671 Revolutionizing MSP Contracts: Monjur

[Uncle Marv]
Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast powered by NetAlly. And today we are doing another vendor spotlight for the IT Nation Pitch It Accelerator program. Today I have with me, returning, Monjur, a pioneering company providing contracts as a service specifically designed for IT managed service providers and others in the industry.

Joining me to talk about that, co-founder, Robert J. Scott, an expert in MSP legal innovation. Rob, how are you?

I'm awesome, Marvin. How are you? Good, good.

Well, you're back for a second round.

[Rob Scott]
For sure. I figured that everything we learned last year is going to put us in a strong position to win this year.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Well, let me go ahead and ask, you know, obviously you're back, so the experience was beneficial for you. What's changed for this year?

[Rob Scott]
Well, yeah, the experience with the Pitch It competition has been very positive for us. We've made a lot of connections with other vendors that are in the community. We got a lot of exposure, which assisted us in accelerating our growth, as well as learning from the speakers and the trainers that bring valuable insights to the contestants for purposes of helping them grow.

[Uncle Marv]
Now, I mean, I mentioned contracts as a service. So for those who may not understand what that fully means, can you explain that in more detail for us?

[Rob Scott]
Of course. So ours is a cloud-based legal service that starts with industry-leading templates, curated over 500 engagements in two decades in the space, customized for each MSP, and then dynamically updated through the cloud. And unlike traditional legal services, we provide our deliverables on smart hyperlinks that actually reside in our clients' quoting tools and sales process.

So we're able to help them collapse the sales and contracting processes into one online step.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So unlike traditional, so everything's in the cloud, dynamically updated. So if we needed to make changes, we can do that ourselves, or do we still need to chat with somebody just to verify that what we're doing is correct?

[Rob Scott]
Yeah, the way that our solution is structured is you have that support available to you if you want to ask questions, but on a deal-by-deal basis, it's not necessary. And any of the online terms and conditions that are on the Mondra platform can be overwritten simply by including whatever language that you agree to your customer within your quote or proposal. The structure of the agreements gives what's called order of precedence to the quote or proposal.

So you don't have to engage with our team at all to do a contract. In fact, the Mondra platform was designed to reduce friction, both in process in terms of internally, as well as eliminate the need for counsel in the vast majority of the transactions that MSPs are entering into with customers.

[Uncle Marv]
Most of us are aware of having a master service agreement or terms of conditions, depending on how you do it, as well as a statement of work, which can vary from client to client. What other types of templates are available to us?

[Rob Scott]
That's a great question. So we do start with a quote or proposal. We provide a quote or proposal template to each one of our clients.

That quote or proposal template calls to the online terms and conditions, which include the master services agreement, a variety of service attachments for any manner of managed services that MSPs may offer. We also have a service attachment for managed compliance and a service attachment for managed AI. We have our schedule of third-party services, which is a vendor list that acts as a waiver of your client's right to sue you for any act or omission of a third-party vendor.

And we also have the data processing agreement. Those would be the regulatory, regulatorily required terms and conditions that MSPs need to have with their customers who operate in regulated industries, including healthcare, financial services, government contracting, and any customers that are doing business in the myriad of states that now have data privacy laws modeled after California's CCPA.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. I'm going to go off board here because you mentioned the addendum for third parties. The company out west that got sued along with a vendor for a backup issue, are you saying that this addendum will allow for us to include the fact that we are, you know, providing or reselling services from upstream providers?

If there is an issue with them, you can't sue us as an MSP. Is that what you're saying?

[Rob Scott]
That's exactly what I'm saying. And in that case that you're talking about, imagine if that MSP had them on your platform. They'd have a waiver for any liability related to the vendor.

And they'd also have a waiver for any responsibility of any criminal acts of third parties, which as I understand it, was the underlying issue. So regardless of whether it was the criminal actor or the vendor's fault, with the Monger platform, the MSP would have much greater legal protections than the situation they find themselves in now.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Again, off the board, because now I'm thinking of other related items, because some of these things are and are not included in our E&O insurance, errors and omissions. This almost feels like it's in that realm where, you know, it's not our fault that something happens.

And so what is the overlap with the agreements that we have along with that E&O or professional liability insurance?

[Rob Scott]
Well, as you point out, Marv, the most important aspect of the E&O customer contract relationship as it relates to your vendors is your insurance covers you for your negligent acts. So unless you have this waiver of your customer's right to sue you for an act or omission of a third party, you could be sitting there like the fact pattern in the case that you mentioned in California, where you have no insurance and no customer contract that makes it clear that you're not responsible for the acts or omissions of that vendor. This is not something that can be solved with insurance, because insurance doesn't cover your vendors, acts or omissions.

It only covers yours. And so therefore, this is an adjunct to the protections that are offered through E&O.

[Uncle Marv]
All right, sorry to go sidebar there on you, but it came up, so I had to ask. So let me ask a question this way. How does Monger help MSPs when, you know, we deal with our own pitfalls or mistakes or oversights and things like that?

[Rob Scott]
Well, you know, Monger serves as defense counsel for a number of E&O carriers. And in many instances, if you're carrying professional liability insurance, you could contact us and we could provide incident response for you or defensive claims for you. And in many instances, the carrier will cover those expenses.

A lot of that will depend on the specific policy and carrier that you're working with. We have relationships with a number of carriers that focus in managed services, and we plan to expand those relationships in the future. But what you'd want to look at is in your policy, there's a section called defensive claims.

And sometimes it says that the carrier has the right to appoint counsel. And in other situations, it says that the customer and the carrier will mutually agree. So you have some control over, in some instances, whether or not Scott & Scott would be your defense counsel.

