Category: Business Process Management

Top 5 Contract Negotiation Strategies

Posted on September 10, 2020 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management

Negotiation and compromise are a part of our everyday lives; whether it’s at home or a business situation. Contract negotiation is a discussion between parties with the desire to reconcile or resolve conflicting priorities in a written legal document. This can be a challenging task, especially when considering the risk or benefit of being too passive or aggressive in your discussions and how that might impact the bottom line.

Whether you’re an amateur or veteran, here are some strategies to keep in mind when negotiating your next contract:

  1. Set the Scope of Your Negotiation

It is important to be involved in setting the agenda of the negotiation. This could involve the method, forum, location, time, topics and the overall terms. By taking an active role, you can set topics of discussion that can protect and advance your interests.

  1. Understand the Counterparty

It is important to research your negotiating counterpart and consider what issues are important to them before you enter the conversation. Having more information and background allows you to predict what factors will be important and what they’ll likely ask for, so you can be prepared to respond accordingly.

  1. Identify Your Best and Worst Case Scenario

Make sure you have a clear idea of what you want from the agreement. Consider which parts of your contract are the most important to you or your company and identify what is your best or worst-case scenario. For example, ask yourself: which contract terms are non-negotiable for me? Which contract terms would be acceptable to compromise on? Highlight these legal issues in the agreement and work your way through the discussion one issue at a time. This exercise will help you prioritize your interests by keeping your eyes on the prize and avoid getting distracted by issues less important to you.

  1. Find Your Middle Ground

Prior to entering contract negotiations, you should set ambitious goals that you believe the other side will not agree to. This creates opportunities for concessions, showing the other side that you can compromise. For example, typically any first offer will be high and not realistic, so the party will expect that you will provide a counteroffer; this process may happen a few times before you find the acceptable middle ground. This exercise will allow you to make concessions that will not ultimately jeopardize your position and give you space to barter on issues of greater importance to you.

  1. Use Collaborative Language

In order to have productive contract negotiation discussions, you should see the counterparty as a collaborator rather than a villain. It’s a good idea to strike a collaborative tone and always attempt to end discussions on a positive note to maintain a professional relationship. For example, ask questions when reviewing the contract like “What’s the purpose behind this?”, “Could you explain what your intention was here?”, and “What about this alternative?” Showing your proactive efforts to work toward a constructive solution will help close the deal sooner.

Reviewing and drafting contracts take up to 70% of an in-house legal department’s time. With ever-increasing pressure to do more with less, improving contract efficiency through automation represents a significant opportunity to improve business performance. Learn how artificial intelligence can help you automate and manage a contract’s lifecycle.

Checklist: Importance of Contract Lifecycle Management

Posted on September 8, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Sometimes, a company is so accustomed to a process that people don’t realize how manual it actually is.

This is especially the case for contract management.

Many corporations rely on manual processes to handle contracts, leaning on paper, spreadsheets and email. While it lets you work in programs you use every day, it also means you’re cutting and pasting information into templates, entering data, writing and sending emails, searching for documents and saving items to multiple drives.

The process is a nuisance, yes. But it also invites risks, such inconsistent legal language, a lack of insight into content and status and an inability to anticipate and accommodate renewal data, pricing changes and emerging legal requirements. (We break down more challenges regarding manual contract management in this blog post if you’d like to read more about them.)

What’s the new evolution of contract management?

A contract lifecycle management solution.

It allows companies to capture, automate and analyze the entire contract lifecycle from initiation through approval, compliance and renewals. It eliminates data silos, automates workflows and reduces the overall time spent. Studies have shown that businesses with a streamlined contract lifecycle management process can compress their time to revenue, mitigate risks and increase customer satisfaction. In short, a contract lifecycle management solution contributes value.

Contract Lifecycle Management Solutions Checklist: How to Vet a CLM Solution

How can you pick the best solution? Start with this checklist to ensure that the solutions you’re vetting offer you the features that work best with your corporate legal department.

