Transcript

Dropbox has taken a view that AI is an enabler and it is way and a tool that we can use to more quickly and efficiently handle projects so that we can focus on some of those more strategic tasks and strategic initiatives. We are tasked with reviewing or interpreting contracts and negotiating about a little over 200 contracts a month. There's a constant stream of contracts coming in. Legal operations is really in place just to ensure that the legal team is working as efficiently as possible. So it's putting new processes in place, really leveraging the tech stack that we currently and then automating any process that we can. So I was highly skeptical of of using it and especially like making it a real part of our day to day. One of the differences in practicing in-house environment versus in a law firm, we have a pretty solid template repository, but it's hard to search and we don't have a template for everything. And I found Spellbook to be really, really, really good at that. And with associate, it just did it all for me in a really quick and robust way. I think that the value is almost immediate with using Spellbook, which is really nice. Lawyers are busy, and I don't think that they necessarily want to learn something that's complex. So it needs to be user friendly. Asking a generalized AI technology like, like a regular old ChatGPT about producing a legal clause for a contract or asking it for a legal opinion is very different than, in my experience, a tool like Spellbook that is specifically trained on contracts and is including, like our own contracts. You can't replicate that with, I think, a generalized AI tool. Spellbook was one of those when I came in and actually started doing some work within Spellbook, I was blown away. Where Spellbook has an advantage in my view, and our use of Spellbook has an advantage in my view is, is that is like the substantive legal work that that we do is able to be run through Spellbook and to make our lives not only easier, more efficient, but I think actually make us better lawyers. Everybody is in the process of navigating how it best suits them. But I think our legal team is what I would call on the forefront of the adoption of AI tools in their day to day. one of the differences in practicing in-house environment versus in a law firm, We have a pretty solid template repository, but it's hard to search and we don't have a template for everything. And I found spellbook to be really, really, really good at that. and with associate. it just did it all for me in a really quick and robust way. I think that the value is almost immediate with using spellbook, which is really Lawyers are busy, and I don't think that they necessarily want to learn something that's complex. So it needs to be user friendly. asking a generalized AI technology like, like a regular old ChatGPT about producing a legal clause for a contract or asking it for a legal opinion is very different than, in my experience, a tool like spellbook that is specifically trained on contracts and is including, like our own contracts and that you can't replicate that with, I think, a generalized AI tool. spellbook was one of those went when I came in and actually started doing some work within spellbook, I was blown away. not only did it do the job of being able to review off of our playbooks and our templates, but it also brought in the industry insights, which is not something that we have seen in other tools, and actually something that I think is a big detractor, think where spellbook has an advantage in my view, and our use of spellbook has an advantage in my view is, is that is like the substantive legal work that that we do is able to be run through spellbook and to make our lives not only easier, more efficient, but I think actually make us better lawyers think everybody is in the process of navigating how it best suits them. But I think our legal team what I would call on the forefront of the adoption of AI tools in their day to day. and I needed a transition services provision. And that's just not something we do like very often at all. And I was like, oh, I have spellbook. Let me give that a try. I did it first without uploading the contract because I wanted to just see what it would give me and I asked it to give me, 4 or 5 different provisions, so I could get an idea of how it would formulate it. And I thought it was really, really great, And so those types of industry insights were really what took what blew me away, as well as the ability of spellbook to kind of create our own playbooks, not only independently within the tool, but within the team. And I think having that by in and that that support from the spellbook team, because we felt like it wasn't only a tool for now, but it was a tool for the future as well. we onboarded spellbook. Kind of an interesting time for me personally. I had a wrist surgery mid last year, when I came back it was like, oh, this we've got this new tool that we really want to get to use and we're trialing it right now. the last time I had seen a AI like legal tool. I was in a law firm. I think it was in one of my, like, law school summer internships, was supposed to help with document review and discovery. It was really bad. It missed a lot of really obvious stuff. It it would fly a lot of false flags, things like that. So I think that paired with a lot of the narrative in the general media about AI hallucination, and And I found it to be really helpful with drafting in that it found it to be like a really helpful tool where I could feed it like a statement of work template that we have with a bunch of details from our clients and say, you know, can you populate a table in this style, or can you modify X or Y or Z this way? And it was really great at one of the differences in practicing in-house environment versus in a law firm, even with a practices diverse as drop boxes where my team, we all work on everything, we kind of the people have their areas of specialty, but we can all be working on any kind of contract. So we have a good amount of variety. We have a pretty solid template repository, but it's hard to search and we don't have a template for everything. And I found spellbook to be really, really, really good at that. Like I was working on something and I needed a transition services provision. And that's just not something we do like very often at all. In, in our in our work, we don't have a ton of occasion to