Dating back as far as 'Hammurabi's code - and perhaps even further - rules and contracts have established standards and guidelines for interactions between people, companies, and each other. Leading organizations and legal departments realize that contracts play a critical role in commercial exchanges in the current economy. Still, there are many outdated contract strategy procedures that result in organizations suffering from wasted time, squandered revenue, increased contract risk, and contract lifecycle bottlenecks. As such, here is how organizations can maximize legal operations for digital transformation success with contract management software.
Why Manual Contract Management Won't Cut It
Organizations can encounter a myriad of challenges during the contract lifecycle management process. Unfortunately, in-house legal departments have been slow to adopt an enterprise contract lifecycle software solution to manage their contracts from beginning to end.
For many legal departments, fostering efficiency between people, processes, requirements, and technologies is challenging. Communications and contract tracking among employees, contract managers, legal professionals, vendors, and customers can be time-consuming, disorganized, and can lead to important items being missed as well as costly delays. It is all too easy to overlook approvals, contract alerts, terms and conditions, contract budgeting, and other important details with the contract process…
...especially with lackluster and antiquated contract management solutions.
Many legal departments utilize a combination of technologies to process legal requests, contract drafting, contract review, contract negotiation, signatures, post-signature contract storage, compliance, and contract renewal (or contract closeout). Legal operations have – unfortunately – relied on emails, shared drives and folders, various document processors, inadequate storage software, and the like to get the job done. The results can be devastating: lost contracts, incorrect document versions, overlooked contract risk, missed tasks, overlooked opportunities, decreased revenue, and a squandered organizational reputation.
In order to avoid the deleterious consequences above and – instead – embrace the future of contract management, digital transformation is a necessity for leading organizations.
Improving Legal Operations With Contract Management Software
Legal operations digital transformation requires centralizing people, process, internal requirements, and external regulations and goals. Too often, disconnected systems such as sporadic emails, tedious legal intake forms, scattered contract drafting tasks, stressful contract approval routing, folder file storage, chaotic contract negotiations, external signing, and manual post-signing contract management rear their ugly heads. A full CLM software system is needed to fulfill successful legal digital transformation.
To begin legal operations digital transformation, organizations should focus on:
- their organizational goals.
- a review of how people work and implement document contract workflows.
- document break downs in the legal processing chain.
- audits of what processes can be automated.
- finding and standardizing contract documents and language.
- documenting exceptions and rules variances.
- implementing systems for automation.
- involving human interaction for complex exceptions.
- measuring contract management KPIs.
- continuously improving.
- repeating this process.
Next, organizations should enlist the aid of a full contract lifecycle management software solution that provides comprehensive contract lifecycle automation and meets the requirements documented above.
Next, organizations should examine ways to improve the entire contracting process, including automated vendor/customer/partner intake forms, full vendor/customer management, automated and user-friendly legal request forms, speedy contract approvals, automated contract authoring, integrated electronic signatures, and post-execution monitoring.
Contract Management Software for Legal Operations
Now you know the cutting-edge legal operations technology tools that can help general counsel, paralegals, and other legal ops professionals to realize a workflow process that decreases risk, lessens bottlenecks, and assists organizations in overseeing a growing number of increasingly complex contracts for heightened legal operations. Therefore, it is now time to choose the legal contract software solution – recognized as a Leader according to Forrester - that best suits your organization's needs.
Stop wasting time, money, and precious legal operations resources on disorganized legal contract management. Start centralizing document management, expediting compliance and approvals, boosting your ROI, and more with a leading legal contract lifecycle management software. To see leading legal contract lifecycle management software in action, click here.
To stay up to date on contract lifecycle management best practices, industry news, and legal tech innovation, click here.
