Exclusive Interview with Praveen Kulkarni, Director and Co-founder of PracticeLeague

With the ever-growing demand for software solutions in almost every sector, the legal industry is also following suit as technologies are taking over the digital gap between the legal domain and technology.  PracticeLeague Legaltech is an innovative Legal Technology startup founded in 2016 by Mr. Parimal Chanchani and Mr. Praveen Kulkarni, with a mission of transforming legal services delivery. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Praveen Kulkarni, Director, and Co-founder of PracticeLeague.

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

We are an innovative Legal Technology startup founded in 2016 with a mission of transforming legal services delivery. Legal is the most important pillar of the enterprise – and works in collaboration with every business function and activity and yet has very little automation. Thus, we specialize in providing a comprehensive suite of software solutions for all the legal technology needs of the organization, connecting it and all its departments into one unified enterprise based on a solid foundation of all its legal requirements. 

We are on a path to bridge the digital gap between the legal domain and technology, with our Product Development experience spanning Contract Management, Enterprise Legal Management which includes Matters & Case Management, Compliance & Entity Management, Legal Spend & EBilling and more. We also offer a comprehensive Practice Management suite for Law firms, namely, RazorLex which is one of the most comprehensive Law Practice Management solutions in the market.

2. With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

We set up PracticelLeague with a mission to bridge the digital divide that exists between corporate legal departments and their adoption of technology to effectively enable the transformation of Legal Services Delivery.  Our objective was simple – to establish ourselves in due course of time as one of the world's foremost Legal Technology companies, one that specializes in not just blockchain and AI based technological interventions, but also humanizing technology and ensuring easy adoption post-implementation – all the while ensuring a state-of-the-art security system catering to data security and encryption. 

Our journey started with enterprise clients in Contract Management and has now expanded to include the entire suite of products covering Legal Technology Solutions as stated above. As a result, the organisation has now expanded its spread, or footprint,  to over 10,000 legal users across 100+ companies in 21 industry verticals.

3. Mention some of the awards, achievements, recognitions, and clients' feedback that you feel are notable and valuable for the company.

PracticeLeague is the only Indian company that has been recognized by Gartner in its ELM Market Guide for three consecutive years from 2019 to 2021. It has also been recognized in many other Gartner reports, like its Legal Spend & E-Billing Guide & Matter Management Guide, or the Cycle for both Legal & Compliance as well as Cyber & IT Risk Management. It is the first Indian Legaltech company to incorporate advanced Google Contract AI. It was also the first in India to use Blockchain in contracting.

In its most recent customer satisfaction survey, the company received a 92% customer satisfaction {CSAT} score. The organization has received numerous testimonials from clients across the spectrum ranging from Startups to Multinationals. The platform has now grown internationally having users across several countries like India, the USA, UAE, Mauritius, Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Ethiopia, etc.

4. Brief us about the proactive Founder/CEO of the company and his/her contributions towards the company and the industry.

My Co-founder Mr Parimal Chanchani and I founded the company in 2016.  Mr Chanchani, the CEO, leads the Product Operations and Marketing / Business Growth verticals, whereas I am the  CTO leading Product Development and Technology interventions internally. Both of us come with over 2 decades of IT SaaS product development experience. We have together been instrumental in setting up an internal organizational culture focused on making customer-centric tech solutions that are simple yet advanced, with a deep focus on client needs. As a result of these efforts, PracticeLeague LegalTech is now one of India's only Legal Technology startups that are regularly listed in global industry reports as mentioned above.

5. Tell us how your company is contributing to the AI Analytics industry of the nation and how the company is benefiting the clients.

PracticeLeague Legaltech is focused on building external partnerships and cooperative working models with AI specialist organizations like Google Contract AI, MS AI, eBrevia, and Cognitive+. This enables in its way AI to develop further, given that AI advancements are a simple function of ever-larger amounts of learning options for the solutions. These deep integrations help us as well, allowing us to internalize AI within our technological learning scales as well.

These partnerships help us deliver robust analytical reporting and dashboards to users, which provide them rich intuitive insights into their business' current status and trends – helping them to compete and stay ahead of the curve.

