Artificial Intelligence. AI has become a bit of a buzzword, but there’s a reason for all the hype. Although we’re not at a level where artificial intelligence can make us a cup of coffee and drive us to work, intelligent software tools are already improving the accuracy and efficiency of businesses by automating repetitive manual processes.
As part of our series about “How To Use Digital Transformation To Take Your Company To The Next Level”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Thomas Hall.
Thomas Hall is the Chief Legal Officer at SirionLabs. Thomas brings more than 25 years of experience as a business consultant and corporate counsel for a wide range of technology companies. Most recently, Thomas was with KPMG, one of the Big Four accounting firms, where he focused on implementing intelligent automation programs for enterprises and led the company’s internal commercial solutions function for US advisory and tax services. Thomas received his MBA and JD from the University of Texas in Austin.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
I’ve had a wide-ranging professional career that has exposed me to many different facets of business operations. I’ve worked as both in-house counsel running legal departments with a focus on driving excellence through customer focus, and I’ve been in private practice specializing in corporate transactions. I’ve also worked as a business consultant and run consultancies, including a negotiations practice that specialized in complex B2B services contracts. Together, these experiences really prepared me for SirionLabs, where I can bring my experience to bear.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?
One lesson that really stands out to me happened back when I was in law school. At the time, I was working as a clerk for the Texas Attorney General’s office supporting its antitrust efforts. There is a federally funded program called the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children that provides grants to low-income mothers and their children who are at risk of not receiving enough nutrients. When I was a clerk, it looked like some manufacturers were colluding to fix the price of infant formula in the state markets. I spent weeks pouring over boxes of documents and eventually found what I believed to be a “smoking gun” memo showing that the collusion was happening. But I was so new to the area, I didn’t realize that each state’s bidding process for the formula was open. In other words, all the prices would be there for everyone to see after the fact. That basically meant I had to find additional documentation to put the smoke back into the gun! After everything was said and done, the Texas lawsuit was consolidated with lawsuits from other states and resulted in a multimillion-dollar settlement that benefited low-income mothers and their children. The lesson I took away from that grand expression of naivete was to always thoroughly understand an underlying business before providing any legal advice.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
In the first corporate acquisition transaction I supported in private practice, I managed some local counsel in various US states who helped with real estate issues. A wonderful man named Vic Davis — a lawyer in Junction City, Kansas — was so helpful and generous in his support. He went the extra mile to guide me and teach me. Not only how to do Kansas dirt law, but more importantly, how to be a gracious professional.
Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
One of the books that has had a major influence on me was John M. Barry’s Rising Tide. It’s a history of engineering the Mississippi River and the great flood of 1927. John’s book is a brilliant confluence of history, technology, and storytelling. It’s not particularly relevant to my legal career, but it was a major influence on my novel.
Extensive research suggests that “purpose driven businesses” are more successful in many areas. When your company started, what was its vision, what was its purpose?
SirionLabs was founded around a simple mission that has a huge impact: Improving the way that businesses manage contracts. Although SirionLabs’ mission is simple, actually carrying it out is a massive challenge. That’s ultimately what brought me to the company: Its clarity of vision and its willingness to tackle a deceptively hard problem head-on. Contracts are so fundamental to business that it’s fair to say that business couldn’t be done without them. They create the legal framework that defines a business relationship and sets expectations for all parties. And while the rules for how we conduct business — to say nothing of the businesses themselves — have changed a lot over centuries, the fundamental ways we create and manage contracts haven’t really changed. SirionLabs saw an opportunity to unlock substantial value for businesses and their clients by reinventing the way we engage with contracts. Its mission was to turn contract management from a passive and routine function into a dynamic and intelligent driver of success for companies. We’re accomplishing this by integrating advanced technologies like machine learning into a unified platform that enables collaboration between all stakeholders in a contracting process. By coupling machine intelligence with human ingenuity in an easy-to-use platform, businesses are able to author stronger agreements, better manage risk, and strengthen counterparty relationships. For me, one of the biggest rewards of working at a deeply mission-driven company like SirionLabs is seeing your work make a direct positive impact on some of the greatest companies in the world by helping them solve complex contract management challenges.
Are you working on any new, exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?
The most exciting project I’m working on right now is as the project sponsor for implementing SirionLabs’ newest products into our own contract lifecycle management platform. I’m living our customers’ journey.
Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion about Digital Transformation. For the benefit of our readers, can you help explain what exactly Digital Transformation means? On a practical level what does it look like to engage in a Digital Transformation?
The term “digital transformation” is usually understood as the integration of digital technologies into previously analog business processes. This can be something as simple as moving a pen-and-paper ledger into a spreadsheet or as sophisticated as using artificial intelligence to automate entire workflows. But I think the important thing to realize is that engaging in digital transformation is not just about adopting new technologies for the sake of using technology. The digital transformation is fundamentally about the nature of work — it’s about driving efficiency, accuracy, and productivity in business. Digital technology enables this, but at the end of the day, it’s just a tool to create more effective processes, enable continuous learning, and improve our ability to make decisions and act on them. The key is to pick the right technology to create these opportunities and not just mindlessly digitizing workflows because that’s what everyone else is doing.
Which companies can most benefit from a Digital Transformation?
I think all companies can benefit from a Digital Transformation, from the small business owners who use a software program to take orders from customers to multinational corporations that require tools to enable hundreds or thousands of people to collaborate around the world. That said, I think digital transformation is especially relevant to large and midsize businesses. In the context of large businesses, their longevity demands transformation because in the digital age survival requires efficiency. Midsize companies benefit from digital transformation because they are able to deliver more standardized solutions in a cost-effective manner, which boosts their competitiveness in the market.
We’d love to hear about your experiences helping others with Digital Transformation. In your experience, how has Digital Transformation helped improve operations, processes and customer experiences? We’d love to hear some stories if possible.
At SirionLabs, we’ve built a SaaS platform that helps our customers digitize their contract management processes, which historically has been a pretty neglected area of business in the context of digital transformation. Part of the reason for this is that the first waves of B2B SaaS were focused on digitizing the low-hanging fruit in business operations — things like customer relationship management or HR operations. Contract management is obviously a core part of running a business. In fact, without it, businesses simply couldn’t operate. But it was one of the last core business areas to be digitized because it is so complex. It’s really hard to build a better contract lifecycle management platform without intelligent features that can both track and contextualize contractual obligations and changes in those contracts that can unlock new opportunities to create value. That’s what we’ve done at SirionLabs and in the short time I’ve been with the company I’ve already seen the incredible efficiencies we’ve enabled for our clients at all different scales. Our contract authoring solution can free up time for employees while ensuring accuracy that can be checked in a single system of record, while our post-signature vendor management service can correct for millions of dollars in lost value when it’s applied to large, complex outsourcing contracts. This ability for a single platform to operate seamlessly across scale and use cases is what the digital transformation is all about.
Has integrating Digital Transformation been a challenging process for some companies? What are the challenges? How do you help resolve them?
It’s definitely been very challenging for many companies, but no one ever said it would be easy. I think the challenges associated with digital transformation are especially acute for large corporations, which have developed complex workflows over long periods of time. These systems are all connected both logically and technically, but these connections are more like a ball of string than a jigsaw puzzle. You can’t just pull one thread and replace it with another. For these companies, a digital transformation means a holistic change. It requires program design and management, then implementing these programs across numerous underlying projects. The companies that see the most success in their digital transformations are those that pick the right place to start and this requires deep thinking about how the technology will change existing processes well before it is ever implemented.
Ok. Thank you. Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are “Five Ways a Company Can Use Digital Transformation To Take It To The Next Level”? Please share a story or an example for each.
Contract lifecycle management software. So of course I’m going to start with improving a company’s contract lifecycle management using SaaS tools like SirionOne. CLM software is transformative because it enables collaboration across teams responsible for managing contracts — typically legal, procurement, and business — on an easy-to-use platform that can be tailored to the exact needs of an organization while empowering those teams with deep contract intelligence that can drive better decisions. SirionOne is unique as a CLM because it creates perfect visibility into legacy contracts, accelerates contract cycles through automated authoring processes, and intelligently manages obligations to build stronger relationships and drive operational performance. We clearly saw the positive effects of our CLM when it was adopted by a large airports authority, which used it to manage the contractual turmoil created during the global pandemic. By using SirionOne, they were able to monitor procurement contracts across more than 700 suppliers while recouping nine percent of their annual revenue that other companies typically lose through poor contract management. The increased efficiencies and recovered value the airport authority gained through automating thousands of operational tasks and consolidating contracts on a single platform was passed on to millions of customers and ensured smooth, efficient operations during a time of great uncertainty.
