key findings from Lexion’s survey include:
- Sales thinks contract review is much slower than Legal does. While 82% of legal respondents indicate that contract reviews and approvals take 5 days or less, just 59% of sales respondents agreed with that timeframe.
- Respondents indicated that the leading complaint from sales teams – by nearly two to one – is that contracts are not returned quickly enough. This underscores an underlying tension between sales and legal departments. With recent technical advances, however, organizations are more receptive to adopting AI solutions, which is key to mitigating this pain point.
- Lack of resources, as well as being buried in lower-value tasks, were indicated as the two primary factors preventing respondents from doing their jobs well. This dovetails into the top benefits expected from using AI across both sales and legal departments: completing work more quickly and efficiently, as well as removing repetitive tasks.
Respondents included hundreds of general counsel, senior counsel, associate counsel, paralegals, contract managers and legal administrators – as well as sales managers – across a wide array of industries.
“This year’s survey shows that organizations are increasingly willing to adopt AI to bolster organizational efficiencies,” said David Wang, chief innovation officer at Wilson Sonsini. “We’ve reached a tipping point in AI evolution, as nearly half of respondents – in a traditionally conservative field when it comes to tech adoption – plan to incorporate AI into their workflow processes. And a significant percentage are already using AI today.”
To overcome the barriers between legal and sales, and to help create harmony between teams, Lexion published a free five-step sales checklist, as well as a free ebook that provides insights into how sales and legal can cut the entropy and focus on wins. Additionally, the following webinars are available for free:
- Close Deals 20% Faster - Getting Legal On Your Side
- Maximizing Operations - From Revenue to Legal to Sales
Lexion offers an end-to-end contract management solution for in-house legal teams that helps them capture key metrics and accelerate deals while using AI and automation to help them scale. Unlike other contract management systems, stakeholders can work with Lexion entirely via email, eliminating the need for complex configuration and training.
About Lexion
We built Lexion at Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s artificial intelligence research institute (AI2) and are backed by the same investors that funded OpenAI (Khosla Ventures), helped launch Amazon (Madrona Venture Group), and have advised Google (Wilson Sonsini). With a top notch and experienced team from Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Amazon, we built a company that CB Insights ranked the #1 most promising AI legal tech startup in the world two years in a row (2020, 2021). Lexion is a Top 40 Intelligent Application based on votes from Goldman Sachs, Madrona, Khosla Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and many of the top AI investors in the world. Most importantly, fantastic brands trust Lexion to manage their contracts: Outreach, OfferUp, Blue Nile, Apptio, Brooks, and many more. Visit https://lexion.ai for more.
Source: Lexion
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Tags: contract lifecycle management, contracts, Lexion