December 2021- Greetings of the Season

Despite the uncertainty and challenges we’ve all faced the past couple years, there is so much to be grateful for.

First and foremost, our QuisLex family is safe and healthy, and it remains our sincere hope the same is true for all our clients, partners and friends. Our gratitude is extended for the continued scientific advancements in medical treatments and vaccines that are improving outcomes and will hopefully lead us to the other side of the pandemic soon.

We’re also grateful for another successful year at QuisLex. We continued our upward trajectory with new growth and expansion, while also helping our clients overcome challenges and achieve new successes. The value of our client relationships is matched only by the value of our talented team, both of which remain strong.

Among the highlights from our year, QuisLex is proud to have again been recognized for excellence by three respected sources:

In May, QuisLex was included in the highest rank of Chambers and Partners’ second annual ranking of ALSPs. For the 11th consecutive year, QuisLex ranked as a Band 1 provider.

In June, QuisLex was named a 2021 ACC Value Champion, together with our client NetApp and two additional partners for a collaboration that reduced NetApp’s contract approval time by 80%. This is our fifth ACC Value Champion award in the past seven years.

In September, QuisLex was identified as a market leader by ALM Intelligence’s Pacesetter Research for Legal Departments-Operations 2021-2022, an independent research group focused on professional services.

While it’s been an exciting year for growth, we also look ahead with anticipation at what is to come in 2022 and beyond. Here are a couple areas on which we’re keeping a close eye:

• Privacy and Compliance

As the GDPR, CCPA and other new consumer protections are expanded and take greater hold, contracts are already being rewritten to redefine what constitutes private information and to comply with new privacy regulations. We are actively working with clients today to prepare for these changes and will continue to focus on expanding our services to support organizations in their efforts to maintain compliance.

• End-to-End Contract Lifecycle Management

We continue to grow our support of contracting, from inception to closure. Law departments, stretched to keep up with contract volumes, have turned to QuisLex to supplement their commercial teams and, in several instances, to take ownership of contract categories, such as procurement, leasing, trials and evaluations and nondisclosure agreements. In addition to supporting this transactional work, we put processes in place to capture data and report on key objectives and metrics. We also update our clients’ templates and playbooks based on accumulated knowledge. The results are lower overall costs of contracting, reduced cycle times, consistency in risk management and internal legal teams focusing on the highest-value work.

• AI-Enabled Contracting

Law departments are also exploring AI tools to supplement contract review, identify nonstandard risks and facilitate approvals. Successful implementations can significantly shrink cycle times and hone negotiations to the most critical issues. However, to be successful, these tools need playbooks that serve as programming instructions and testers to review results and provide feedback. QuisLex has been working several AI developers to establish the infrastructure and to integrate these tools into the contracting process. Our 2021 ACC Value Champion Award is one such example of a successful collaboration, and we look forward to more inroads with AI.

• M&A Due Diligence and Integration

We are seeing a significant uptick in merger and acquisition activity. The due diligence process has always been ripe for right-sourced review and capture of pre-merger obligations and overlaps. The successful integration of two or more companies further requires an operational approach to align relationships with customers, suppliers and common partners. QuisLex is heavily involved in this post-merger work for several of our clients, relying on experienced project teams in India and the U.S. We have recently hired Shanil Vitarana as our U.S.-based executive director, corporate and M&A solutions, to oversee and innovate in this burgeoning area of client service. Shanil has 15 years of in-house experience in financial services and leading M&A and strategic investments in the U.S., Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

• Litigation and Regulatory Investigations

It was gratifying to see our clients and their law firms gravitate to QuisLex for their value-added litigation work, especially for managed document review for regulatory investigations and litigations. Many of these were high-stakes, high-volume, fast-paced matters of critical importance to our clients. We expect regulatory enforcement actions to return to pre-pandemic levels going into 2022.

Thank you to all our clients, partners, employees and friends for your support throughout this past year. We wish you and your families the happiest of holidays and all the very best in the new year!