On today's episode of The Contract Lens Podcast Becky Holloway, VP of Marketing at Malbek, chats with Omar Sweiss, Founder and CEO of JusticeBid, about e-auctions and diversity – two topics that might seem unrelated but are deeply connected. Omar begins by explaining the pain points of procuring legal services and how e-auctions can help alleviate these troubles. Using his experiences as a springboard, he dispels common myths about the e-auction world. Omar also describes how Legal as a community is becoming more curious about and willing to adopt new technology to drive value. Omar continues the conversation by sharing how e-auction technology, like JusticeBid, is helping to increase diversity in legal firms and law departments by taking down systemic barriers and creating sustainable change. So grab a glass of wine, and let's talk contracts!
Intro:
Welcome to the contract lens podcast brought to you by Malbek. In this podcast, we have conversations with contract management thought leaders and practitioners about everything contracts and its ecosystem. Today's episode focuses on e-auctions and diversity, two topics that might seem unrelated, but in reality are connected. We are joined by Omar Sweiss, founder and CEO of Justice Bid, a Chicago based company that helps legal and procurement teams save time and money in their legal procurement activities using their e-auction SaaS technology. Omar is a lifelong entrepreneur who went to law school so he could be a better entrepreneur. In the 20 plus years, he spent building businesses he's learned that trust is paramount. Servant leadership is the only way to lead, and teaching and learning are his highest callings. So now it's time to relax, grab a glass of wine, and let's talk contracts.
Becky:
Welcome, Omar. It's great to have you on the Contract Lens podcast. You are founder and CEO at Justice Bid. We really appreciate you joining us today.
Omar:
Becky, thank you I really appreciate the invite to be here with you and your audience. Thanks a lot.
Becky:
Definitely. So what are the main points that law firms and companies face around legal services procurement?
Omar:
So I think when you talk about points, Becky, we're probably thinking about pain points that I think both sides of the equation are experiencing. When you focus on the law department side, I can tell you that one of the most important things that a lot of them struggle if they don't already have an RFP program in place, is that it's very difficult to get one in place without technology helping. Prior to the technologies like ours being out there, it was really being done offline via email and spreadsheets. It was very difficult to administer. I think that's one of the beautiful things about technology is that it can help not only automate, but it can help streamline and make everything more efficient.
Omar:
So the next major issue that I would tackle in terms of a pain point for law departments is the evaluation piece. When you think about sourcing legal services and you're putting an RFP out there to a select number of firms. When you get the responses back, one of the struggles without technology, in my opinion, is how do you evaluate the responses. Especially when they are qualitative in nature and you want to be able to arrive at well, who is the best firm to handle this specific matter, who are the best firms to sit on my panel? I think that's probably another major pain point where a technology like a sourcing technology like ours can come in and really help, no doubt.
Omar:
Another thing to think about is the apples to apples comparisons when you're putting an RFP out there for bid. For example, I'll use e-discovery as an example, because it's such a clean example. You have one vendor coming back quoting you on a per gigabyte basis, another one quoting you on a per page basis, another one on a per document basis. You're not getting that apples to apples comparison. I think that's another struggle there for you as well.
Omar:
Finally, I think in many cases, when you're thinking about sourcing legal or legal procurement, oftentimes in some organizations where procurement and legal ops folks are working together, there's a lot of tension. There's a lot of misunderstanding of the goals of each side. I've seen great examples where they work very effectively together and I've had great successes as a result, but I've also seen areas where there's a lot of struggle. And oftentimes it gets to the point where legal ops cuts off procurement completely, and they end up doing this on their own. So these I think are the main struggles from the legal ops side of law departments that I think I would identify for the legal procurement space.
Becky:
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Definitely on the Malbek side with contract management, we see a lot of those tensions that can exist between legal and often it's with sales for us, but it's with procurement as well. There's the finance component. So each department has its own perspective on the issue at hand, and they're not always in alignment on how they want to handle that. So that makes a lot of sense.
Omar:
That's absolutely right.
Becky:
So you originally started with a marketplace for companies and law firms to post their project needs and vendors and suppliers could bid on them. I was reading in your about section on your company page, which I love, you mentioned that that did not work, your original idea. Why didn't it work?