  • Collaboration – A secure collaborative capability facilitates editing and communication among team members.
  • Client and partner self-service – Highly intuitive, streamlined portals give authorized individuals access to commonly used contract templates and verbiage.
  • Easy-to-access requests – These allow anyone within the corporation to initiate the contract process. They don’t have to set up an account.
  • A central repository – A single source for all contracts and associated documentation means no more searching for information.
  • E-sign capabilities – Timely signatures are vital to the contract process. Users should be able to sign contracts electronically and manage them within the contract lifecycle management software. It should integrate with tier-one e-signature solutions. Upon completion, the solution should automatically store the contract in the central repository with all of the expected notifications without any additional intervention.
  • Routing and approval – The technology should enable the easy building of configurable workflows to route contracts for review and/or approval.
  • Human-centric user interfaces – The system should be intuitive and lightweight, requiring little to no training.
  • Microsoft Word integration – Word is used extensively in creating contracts. An integration with Word captures changes and notes as they occur to contracts, speeding up the entire process.
  • Notifications – Proactive alerts such as notifications or reminders should be sent by the technology as the contract progresses through its lifecycle.
  • Enterprise contract management – The software should manage sell-side, buy-side and corporate contracts.

Are you interested in learning more? Download this white paper: “What to Expect from a Contract Lifecycle Management Solution.” You can also read more about Onit Contract Lifecycle Management or request a demo.

Filling the App Gap: How Process Builder Makes it Easier for Corporate Legal to Automate Processes

Posted on September 3, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

According to a McKinsey survey, the use of automation has increased by roughly 10% compared to two years ago. Participants who reported high levels of success often attributed it to the fact that their companies made automation a strategic priority.

Earlier this week, Onit announced the availability of its Solutions Catalog (now available online here.) The catalog shares more than 5,500 Apps and 130 solutions, all built by Onit customers, partners and employees on the Apptitude platform. The Apps reach beyond the legal department to automate critical business processes, extending into HR, IT, accounting, sales, procurement and more. As a result, legal operations innovators have increased transparency, saved time and ensured compliance with governmental regulations and internal guidelines.

The progress made over a decade is astounding, as hundreds of thousands of users worldwide rely on Apps and solutions built on Onit Apptitude to streamline processes.

However, we wanted to make it easier to create Apps.

Introducing Onit Process Builder

The latest version of Onit Apptitude, released in August, bridges the gap between technical and business uses and simplifies the creation of new workflows. Process Builder, the new interface for Apptitude, provides a visually-oriented, drag-and-drop-friendly workflow-building interface. The new configuration tool empowers Onit Apptitude developers (our Onit Nation) to build workflows much faster. Process Builder was designed from the ground up with ease of use as its primary goal. As a result, it benefits both experienced Apptitude Developers and those who are brand new to building.

Join Us for Apptitude Training

Learn more about Process Builder by joining us for Apptitude certification classes.

Whether you’re simplifying a contract management process, building a full-featured e-billing or matter management system, or implementing a custom process, it is valuable to learn Apptitude’s many workflow tools and configuration options. The Apptitude certification track takes a vertical-agnostic approach, focusing on the key concepts required to work with Apptitude’s many automation and metadata management tools.

You can find classes and schedules here.

 

One Platform, Limitless Opportunities: How Legal Operations Pros Solve Business Process Challenges

Posted on September 1, 2020 by - Business Process Management

There are more than 1.3 million lawyers in the United States. And they’re interested in learning what other lawyers are doing – especially when it comes to technology and legal operations. Whether through networking, industry organizations like CLOC or ILTA or on-the-fly discussions in (virtual) hallways, they make connections to explore legal innovation and how it can work for them.

One of the latest areas of interest is automation. According to the CLOC 2020 State of the Industry report, a high priority for most corporate legal departments is automating legal processes. As automation continues within the department, innovators are quickly realizing that they can automate beyond legal. Each day, in-house counsel and legal operations professionals work with departments across their enterprises like sales, HR, accounting, procurement and more. The automation potential is limitless and promises substantial results in streamlining processes and increasing efficiency.

With this in mind, we are thrilled to announce the release of our Onit Solutions Catalog.