Digital post-signature contract management tools. Managing post-signature contracts is one of the most overlooked areas where businesses can unlock value using intelligent CLM tools like SirionOne. Post-signature contract management can dramatically improve business relationships by ensuring that businesses and their customers are delivering on their promises. It turns a static contract into a living document, which creates opportunities for businesses to deliver a superior experience to their customers even if situations change after a contract is signed. At SirionLabs, we clearly saw this with a global telecommunications service provider, which manages supplier relations for one of the largest wireless carriers in the world. By consolidating post-signature contract management for its roughly 3000 suppliers across 35 countries into a unified platform, the company was able to cut manual efforts and costs by 60% through new contract creation within SirionOne and generate an 80% reduction in supplier disputes through trust and alignment with suppliers. These are the kinds of gains in productivity and cost savings that companies should be aiming for in a digital transformation.
Artificial Intelligence. AI has become a bit of a buzzword, but there’s a reason for all the hype. Although we’re not at a level where artificial intelligence can make us a cup of coffee and drive us to work, intelligent software tools are already improving the accuracy and efficiency of businesses by automating repetitive manual processes. As the only contract lifecycle management platform that leverages machine intelligence to manage the performance of contracts against outcomes, we’ve seen AI work wonders for our customers. The numbers speak for themselves here. SirionLabs has seen its customer base quadruple over the past year-and-a-half and has doubled its year-over-year revenue each of the past three years. Why? Because our unique AI-powered contract management tools unlock a tremendous amount of value for our customers
Digitize documents. This one isn’t quite as glamorous as artificial intelligence, but it’s just as important for companies pursuing digital transformation and is actually the foundation for intelligent software. A company’s documents are the raw data that drive efficiency through the implementation of digital tools. Without this source material as input, digital tools lose a lot of their effectiveness. Not only does digitizing documents eliminate all the wasted time rummaging around in filing cabinets through easy search functions, but it also creates opportunities to generate new insights by using intelligent software to tease out hidden connections in unwieldy amounts of data. A major telecommunications company offers another great example of this in practice. This company operates across multiple continents and one of the first priorities in its digital transformation was digitizing and consolidating its supplier contracts from around the world onto a single platform. This created a large repository of supplier contract data that the company could use with SirionOne’s intelligent contract lifecycle management platform to create more efficient and cost-effective supply chains for its businesses around the world.
SaaS Integrations. By now the idea that “software is eating the world” has become a truism. There are SaaS integrations for just about every business function imaginable and businesses should leverage these integrations to get the most out of their digital transformation. To use SirionLabs as an example, we recently partnered with Box so that customers who use both these tools can use them more efficiently. Our partnership allows our customers to seamlessly connect contracts in the Box repository to our SirionOne contract lifecycle management platform. This overcomes one of the most challenging parts of CLM — allowing easy third-party access to contracts without compromising security — through a strategic partnership between two SaaS providers. In terms of delivering value to our joint customers, SirionLabs and Box’s partnership is greater than the sum of its parts.
These are just a few ways that businesses can create successful outcomes in their digital transformation, but I’d expect they will become increasingly common in the coming years.
In your opinion, how can companies best create a “culture of innovation” in order to create new competitive advantages?
The best way companies can create a culture of innovation that leads to competitive advantage is simple. They should reward initiative and change. If it’s so simple, why don’t most companies do it? Because change is frightening. It’s risky. It doesn’t always end with wine and roses. But change is necessary for survival and success. The world is constantly changing and it’s critical for companies to empower their employees to change before it if they want to stay ahead. Good things tend to happen when management backs team members who are working toward intelligent, courageous change.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
My favorite is from Mark Twain: “It is wiser to find out than to suppose.” It’s a reminder that we all operate on a set of assumptions both in our business and personal lives. I don’t obsess over assumptions, but I do try to spend at least a little time questioning every assumption before making a decision about something. This has served me well in my personal life and in leading negotiations in business. You never know when your implicit biases may be blinding you to a better solution. If you take the time to interrogate them it can lead to great results.