Omar:
Right. What's funny here, Becky, is that when you think about most startups when they're first launching and as you probably know already, the majority of startups fail, most new companies fail. Typically the reason why is that they haven't identified the right pain point to solve. In our instance, in JB version 1.0, we were tackling the right problem, but we had the wrong solution. The reason it was the wrong solution was that my expectation was that we would have law departments come to our platform in the marketplace model, they'd be able to post their project needs and requirements. Then all of the law firms that would be signed up at our platform would be able to see that project and say, "Listen, I'm interested and I want to place a bid on this project."
Omar:
We learned very quickly that that was not going to work. The reason it wasn't going to work was the lack of control by the law departments. Even if we had a feature where you would allow them to anonymize the client name, in many instances that would turn off the law firm side without knowing, well, wait a minute, who are we potentially going to be working with? How can we clear conflicts? How can we do all of this without really getting a proper understanding of who we would be working with? So very quickly we found out that it was not going to work, and this was where my mistake came in to be quite honest, and I'm always happy to share stories of my failure. I've been building businesses my entire life. All of those businesses have been in the bricks and mortar space.
Omar:
This has been my first business in the legal and the technology world. So I didn't really approach it from a customer driven, customer discovery process. I began with my hypothesis on the problem, which fortunately enough I was correct on. However, I didn't go out and start testing and doing interviews with potential prospects and clients to really get a proper understanding if this would be the right solution. So I failed quickly and that's probably one of the best things you can do as a startup, fail fast.
Becky:
Absolutely.
Omar:
Only because I knew that we were tackling the right problem, I wasn't going to walk away. I knew that I was going to take what I would learn from that failure and come back to the drawing table and build out the solution. Which is what it is now, a software as a service solution offering that would solve all of those major pain points and issues that the corporate law department clients had with the marketplace model that we were not solving.
Becky:
So the concept of failing fast, I think failure in the startup world over the last five to 10 years has really been celebrated in many ways because it's actually one of the greatest teachers. It's how you get to success ultimately. As you said, most startups are going to fail, and the idea that you're going to come up with an idea and it's going to be perfect from day one is just unrealistic. Listening to those who are experiencing the pain points is critical to finding a solution that they're actually going to use, that they're going to want and that they're going to use.
Becky:
So you later pivoted to a SaaS based legal services, e-sourcing solution. As I mentioned, you talked to numerous in-house counsel, law firms, tech providers. What did you learn from those conversations that you were missing from your first solution? You did mention lack of control. What were some of the other things you learned?
Omar:
So I'm going to hit that one once again, because the lack of control was probably the number one thing. They wanted to have the ability to influence who was invited to their events. Oftentimes remember, they typically are not inviting firms they have not worked with in the past. So they're typically going to their panel of attorneys and they would want to be able to invite those attorneys that specialize in a specific practice area or a geographic region they were looking for and invite them to that specific event.
Omar:
Imagine being in a marketplace model where you have literally, let's just say the Am Law 200 firms signed up and let's say 50% of them are like, "Wow, this seems like a pretty big case here, a pretty big matter. More likely than not, it's going to be a larger client. What if we placed the bid on this now?" Now you've got a corporate law client who potentially could have a hundred proposals that they would have to filter through and review, which when you think about a panel program, you're probably doing that anyway. But to do that on a matter by matter basis, that can become very cumbersome. That to me was the number one issue that I think we saw that the law departments had with the marketplace model. And I think that's probably the main reason why we moved away from it.
Becky:
Okay. That makes a lot of sense. So let's talk about e-auctions. So for our listeners who are unfamiliar, what is an e-auction? How does it work? How is it different than the marketplace you had originally envisioned?
Omar:
Excellent question. So when you think about sourcing legal services and you think about the sourcing process, it typically nose dives into two categories. One, you can run an RFP where you're literally sending out the invite to specific firms, collecting their proposals, evaluating them, and then making a decision based off of that. An e-auction however is a little bit different. An e-auction says, "All right, not only did we collect the responses on this proposal, but for the pricing component of this proposal, we are going to take X amount of these firms that we're going to shortlist potentially, or maybe all of them and put them into an e-auction." Typically an e-auction for legal services is a reverse e-auction.
