Recital eliminates hours of contract negotiation with integrated email

Recital selects the Nylas Email API to save 9+ months of development time and $100,000s

Recital is an AI-enabled contract negotiation experience that works in and with the tools legal teams use everyday, like Word and email. Recital unlocks the prior work of in-house counsels, contract professionals, and legal departments to create a clause library and playbook, and make that knowledge available directly in Word. The application also lets you compare contract revisions directly from your email inbox, based on a version history of contracts that are automatically assembled from email attachments and cloud storage.

Traditional legal tech products require months of costly implementation. Recital disrupts this paradigm, delivering a simple yet elegant solution so that legal teams can see value from day one.  

Challenge: 

Unifying disparate conversations and contracts in a single interface 

When Brendan Mulholland, Co-Founder and CTO at Recital Software, and his team first set out to build a better solution for contract negotiation, they knew they needed to seamlessly integrate their application with the tools that legal teams use today to draft, share, and store contracts, including cloud storage solutions and email service providers. 

“Lawyers are expensive people,” says Mulholland. “Traditionally, they’ve negotiated contracts in a very manual way, spread across different communications threads and files. Legal teams spend at least a quarter of their time hunting down things like email attachments, which is a huge waste of time that could be better spent on other work.”

The development team at Recital knows how hard it is to integrate with complex external services. They built a similar integration, with cloud storage providers, and found it was easier said than done. “We spent a month building an integration with Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, and SharePoint to allow users to scan files within their cloud storage provider. Without a single, unified API, we had to start from scratch for each provider, consuming limited development time and resources.” 

Solution: 

How Recital empowers legal teams with streamlined document comparisons from email

When the time came to build integrations with email service providers, Brendan and his team set out to find a solution that would save time and resources upfront while also minimizing the burden of maintaining those integrations later on. “The first vendor we evaluated was acquired and shortly thereafter shut down its service,” remarks Mulholland. “We needed an integration partner that would be around for the long haul.” 

Then, the Recital team discovered Nylas. With the Nylas Email API, Recital could quickly launch support for its user’s preferred email service providers while leaving the door open to easily add additional providers later on. “The vision for Recital included email scanning right from the start. We needed to prove the product was viable while also setting ourselves up for maximum compatibility down the road, all on limited time and resources. Nylas was a natural fit.”

Recital used the Nylas Email API to build integrations with Gmail and Microsoft Outlook, the top two email service providers for business users worldwide. With these integrations, legal professionals can select contract files directly in their email client to compare in Recital. Once selected, Recital automatically detects any previous versions of the contract and highlights all changes between the versions. Within seconds, the user can see all previous versions of a contract and quickly review the latest changes–all without manual, tedious review cycles.  

Results:

Recital streamlines contract management with Nylas 

Through Recital’s integrated approach, supported by Nylas’ Email API, the team built its email features in just two days with one engineer, saving 9+ months in development time and $100,000s. 

Today, with the help of Nylas, Recital delivers an intuitive experience that helps legal professionals save more than 25% of their time previously spent negotiating contracts. “For the average legal team, Recital can save at least $50,000 per employee, per year,” says Mulholland.  

Additionally, by eliminating manual reviews and context switching between different documents, cloud storage providers, and email clients, Recital has accelerated the time it takes to compare documents from 5 minutes to 5 seconds per document. Contract managers review 8-10 contracts at a time with at least 5-6 stakeholders, which represents close to 5 hours for full review cycles across all stakeholders. Recital condenses this timeline by 60x, quickly adding up to significant productivity gains across a contract team’s entire workload. 

Moving forward, Mulholland and his team are excited to take advantage of the latest platform updates courtesy of Nylas API v3, including instant, unlimited historical data access, to deliver the best possible user experience. To learn more about Recital and how they use Nylas to modernize and streamline contract management workflows, check out this on-demand webinar.