6. Kindly share your point of view on the current scenario of the Legal Tech and its future.

As the situation stands today, LegalTech is poised for its next big leap; for too long, it was ignored or considered a lower priority. The past few years have addressed that to some extent, but we at PracticeLeague feel that the best is yet to come. The coming years will see big moves ahead on both technologies as well as client-adoption fronts. As the factors of complexity, ambiguity, and business changes play out, we shall see more and more organizations moving to an enterprise-wide single unified system connecting all Legal aspects of the business. On the technology front, as Blockchain adoption comes mainstream and AI levels out with deeper work being done on ever-larger data sets, smarter solutions with deeper insights are set to emerge as the power of these two technologies is truly harnessed

7. Kindly mention some of the major challenges the company has faced till now.

The legal dept was hitherto treated as a cost center and usually had limited budgets. This was the first challenge – which was successfully overcome with a minute client-centric approach focused on the integration of the software and its configurability which ensured the comfort of usage to the clients. The second string was the focus on fast implementation, enabling the client organization to realize a clear value yet remain within budgets.

Now,  this is changing – as the ambiguous business environment operating in the backdrop of a changing regulatory ecosystem catalyzes a shift towards the General Counsel (GC) being a business enabler and advisor.

The second challenge that comes to mind was Covid; instead of feeling threatened, the organization delved into its inbuilt flexibility to convert it into an opportunity – ensuring that its services, not only continued but grew in options, while the client-facing part of the organization set about ensuring continued support to the users while constantly evolving innovative new solutions. This enabled the organization to take advantage of the acceleration in customer adoption brought about by the pandemic, with increasing demand for solutions like ESignature, Compliance as well as Contract Management, for example. This enabled the organization to not just weather the storm but emerge stable out of it.

8. What is your biggest USP that differentiates the company from competitors?

Our key USPs are three – A scalable full Legal Ops Platform that grows with the client; secondly, the high degree of configurability of our solutions which work effortlessly across 20 business verticals and can be easily blended into current organizational systems, supported by strong and deep integrations with wider organizational systems. This is further supported by software design elements that enable flexible adaptation to internal client workflows and templates. This is what gives our platform its configurability and adaptability to client organization requirements

The third key USP is in the speed of implementation enabling us to straddle the rare Value For Money with a High Product Quality platform with ease. This USP is ably supported by a third element  – the full range of solutions that the company offers on its platform, which bridges the full spectrum of Legal Technology.

9. How is AI evolving today in the industry as a whole? What are the most important trends that you see emerging across the globe?

Within the Legaltech domain, the field of AI will see a lot of focused action around the Extraction of Smart Fields, Summarising Work, and Document Review & Analytics. At the macro level, as the trend towards automation picks up, moving in tandem with regulatory shifts – there will be an increased focus on these aspects as the volume of documents and contracts involved will be simply too large to be handled by hand anymore, for any organization.

At the micro-level, within Legaltech, the importance of AI-based contract review, trend analysis; predictive or smart contracts are two fields that are set to grow exponentially. Another fascinating possibility is the usage of AI in predictive aspects for Relational contracts, a new contracting paradigm being examined by lawyers. The other two fields that are already in vogue – AI-based chatbots and AI-based legal research are expected to continue, as also the relatively newer field of AI usage in litigation in terms of both predictive and hunting modes of operation.

10. Please brief us about the products/services/solutions you provide to your customers and how do they get value out of it

The PracticeLeague platform is spread across four sub-brands, named Razor365, the Contract Lifecycle Management Suite; RazorCube, the Enterprise Legal Management Suite, and RazorLex, The Law Practice Management Suite. Together, these three provide a full range of legal technology solutions to nearly all legal technology requirements of organizations. The latest addition is the RazorSign solution, which provides a native inbuilt ESignature solution that can seamlessly work with all the above, or indeed, even on its own as a standalone.

Razor365 – Our Contract Lifecycle Management software fast-tracks the contracting process and makes its management effortless.

RazorSign- E-signature platform with Adhaar to electronically sign contracts faster and in a secured manner.

RazorCube – This Enterprise Legal Management platform digitally transforms complex end-to-end business operations with simplicity, connecting contracts, matters/ cases, compliance, entity, documents, IP Portfolio management into one smoothly functioning whole.

RazorLex – The integrated legal tech ecosystem revolutionizing law firms and empowering them with agile and advanced functionalities.