Omar:
Now I do want to point out here very quickly that e-auctions in the legal space are pretty much relatively new, for the most part. There have been some early adopters and pioneers in the space like GlaxoSmithKline, like Toyota, eBay, and a few others that have been doing e-auctions for over 10 years to be quite honest. But the majority of those in our space have not even heard of or understood how e-auctions even work. So a typical reverse e-auction functions like this, and we have different types of e-auctions, but I'm going to stick with I think the most common one, which is our English reverse e-auction.
Omar:
What happens is the initial pricing that the firms had submitted with their RFP and their response is going to be the beginning point for them in the reverse e-auction. What happens is in the e-auction, they're going to be in a live timed event, typically 45 minutes or so, are going to be able to adjust their pricing real time, comparing themselves to others without seeing who the other firms are. So they'll be able to see their ranking compared to the other participants in the e-auction, and they're able to adjust their pricing going in a reverse direction.
Omar:
So if you had, for example, $100,000 for the discovery phase of a litigation, you now are probably going to adjust that down to 90 or 85, depending on how you see yourself competitively in the marketplace. So that to me is how I would, I think succinctly define what a reverse e-auction is and how an e-auction functions.
Becky:
Okay. So I noticed that you use this term race to the bottom in your About Us section. How are e-auctions not a race to the bottom, but actually benefit both sides of the transaction?
Omar:
That's one of the things that I think I'm always trying to bust as a myth is that e-auctions are not a race to the bottom. Let me begin by also pointing out the history for a moment. Back in 2009 when we had the recession, and coming out of the recession is really where we start to see the emergence of RFPs, albeit done offline and email and spreadsheets. The first reaction by many and typically law firms and others in the space was, well, wait a minute. I mean, is this going to become a race to the bottom, RFPs? Are we pencils? Are we commodities? What is this? Very quickly now, I mean, fast forward 10 years now, we got law firms responding to thousands of RFPs a year, and it's not even seen as a race to the bottom. It's seen as more of a competitive bidding process.
Omar:
I think the same thing goes for e-auctions. Most people when they hear e-auction, they are thinking the same thing they thought about RFPs 10 years ago, that it is a race to the bottom. But quite to the contrary, and I'm going to bust this myth for you very quickly with a statistic that I think will blow your mind. In the majority of our e-auction events in our platform, the ones awarded the business are not the lowest bidders. So that hopefully should beg the question from you, well, wait a minute then, what's the purpose of the e-auction? The purpose of an e-auction is market transparency. At the end of the day, when you have these firms that are participating in an RFP process, they cannot see how they compare to others in the RFP process.
Omar:
However, in an e-auction where you're going to be able to show them their rankings compared to others, this allows for market transparency. It shows you how you are doing in the marketplace, compares to your peers in the marketplace. You take that information, meaning who's going to become more competitive in the marketplace, along with their qualitative responses to the RFP. Then you make a value driven decision on who you award the business to.
Omar:
So it's not saying well, here was the lowest price bidder, but I was not happy with their responses on the qualitative questions. What happens is that we're going to take what we were very happy with and very satisfied with, in fact, very confident in when they gave us the responses on the qualitative questions, but now let's take a look at them and see who's going to be a little bit more competitive with their pricing. So ultimately it becomes a value driven decision and not a race to the bottom type decision.
Becky:
So you're looking at all of the different factors and weighing them how they matter to you and what you're trying to accomplish here?
Omar:
Absolutely. So every client will define value differently, but I can tell you the great majority, and this is where the tension sometimes is born between procurement and law departments is that procurement obviously is very much driven by cost savings. That's where an e-auction I think can really deliver some of that value, but it's not a one dimensional decision.
Omar:
You're taking that information, coupling it with the information on the qualitative responses in the RFP. Who are your proposed team of attorneys, what's your strategy to bring this case to a resolution? Taking all of this data and combining it. We have our scoring and weighting system that allows you to be able to make this an objective driven decision as well too, where it ultimately shows you who the best firms are that you should be hiring for this matter.
Becky:
That makes a lot of sense. So do you get a lot of resistance from certain attorneys or certain companies around whether this makes sense for them? What is the feeling in the legal community around e-auctions?