For other policies, for example, certain carriers with Lloyd's of London, we've made an exclusive arrangement whereby we'll be the claims counsel for all of the claims. And so it will just depend on who your carrier is, whether or not we can serve as your counsel and the carrier pay us for our services in the event of a claim.

[Uncle Marv]
Now, we've talked about all these services, we've talked about the online portal, but in terms of pricing, a lot of MSPs, you know, they will go online and try to find the generic templates or they'll try to DIY themselves into an agreement. I, on this program, have advised people not to do that. But in terms of pricing, because that usually is the barrier that people see, I know that you have, obviously, the monthly subscription service, but how is this affordable for MSPs to do this?

[Rob Scott]
So we've launched it. And so, you know, one of my whole purposes in developing Manger was to make our legal services more affordable to the smaller MSPs. In reality, if you think about the managed services landscape, there's a substantial portion of MSPs that have revenue under $1.5 million. So in the first of this year, in January, we created our MSP contracts essentials package, which is geared for MSPs with under $1.5 million. It starts at $149 per month and fully loaded, it's $299 a month. So for smaller MSPs, they can now get all of the legal protections afforded by the Manger platform for $299 a month until they pass the $1.5 million in revenue threshold. And then we upgrade them to our standard package, which starts at $399. Most clients are paying $498 one-time setup fee and $498 per month.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So, I mean, I'll go ahead and ask the question, what don't we get with the essentials plan that you would get in the others?

[Rob Scott]
So there's two things that you don't get with essentials in terms of documents. One is the service level objectives and the schedule of services. We remove these documents, one, because the schedule of services is a big hurdle to onboarding and the service level objectives, many of our smaller clients weren't using those.

And so they weren't essential to the legal protection, so we remove those. The other differences are there's no logo or personalization or customization of the documents in the essentials plan. You're basically working off of our industry best practices templates, but we do customize the URLs for each MSP.

And then the other aspect that's different is the timing of the updates. The essentials plan actually updates much more frequently than the standard, and we're pushing updates to the essentials plan every month with a long-term vision of being able to push real-time updates to our clients so that they'll be able to visualize changes as we make them. That's on our roadmap, but today we're offering monthly updates for any changes to the documents for our essentials plan.

So in terms of frequency of updates, the essentials plan is much more frequent than the standard. The standard plan involves more customization, consultations with counsel on a quarterly basis that don't exist in the essentials plan.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So it sounds like it's a pretty good deal even for the essentials, cover all the basics and get yourself started.

[Rob Scott]
Exactly, and that's what it's designed to do is it's really designed for that smaller MSP who may not have very good contracts now, may have a very, you know, standard offering of managed services for which the Monitor platform was built, and they could take our standard essentials plan documents and roll them out, and it's taking us typically 14 days to go live on our essentials plan, which is another one of our goals, is to really increase the speed at which our clients obtain the legal protections.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay. Let me ask a question that I know I asked last year, maybe a little bit differently, but with, you know, Monitor offering this online, you're dealing with, you know, all the different laws in each state. How do you guys stay on top of that?

[Rob Scott]
Well, we're using artificial intelligence, legal research tools in partnership with Lexis Nexus to monitor data privacy and security regulations on a worldwide basis, so we not only cover all U.S. states, but we also cover all the federal regulations in the United States. We're also in Canada, so we're looking at the PETA and Canadian Health Act, and we're also in Europe, so we cover GDPR and UK GDPR and EU GDPR. So our data processing update services are powered by legal research tools from Lexis Nexus that we monitor.

We have lawyers that are assigned to monitoring those laws and any new laws that come out. For example, we've had new laws in Texas, Montana, and Utah this year. As soon as those laws become available, we're scrutinizing them for potential impact with our customers, and as that impact is determined, we're pushing those updates to their data processing agreements.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. If anybody out there works with attorneys, you will recognize the name Lexis Nexus and know that we're completely legit when talking about this. All right, Rob, well, it was good to chat with you again, and as per usual, we'll be, you know, monitoring you throughout the summer.

And let's see, you're probably, what, week two or three into your boot camp with IT Nation?

[Rob Scott]
That's correct. Yeah, I think we're in week three now, and, you know, it goes by pretty quickly, and it's a great program for any vendors that are considering getting involved in the Pitch It program. First of all, the IT Nation is a great group of people to work with.

We're part of the Evolve community, which we're very grateful for, but if you're a vendor in the managed services space, the Pitch It contest would be a very valuable thing for you to consider.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. And you obviously can see Rob out and about. I saw you at the IT Nation.

Did I see you at PAX 8 Beyond?

[Rob Scott]
PAX 8 Beyond.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, we saw both of those.

[Rob Scott]
I was there, and we'll be at RoarCon this month. We'll be at MSP Masterminds. We'll be at Evolve Q3 in Denver.

I'll be speaking at Exchange in San Antonio. So, big title sponsorship, platinum sponsorship with MSP World coming back into the market after a long absence, excited to get back to MSP Alliance and MSP World. So, if you're in managed services, it's going to be hard not to see Monjur.

[Uncle Marv]
Yep, and I've already checked out their swag. I might even have a mention in an upcoming episode. And all of that, of course, on the road to Orlando.

We'll see you at IT Nation Connect in November, and hopefully you'll be one of the final three given pitches there.

[Rob Scott]
We'll see. I hope so. Thank you, Marv.

[Uncle Marv]
All right, Rob. I will chat with you later. Folks, thank you very much for downloading and listening to this episode.

Come back for more vendor spotlights as we do this throughout the summer. Check out everything over at ITBusinessPodcast.com. We'll see you soon.

Holla!