Can We Afford to Continue with Business as Usual When it Comes to IT Agreements?
Anne Hall is the Founder and CEO of ITagree, a global online IT legal solutions provider aimed at ‘helping businesses agree’. ITagree does not provide legal advice; customers buy their products, use their configuration services and then get whatever customisation or legal advice they require from their lawyer, at their discretion. With lawyers and businesses buying their products, we speak with Anne about how her company is changing the legal sector and why ITagree is an innovative way to do business.
Can you please give me a brief description of ITagree, its services and its journey so far?
ITagree began as a business idea in the year 2000. I had only recently established my specialist law firm ‘IT Law’ after 9 years as an IT lawyer in a big firm.
I decided I wanted to provide resources for IT companies and others to access IT legal agreements without having to visit a lawyer. I had been working as an IT lawyer for many years and knew that IT law was still a very specialist area. It was mostly only big firms that had IT lawyers which made it financially out of reach for many IT companies. Also I perceived a cultural mismatch between the big firms and the relatively new tech industry. IT Law started in 1999 with some large corporate clients and also a mix of smaller tech companies as clients. I wanted to reach a larger audience, a global audience.
2011 was an exciting time as we were getting our first online customers. It was very interesting that the customers were mostly in North America and were well-established businesses, not the small tech companies I was expecting. There was a variety of utilities companies, hospitals, digital agencies and software companies; our first law firm customer was even a big firm on 5th Avenue in New York!
My belief is that the ‘standardization’ model is good for efficiency and consistency; this was further confirmed with a significant project I worked on for the New Zealand Ministry of Health. I was engaged by the Ministry to draft and establish an ICT agreement for use by the Ministry and the major health agencies in New Zealand. It was an ambitious but very worthwhile project. I was part of a team that included a change management lead and other senior leaders that brought this project to life. I knew that if we could do this with the health sector in New Zealand, we could bring a similar thinking to other industries. By this stage, I had advised large corporate clients in a variety of industries and I had a strong sense that I could bring to these verticals a new and improved way of managing their IT legal engagements. I felt a sense of frustration for my clients when every supplier they dealt with presented a different type of agreement and realised the process could significantly benefit from standardization. Also, suppliers often faced lengthy negotiations each time they issued an agreement and there was no easy way for me to share the learnings (and drafting) from one negotiation to the next. I decided to make it my business to change this. Our next website iteration was launched in 2015 and it was based on a subscription model. We presented the legal products based on industry type. We also introduced negotiation resources, to share (in product format) the learnings from my negotiation experience and from feedback from user communities.
Who are your ideal clients and users, and what are they looking for that you offer?
IT businesses of all varieties benefit significantly from using ITagree. So do businesses that are procuring IT, most businesses! They want to manage this process efficiently and safely. Although each business is unique in its own way, we have visibility of the types of issues that need to be addressed by businesses with certain characteristics. By becoming an ITagree customer, the business benefits from the user community we create around that business type and for which we produce updates and new products as needed.
Lawyers are often doing a great job but they are working within the confines of a traditional mode which rewards long hours and risk adversity for the law firm. What businesses need is a rapid jump-start and then to get the ‘unique to them’ work done by their lawyer as required. ITagree provides that rapid jump-start. Lawyers are also a natural user of ITagree products and by using ITagree, the law firm can be even more profitable. Lawyers either don’t have a solid precedent base or if they do it comes at a high cost to the practice.
Another really important aspect is that we work with business networks and communities of various types in a way that recognises the common or recurring needs. Then we provide products to suit. The community could be a supplier network that includes resellers and others, or it could be an association with multiple members. An example is the work we are doing with Microsoft; Microsoft is introducing us to their distributors and the distributors are bringing us in as a vendor because the distributor’s networks all need IT agreements and so on. With this type of consistency and access to relevant legal products across a community, there can be some excellent new benefits and insights for everyone.
How would you say ITagree is changing the game when it comes to IT agreements?