Omar:
Right. So it's probably the very similar nature what their reaction was to RFPs back in 2009, but it's very quickly changing. I'll tell you for a few reasons why. But with e-auctions, the reason why we're seeing a lot of participation by the law firms is number one, the clients. You've got big client names are saying, "Hey, listen, if you want our business, we want you to be part of this process." Nine times out of 10, they're going to be a part of the process.
Omar:
Now there are moments in time where law firms, whether it's an RFP or an e-auction, have to make a decision, whether this event, again, whether it's an RFP or an e-auction, if it makes sense to participate. Regardless if it's the auction or the RFP, they have to make a decision on for our firm. Does it make sense to invest some time and resources on bidding on the specific matter? Do we have the right team? Do we have the right strategies? Do we have the right people? Can we be aggressive enough in pricing to be able to win this business?
Omar:
If they feel like it's not worth their time to do it or if they feel like they might not have a chance, or they feel like, you know what, it's probably not good for our business, they probably will not participate regardless if it's an e-auction or an RFP. But I'll give you an example. One of our clients recently said, especially coming out of this pandemic now, cost consciousness has really risen to one of the top priorities for law departments. They said, "We want to give an e-auction a go."
Omar:
They've been doing RFPs for quite some time. They actually had an RFP where they sent it out to 12 firms. Then they ultimately had the e-auction afterwards. In the e-auction, they had six of the law firms they invited and they told me that they're expecting three of the six to actually participate. Within 24 hours of the invite going out all six said, "Yes, we are in." So I think we dispelled the myth for them as well too, that law firms probably won't participate in, especially if they already responded to your RFP.
Becky:
Sure. So you mentioned the pandemic. How has the pandemic either helped or hurt the perception of e-auctions?
Omar:
Yeah. So I'm going to throw a little hot sauce on this for you right now, okay? Bear with me, Becky.
Becky:
Sure.
Omar:
I was very bullish on RFPs in 2009, and I got a lot of pushback by a lot of my attorney friends because I'm a lawyer by background. So I talked to a lot of my attorney friends, and a lot of them said, "Man, you're crazy. You're talking about RFPs for legal? I mean, what are we pencils? Commodities? It's not going to happen." Again, fast forward 10 years later, here we are now. They have pricing directors on staff, business management, people on staff, proposal writers on staff. It's become its own industry. I am now coming out of this pandemic going on record to tell you that I am very bullish on e-auctions. I think this pandemic has accelerated that for us in terms of what we've seen at Justice Bid.
Omar:
A lot of our clients are now saying, "We want to learn more about e-auctions and it always begins with education. Tell us more, tell us how they work, tell us how your clients have used them effectively and which type of e-auctions should we be using when." I'm telling you within the next 12 to 24 months, I think we're going to see a steady rise in corporate law departments use of e-auctions. That's my bullish prediction to you. I'm already sensing it from our clients already, but I'm going to go on record and say industry wide, that we're going to see a lot more people exploring the concept of e-auctions.
Becky:
So we'll revisit this in a year and check in and see how things are going. I like it.
Omar:
There you go.
Becky:
Are there types of legal services or types of scenarios that it makes the most sense for to utilize an e-auction?
Omar:
Yeah. That's a great question. I think typically it's all about adoption. I'll tell you from our perspective, we've seen it done for almost any type of work, but when law departments are starting to say, "We want to experiment with it. We'll probably start with more of the lower value based work." They begin there. Once they see the actual results is when they get a little more excited and they're like, "I want to try it now for something else, something a little bit more higher up on the chain of risk and see how that works." Eventually they move to doing more and more e-auctions in all different types of matters.
Becky:
So they got a little bit of taste of it and they have to come back for more?
Omar:
That's the nature of humanity, right? When it comes to change management, it's hard to do it cold turkey, right?
Becky:
That's right.
Omar:
The full 180 change. So you begin doing a little something, dabble a little bit, get a little comfortable with it. Once you do that, then you take some more incremental steps.
Becky:
Yeah. I mean, it wasn't that long ago that the whole idea of cloud-based software, it was ludicrous, right? What? Something not behind our firewall? We would never do that. So you're absolutely right.
