JPM gets relevant clause suggestions in Serbian, German and English.

No setup and always up to date

It’s hard not to get excited about how technology can influence the legal practice when talking to Nemanja Stepanović and Bojana Javorić Mićovic from JPM. Since its start, JPM has always been focused on improving the quality of their work and streamlining their processes and workflows by using technology.One (very time consuming) challenge they wanted to solve, was to increase the access to their collective knowledge. Before implementing Henchman, they had no decent way to consult their existing templates and contracts. Especially colleagues who deal with contracts and lengthy documents, such as the M&A, commercial and corporate teams, lost a lot of time browsing for information.

In their quest to optimize this process, a lot of tools were researched. But they always required a lot of manual work, like populating the tool with information, or turned out to be time-consuming anyway as the lawyer still had to go through the whole document in detail to find the proper clause. Time that is usually not billable.

When JPM came across Henchman they were impressed by how well this solution fits their needs. A huge benefit is that Henchman is able to extract information from Epona, where they capture all their documents: ​“The fact that Henchman is resyncing with our database regularly is amazing. Newly added contracts are usable right away.” Nemanja Stepanović, Managing Director at JPM explains.

Having been engaged in all aspects of managing legal documents in JPM operations for 20 years, I can honestly say: Henchman works like a charm!
Nemanja Stepanović, Managing Director at JPM

Meaningful suggestions in each language

Founded in 1991, JPM has three decades of experience representing Serbia’s most prestigious companies and advising international clients entering Serbia and the SEE region. In practice, this means they work in many different languages, like Serbian, German, English or French. Some documents are even bilingual. Clearly, a contract drafting solution that is language agnostic is crucial for their workflow: the tool has to be able to correctly interpret contracts in different languages, and suggest clauses accordingly. Nemanja Stepanović is really pleased with the way Henchman is able to process information: ​“I’m working in law close to 20 years now, and I can honestly say: Henchman works like a charm!”

As Henchman is available within the tools our colleagues already use, the adoption rate is much higher (and quicker) compared to when you would have to open another program.

Bojana Javorić Mićović is a senior associate in the corporate M&A department who uses Henchman very extensively. ​“I love the fact that you can find everything on a clause level, and also do a more detailed search by using filters”. The main benefit of Henchman according to Bojana? ​“A lot of time is saved. Before, I spent hours searching for clauses. Sometimes I even ended up calling another lawyer or partner to check whether they had done something similar before.” Now Bojana only needs to turn to Henchman to ask her questions. And she is impressed with the results: ​“When we started using Henchman, we had some trainings but the tool is actually really intuitive. To get the hang of it, I did some queries – just to check whether the results would really pop up in Henchman. And as it turned out, they did!”

High usage ratio

At JPM, they are early adopters when it comes to new technology. Not for the sake of innovation, but for actual use. ​“You always have to balance between having the newest technology and paying for those tools. Usage ratio is key”. Nemanja Stepanović explains. That is why he finds the integration with Office 365 and Microsoft Word a huge advantage: ​“As Henchman is available within the tools our colleagues already use, the adoption rate is much higher (and quicker) compared to when you would have to open another programme.”