be needing transition services. And I was like, oh, I have spellbook. Let me give that a try. And so I queried spellbook associate for transition Services. I I did it first without uploading the contract because I wanted to just see what it would give me and I asked it to give me, 4 or 5 different provisions, so I could get an idea of how it would formulate it. And I thought it was really, really great, especially the explanatory feature that like, tells you why it formulated the provision in a particular way. from there, have picked one of them and say, oh, can you change this and make this more favorable? Can you add this bespoke term and even I would say if I had had an on point template, it would have taken me longer to like extract it, change all the defined terms and make it fit into my agreement and with associate. Because I was able to then upload the agreement I was working on, it just did it all for me in a really quick and robust way. So that was kind of a turning point in terms of using it for a lot more like substantive functionality. for me, it's a really helpful kind of dynamic tool in terms of supplementing my resources and helping me like draft in a really concise way. And I think one thing in particular that is unique to the in-house environment is the structure of team makeups. Like, when I'm working on a deal, I'm just doing it by myself. Whereas in a law firm, you've got, you know, a junior associate, a mid-level associate, you've got a partner, and there's multiple rounds for review and feedback and even just brainstorming. And we have a great culture on my team, and we have resources to be able to communicate with each other, but especially in a remote first environment where you don't have somebody in the office next door, you can just knock and be like, hey, can I, can you, can you? What do you think about this provision that I've written? Something like spellbook can be that that sounding board where if it's something that I wrote, I can put in and maybe it's something nonstandard that I've worked on, like some kind of weird license. I do a lot of music licensing stuff, which nobody else at Dropbox really has any experience with, so I'm at least from the contractual side. So it's kind of just me doing my own thing. But spellbook is trained on that kind of stuff, so I can feed in a music licensing provision into it and get feedback from spell back on it, whether that's to improve it, to make it more favorable or less favorable, or whether to make it something more market, is a kind of resource that I could only get if I went to outside counsel or like, hey, sort of like a second opinion. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And and also being a repository for like template language and things like that, where those are all like their own costly resources for in-house legal teams that we don't necessarily have budget for because, you know, you can those those resources exist, but they're really costly. And not everybody's using them to the same extent. And so you have to make a whole business case about it. But if you have a tool like spellbook where it does all of that in one, it just makes it a lot easier both to justify from like a as a business requester and like trying to get finance on board for something like that, but also in my day to day of just it's all in one place. I think I mentioned like the using it as, like a, as, like a drafting tool to just do the actual work of composing a document, like hugely helpful. And I don't think there's a ton of I'm not losing anything substantive in terms of my skill set or my review capabilities in using something like that. It's can you compose a six row, three column table with milestones of this information? It's just a matter of like copying and pasting and something like that, especially without frustrating certain word processing tools. Can be can take just an inordinate amount of time and spellbook can do it, you know, super, super quickly. And in my experience, with very, very few errors when it comes to the drafting component of stuff. say a myth about using AI tools in the legal space. I don't think it's going to replace anybody, especially especially like attorneys and like experienced contract managers. I think there's a misconception about what those tools are. You know, email didn't replace us. Word processing software is did not replace as the internet didn't replace us. You know, technologies that allow I don't mention this, but like legal zoom and like things that give you the ability to, you know, give non-lawyers the ability to do legal things did not replace us. And I don't think that this is any different. It is a tool that is very advanced and very robust in its capabilities, and I think that should be valued rather than feared. And It is a pretty high volume. And many of our negotiations, particularly the international ones, can actually be fairly sophisticated in terms of the level of issues when it comes to data protection, when it comes to data privacy, security, as well as the changing landscape of AI, has introduced a fair amount of complexity into our negotiations, both on the vendor and the customer Right now we're about 1010 folks, and where we have a mix of contract managers, attorneys and and legal operations professionals, and we're in the process of rebuilding and growing the team both domestically and internationally. My name is Cassidy I. My title is legal operations manager, and I've been a drop box for just over a month. Dropbox. Yeah. My name is Jason LeBlanc. I have been at Dropbox for about three years now, and I am a senior commercial counsel and a manager on the commercial legal team. I mean, I guess because of our I mean, Dropbox is size and like place in the market. We kind of always have a lot of contracts. And we have, I think from a business side, we really empower a lot of our engineers to try out tools. And I think there's a very engineering first mindset with, especially in the AI, the AI era of having people test out new kinds of tools and improve our existing tech stack with AI tools. my team handles any contract that Dropbox is a party to. So we see we're also working on marketing stuff, working real estate, infra kind of you name it. If somebody from Dropbox signs it, we work on it. So we always had kind of a steady state. But I would say especially now, we're definitely seeing an uptick in the number of contracts that we're doing.