Omar:
That's something for sure in the legal world. I know that change management always been an issue, but I think we're seeing an acceleration of that with a whole host of digital transformations across the board that really, I think is accelerating businesses like Malbek and Justice Bid and others out there that can really help drive value for law departments.
Becky:
It's actually a really exciting time, I think, to be in this space. I mean, I've talked to a number of guests on the podcast who, we've talked about sort of traditionally legal and I can say this to you since you're a lawyer. They're not known for necessarily being those early adopters.
Omar:
You're right.
Becky:
They tend to be a little bit tentative around trying new technologies. How does that factor in for you guys?
Omar:
I think we're seeing a change though. I think the nature of the world, the pandemic we're in, the social justice movement we're in, we're seeing people now willing to take more risks. I think that to me is ultimately what the heart of creativity is all about is your willingness to say, let me experiment with something new.
Omar:
Then again, going back to our earlier conversation, we're really overcoming the stigma of failure. It's okay to fail now. It's okay if we made some mistakes, but I guarantee we learned a lot from those mistakes that will inform what we're going to do in the future. So I think coupling all of that information together bodes really well for where we're at as an industry and I think where we're heading.
Becky:
Absolutely. So this is the Contract Lens podcast. Malbek, we do contract management software. We talk about contracts all the time. You're in kind of an adjacent area. We're not competitive. Where do you see the touch points or the synergies that exist between the e-auction world and contract management?
Omar:
Yeah. So typically whether you're in legal or even non-legal worlds, sourcing usually happens before you contract typically. We want to figure out who we're going to do business with. We're going to vet them. And then once we figure out who we're going to give the business to, then we're going to go into a contracting stage. So I agree with you 100%,. We are definitely not competitive. It's more synergetic than anything, but I'll give you an example, like for a lot of our clients that might be running RFPs for e-discovery services. You might have certain vendors bidding on whether it's hosting, review, OCR, whatever it might be.
Omar:
Once you decide who you want to award the business to, and it can be one vendor or multiple vendors, at some point in time, you are going to have a contract. What will happen is the RFP responses become the foundation for the material terms that go into your contract. So I do see some overlap there, but again, not competitive, more synergetic and where we really help inform what goes into the contract. Then the contract negotiation happens within a system like Malbek.
Becky:
Absolutely. Let's talk a little bit about diversity and inclusion in the legal community. I attended a legal week back in February and Malbek actually participated. We had a panel. One of the requirements for participating was that half of the speakers on the panel had to fall into a diversity category. I think this is really fascinating. I'm seeing this more and more. I'm seeing diversity tracks at different conferences that I'm going to it. People are talking about it outside of just the news.
Becky:
It seems to have penetrated into the business world in a way I just haven't seen previously in my career. I'm curious if you could comment on that and do you think that's here to stay? I guess kind of adjacent to that, how can e-auctions help law firms and corporations achieve their diversity and inclusion goals? Because I'm assuming that insight into a firm's demographic makeup of the people who would be working on your matter, that that could be included in the e-auction as well.
Omar:
Great questions there. Actually, you're bringing up one of the topics that I'm most passionate about, and that's diversity. As being a young South side, Chicagoan growing up in the inner city here in Chicago, being a minority, being a minority owned legal technology founder, being a minority attorney, I've always been in this position of seeing diversity through a different lens. I've been fighting for these issues, advocating for these issues, writing about these issues, speaking on these issues for many years. I think this year because of the social justice movement and everything that has happened, as unfortunate as it has been, that's been happening, I think has really awakened many people.
Omar:
I think the million dollar question is, is what we're seeing now sustainable and will it be sustained, meaning the energy and helping drive change, or is it going to be one of those ebb and flow types? Oh yeah, we're very interested in this topic now. We care about it. We're going to help make some change. And then typically dies off. We've seen this rollercoaster far too many times in all spaces, legal and otherwise, where things like this happen, everyone stands up and says, "All right, we've got to do something about it." And then it just dies down.