We are bringing to the IT sector and their networks, an approach which has long been in use by the sector itself. That’s why it makes so much sense to our customers. IT suppliers are used to supplying base software or a cloud service and setting it up for their customers.
Bespoke software development is not very common these days, it’s all cloud service and licensing models. Imagine if we still needed to rely on software developers writing code every time our business needed some IT functionality! Yet despite this incredibly fast-paced IT industry, legal work is still being done on a bespoke basis.
At ITagree, we take the learnings and create products to disperse good practice with the speed required. When new products are required, our approach and product architecture enables those new products to be rapidly produced.
What is the rest of the agreements industry lacking, where ITagree fills the gaps?
There is a big gap in terms of IT agreements and related resources, between free and cheap templates at one end of the range and lawyers charging hourly rates at the other end of the range. Template sites often have thousands of products with an anonymous author or, templates are provided by law firms as a means to get the client in the door. There is a perception that if something is lower cost it can’t be good. Customers want the assurance of quality and support to suit their needs and so we focus on meeting that need in a highly responsive way. At the same time, our customers include cloud service providers who are charging small monthly amounts per user. For them to pay big legal fees is often unpalatable. With our plan options, we have something for everyone.
ITagree is positioned as a premium provider of standardized IT legal products. Customers know the products are drafted by IT lawyers with significant expertise and that they can get the agreements and clauses that they want. Even if we don’t have the type of agreement that a customer wants, we can produce it very quickly thanks to our approach.
There’s also a gap in that having a good agreement is often just the start. For this reason, ITagree’s products include checklists, additional clauses ad negotiation resources.
Do you have an example of a time when you have worked with a client and ‘changed their game’, allowing them to see opportunities or risks they did not see before?
Our customers are relieved to find ITagree and happy to know we are there. The customer stories are typically very positive. An example: a listed company in Australia, an e-learning platform provider, asked whether we had a ‘content creation agreement’. We didn’t, but agreed to produce one. We expected other e-learning platform businesses might be interested in this agreement too and so while there was no commitment needed from the customer that they would purchase the new agreement, we were happy to produce that agreement product and make it publicly available for purchase on our site. Within 48 hours the agreement was available and the customer did purchase it. The customer reported that they modified and populated the agreement for their own use and were able to issue it to the content providers within half a day of down-loading it from our site. In the customer’s words: “The quality of the ITagree product meant that we could use it immediately. It was all very pain free and within a few hours of first looking at the Content Creation Agreement we were able to use it and send it out – the same day! ITagree provides a valuable and high quality service that saves us time and money.”
Finally, what would you say is ITagree’s prime purpose in the world of business of law?
Our prime purpose is to help businesses agree, efficiently.
Speed to market, speed to start a project or new service, speed to stay ahead of competition and speed to transform. However you look at it, businesses need to be able to move and respond quickly. While quality needs to be a given, speed and cost are the two big differentiating factors for us. For some businesses it’s speed that’s most important, for others it’s cost, for many it’s both.
ABOUT ANNE HALL
Anne Hall specialised as an IT lawyer in 1992 and has worked exclusively in this area of the law ever since. She established a specialist law firm called ‘IT Law’ in 1999 and in parallel with that, she has worked on her online business which is today called ‘ITagree’.
ITagree utilises her experience as an IT lawyer across many industries to provide a fast and cost-efficient product-based service aimed at delivering on the speed that their customers need.
OVERVIEW
Many businesses are in transformation mode and speed is essential so that they can remain or become competitive; other businesses have, for a long time, reluctantly accepted the way they need to go about the contracting process but question why it needs to be so complex, time-consuming and expensive. ITagree’s products are aimed at all businesses looking for an efficient way to agree with other businesses on how they will deal with each other relating to supply or procurement of IT.
CONTACT
Anne Hall – Founder & CEO of ITagree
T: +64 9 377 6220 | E: anne@itagree.com | W: www.itagree.com
