That’s a wrap! A recap of everything Plexus in 2023

And so we have arrived at another December, and 2023 was another massive year for Plexus.

At the beginning of the year, we announced the appointment of Craig Harris as CEO, taking over from company founder, Andrew Mellett.

Under Craig’s leadership, we welcomed thousands of new users from all around the world to scale their impact and execute legal tasks with certainty and speed. The Plexus team also attended the Association of Corporate Counsel Australia National Conference and presented the Small Law Firm of the Year award at the ACLA Awards. Andrew Mellett also took to the stage to deliver his insightful keynote address on embracing the future of Legal transformation with The Agile Legal Function. You can download his slide deck here.

We’ve also heavily invested in R&D this year launching a range of new features to optimise and improve the Plexus platform for our customers, including enhancing our contract management solution with Microsoft Word for Web, and launching our first AI-enhanced features: AI-Generated questions, AI Draft Advice and AI Contract Summaries.

Take a look at all the updates we’ve made this year below.

Boost Legal team productivity with AI Draft Advice and AI Generated Questions

The new AI-powered features identify relevant additional contextualising questions to ask the user. Using the business user’s input, the AI system predicts relevant legal concepts to auto-generate an initial structured draft response for lawyers, addressing key issues. The allocated lawyer can then make any changes to add more nuanced legal expertise to the advice before sending the advice to the business via their automated Plexus workflow.

Read more about this update here.

Enhanced contract management with Microsoft Word for Web

The Microsoft Word for Web integration fit seamlessly within Plexus enabling users to create and edit contracts, leave comments, compare document versions, view supporting materials, and negotiate with external parties in one secure location.

Through our partnership with Microsoft, Plexus gave users the opportunity to use the technology they already know and love to draft their agreements, while also benefiting from the full Plexus contract management solution.

Read more about this update here.

Enhanced the efficiency of the Legal team with AI Contract Summaries

Our second AI-powered feature took away the Legal admin of reading and summarising documents for approval and signature; speeding up the contracting process and freeing up Legal to deliver recommendations and strategic advice to the business faster.

Read more about this update here.

Closed the contract lifecycle by linking related documents together

Client or supplier relationships can go on for years and involve many contracts and related documents. Contracts can be extended, altered, superseded or even terminated. Plexus users can now link all related documents in their Contract Management module together as Supporting Materials.

Linking these documents together ensures that every document in the contract lifecycle is connected, making related files easier to discover and providing richer context to contract owners.

Enhanced reporting to demonstrate the value of your Legal team

Plexus’ new look Performance and Matters reports enhance the visibility of your Legal function performance and provide key insight into the value Legal provides.

In the new Matters reports you can show:

• How matter cycle time has shifted

• How many matters legal has taken on

Average cycle time for matters

In the new Performance reports you can show:

• How long contracts spend in each workflow stage on average

• How long it takes Legal to review documents on average)

• How many documents a lawyer has reviewed and the average time taken

• Plus lots more

Plus hundreds of minor improvements including…

• Updated Promotion Wizard to reflect the recent national legislation changes related to privacy and unfair contract terms in Australia and instant win promotions in New Zealand

• Enhanced delegation rules creating more flexibility with AND/OR conditions

• Improved notifications for comments at all stages of the document workflow

• Updated the variety of date formats Plexus support to match the local date format for customers across globe

• Improved UI across the platform to better visualise sub-documents and highlight status and priority on the Document and Matters lists, indicate if a document’s status is ‘Waiting’ to be progressed, and confirm when a document is signed

• Improved editing capabilities for matter titles and in-line editing of Matters and Documents

• Improved security functionality to ensure admins have control over what data their users have access to view

• Enabled browser spellcheck for comments on the Activity feed

• Enabled lawyers to delete obsolete matters to keep a clear document repository

And many, many more!

These improvements are thanks to the great feedback from our users.

See you in 2024