Omar:
My hope and my prayer that this time around is that this will be sustained and it has to be sustained because there's so many systemic barriers for people of color, for people of different sexual orientations, for people with differently abled status, whatever it might be, that we as a society have to do better. We have to overcome, I think what ultimately stems at the heart of all of this, which it stems out of, it's the hatred behind it. We have to make sure to overcome hate. I think you overcome hate with love and care. It begins with not only that on a high level, but it also begins with, now what can we do, all of us? What can we do as a community to help overcome these challenges that so many people are facing daily? That's where I think the diversity piece really comes into play.
Omar:
Now, what can we do? I do my part outside of Justice Bid, but even in Justice Bid we've done our fair share in terms of what we think we can help do to influence change. When you think about e-auctions, I'll even extend that to RFPs, when it comes to RFPs in e-auctions, how can that help influence diversity in the legal space? Well, you think about it this way. When you're putting out RFP for a bid in a competitive matter, a matter out for competitive bid, what typically happens is that you're going to be asking about, as I mentioned earlier, who are your proposed team of attorneys?
Omar:
One of the things that we push all of our clients to do is not only ask for a proposed team of attorneys, ask about their diversity status as well too. Let's find out who the diverse attorneys are on a matter that are being proposed on our matters. Let's help make some of these decisions given that more weight than we would have in the past, because we want to be able to influence what we can as a corporate law department. That means diverse attorneys working on our matters. The way you can do that is via the RFP e-auction process. On the qualitative questions, you should be asking for this, you should be demanding this, and you should be actively looking for it.
Omar:
That's how you begin to make change because at the end of the day, there are systemic challenges when it comes to how an attorney at a big law firm becomes a partner, and that's not going to change overnight. But we know that you get rewarded for your rainmaking abilities, your ability to get clients, et cetera. But a lot of attorneys that come from the South side of Chicago and others don't have relationships. So they're already at a disadvantage coming into a big law firm with no connections, no relationships.
Omar:
So what you can do as a corporate law department is if you get the RFP process, is demand these attorneys work on your matters. Then outside of the RFP process, socialize those attorneys with your in-house counsel, with your GCs. Let them build these relationships so that when they're up for partnership ranks in the future, they can point to those relationships and they can say, "You know what? I got these relationships and now I can be rewarded and hopefully become partner in the actual big law firm."
Becky:
Yeah. You touched on such a huge topic that would be for another podcast entirely. The whole systemic part of systemic racism. Systems in place that just like you're talking networks, networks is a system. So people who are getting their law degrees and wanting to advance in their career, if they don't have that sort of built-in network already, they're going to be at a disadvantage.
Omar:
Absolutely.
Becky:
So very interesting insights there. I'm going to throw you a bit of a curve ball here. I'm curious, given the name of your company, so you're Justice Bid. You're not legal bid. You're Justice Bid. Was that intentional?
Omar:
Absolutely. Absolutely. So people either love the name or hate the name, but they always ask me why. I always tell them why.
Becky:
Hey, as a marketer, if they're asking, that's good.
Omar:
Absolutely. I'll tell you my answer to everyone. It's always about justice, usually implicates fairness. I believe that when you're looking at an RFP process, we want the corporate law departments to be fair to firms, but we also want law firms to be fair with the clients. I mean, ultimately what led me to law school was when I was building businesses in my entire life, whether it was buying a property, selling a property, needing a lease drafted, needing a franchise disclosure document reviewed, I'd be calling upon my lawyers and I'd be getting charged $800, $900 an hour. At some point I was like, this is kind of getting excessive. Every year, it's going up more and more. Where does the reasonableness now demand that, all right, let's be a little more conservative here, a little bit more competitive here, and reward him for giving us a steady stream of business.
Omar:
So I said, you know what? I can do it on my own. But that's what led me to law school was how can I do better for myself? That's what brings me back to your point there as well, too. When you're thinking about what drives change, what can you do to make an impact with diversity, with justice, it's all about fairness. Fairness for everybody. Then for me, it's the diversity piece. One of the things that I have not told you about already that we do for corporate clients is when we run an RFP in the auctions, we are capturing the diversity data on the attorneys being proposed. But that not every single matter that a law department has is going through an RFP process. So how do we capture all of the attorneys working on these corporate law department clients matters?
Omar:
So what we do is we help our corporate law department clients issue their diversity surveys. We collect the firm-wide data for our clients on the firms they're doing business with, we collect the demographics of the attorneys. Then we also collect it on a timekeeper level. So who are the attorneys that have worked on our matters the past year? What was their diversity status? We're trying to give our clients the data they need to have some maybe tough conversations, but conversations that are very much needed about who should be working on their matters with the firms they're working with.
Omar:
We want diverse attorneys on their matters. I think to do that and to get to that, you've got to present your clients with the data. So Justice Bid is all about fairness and fairness means in so many different ways. Fairness applies to firms, to corporate law departments, to the entire ecosystem, to diversity, and so many different levels. So for me, it has special meaning, and that's why I called the company Justice Bid.
Becky:
I really like that. You mentioned that e-auctions, you're going on record that this is the future. What else do you see on the horizon?
Omar:
When you think about the sourcing legal world, sourcing of legal services, it's still in its infancy stages. So I can talk about RFPs to you right now and e-auctions, but I can almost guarantee you that the majority of corporate law departments and corporate clients are still not doing them, or maybe not doing them as frequently as they should be. I think for me, it all stems from not having the right knowledge about, for example, e-auctions. So there's a huge education piece that I think is still something that we work on with every demo. Before we go into it, let's talk about how RFPs can bring value to your organization and how e-auctions can also help drive change for you as well. So I think the education piece is clearly one of the most important things.
Omar:
I think another thing that I love to see more cross disciplinary work across organizations, I think the more legal departments get out of our bubble the better. So I'll give you an example for my team members. I've brought in a diverse team that has people from different industries in different worlds, people from the sourcing world. Guys like Adam Selsby, who is our CTO, who's been sourcing things like whether it's corrugate or things like urinals. He's been doing so many of these things in his past life, and he's bringing that outside perspective to our world. I think it's influencing what we see, because oftentimes when you get in your bubble, you kind of get fixed on seeing things a certain way. Oftentimes it's great to bring in a different perspective.
Omar:
So I think that's another thing as well, too, when you're talking about cross disciplinary work, I'd like to see a lot more work between procurement and law departments, because I think procurement can bring so much value. They have a specific skill set that not to say law departments don't have, but procurement has. So I think they're the ones that can have a lot of these discussions with the law firms on your behalf, which can be sometimes uncomfortable. They can be the ones to help negotiate the arrangements. They can be the ones that can help you actually execute these events, and help you focus more on the data piece and the analysis piece and the interpretation piece and the decision-making piece. So I think there's a lot of value to having more cross disciplinary work across different business units for sure.
Becky:
Yeah. So, you mentioned Adam. We have interviewed him for another episode of the podcast talking about RFPs, so definitely tapping into all that insight he has in that area. I think that's fantastic that you have that cross disciplined focus. So as we're wrapping things up, I wanted to give you an opportunity to promote Justice Bid. Where can folks find you? Where can they find you personally, your company? Are there any projects coming up that you'd like to promote?
Omar:
Absolutely. So I think one of the things about me is I'm very accessible. If you go to our website, justicebid.com, go to the About Us. You'll see I give you guys my email and phone number, to your audience. If you go to my LinkedIn page, I have my profile and my email and contact information. One of the things about me is that I love to have conversations. If you haven't figured this out by now, I'm a people person. I love people. I love to interact with others. I love to have not even just sales conversations, just any conversation about business and the legal world and how we can do better as a community, especially on the diversity piece.
Omar:
Some of the projects that we're working on, again, we're continuing to work on the education piece for RFPs and e-auctions, especially e-auctions. So we're doing a lot with diversity and diversity surveys and helping corporate clients with that end of things. So I'm excited about that. I'd love to have conversations about any of this with any of your audience members who might be interested in talking about it. At the same time, I want to thank you, Becky, for giving me the time to speak about a lot of these passions of mine, especially the diversity piece, and giving me the time to talk about Justice Bid as well, too. So thank you.
Becky:
Yeah, absolutely. It's also something that we care very deeply about at Malbek, also a minority owned tech firm and we're with you in this passion. So thank you for sharing that piece of it in addition to sharing a little bit about your technology. We really appreciate the time you've taken today to join us on the podcast. So thank you, Omar.
Omar:
Thanks, Becky. Thank you. I look forward to connecting to you guys soon.
Becky:
Thank you.