The catalog represents more than 5,500 Apps and 130 solutions built on our workflow and business process automation platform Apptitude. Developed by Onit customers, partners and employees (aka the Onit Nation), the catalog reveals innovative approaches corporate legal departments have taken to automate business processes in legal operations and across departments.

As our CEO and co-founder, Eric M. Elfman, explains it: “If there’s a use case, Apptitude can automate it.”

Apps that Reach Beyond Legal

Examples of innovative Apps built on Apptitude include:

  • TREAD Report – One of the largest automotive manufacturers uses Onit to automate reporting for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Transportation Recall Enhancement, Accountability, and Documentation (TREAD) Act, reducing manual work and ensuring the company complies with the act.
  • Trade Association Approval and Management – This App, created by a Fortune 500 company, manages memberships, renewals and spend for trade associations worldwide. By adding transparency and reporting to the process, the company drives more value from association participation and greater accountability that lowers costs.
  • Fund Management – This App helps manage all of the necessary business processes, reviews and approvals for the transfer of assets between portfolio companies and generates the legal documents needed to memorialize the transactions. Now, a company can facilitate higher volumes of these complex financial transactions with the same size staff.
  • Policy Endorsement Drafting Portal – With this App, insurance underwriters can submit policy endorsement drafts for review and approval, saving time and improving response rates with self-service and automation.
  • Marketing Challenges – A leading global consumer products company uses Onit to centralize challenge requests from emails to a single location, increasing knowledge management and enabling analytics to understand the consistency and success rates of challenges.

A Worldwide Platform

More than 400 customers, including 57 Fortune 500 corporations, use Onit’s Apptitude platform. It is highly configurable and scalable and supports hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. The recent launch of its new visually oriented, drag-and-drop-friendly, workflow-building interface Process Builder dramatically simplifies the creation of workflows and business logic for all users – regardless of technical proficiency.

This latest version of Apptitude offers features such as 200+ out-of-the-box workflow actions, unlimited end-user licensing, and an intuitive interface that creates a workflow visualization before it is even finished.

Next steps

If you’re an Onit customer interested in learning more about the Onit Solution Catalog, contact your account manager or email [email protected]. For anyone else, please request access via [email protected].

To see how one corporate legal department used Apptitude, view this webinar: TIAA: Transforming Operations and Driving Innovation with a Platform Technology Strategy.

To see Apptitude in action, you can request a demo here.

How to Calculate ROI for Contract Lifecycle Management Solutions

Posted on August 27, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

In the last two issues in this series, we explored contract lifecycle management challenges and how to choose the right solution for your organization. In this blog post, we will discuss how to calculate savings metrics for a solution and highlight a company that has won multiple awards for their contract lifecycle management transformation.

ROI for Contract Lifecycle Management Solutions

Contract lifecycle management (CLM) solutions drive efficiencies and savings in many areas of the business – so much so that experts say the right solution will compress time to revenue, mitigate risks by having fewer contractual exceptions and increase customer satisfaction.

However, the question on everyone’s mind is this: What’s the return on investment?

To accurately assess the potential for contract lifecycle management ROI, we developed the Onit Savings Calculator. The calculator factors in time spent on contracts, missed renewals, obligation management needs, sales cycles and realization, rogue spending and expanding spend under contract.

For example, consider a company with more than $850 million a year in legal spend. The calculator determined that the company could save almost $6 million in the first year after deployment and close to $12 million by the third year of use.

Overall, we find that companies have an average cost savings of 9% and a 20% reduction in hours spent on contract review with a contract lifecycle management solution.

The numbers are generally the biggest persuader in whether or not your organization should invest in a contract lifecycle management solution. The savings calculator can help you build the business case and determine which cost-saving or revenue-generating projects to prioritize.

Our industry experts will help you pinpoint your CLM ROI. Visit here to request your evaluation.

An Award-Winning Success Story 

Pearson, a global learning company and an Onit customer, created a new way of delivering legal services. This initiative so transformed the company’s contract processes that it landed them multiple recognitions including:

Pearson, along with Onit partner Morae Global Corporation, developed, implemented and operated an innovative, highly efficient Transaction Service Center as an extension of Pearson’s legal team in support of the company’s businesses worldwide. This included the creation of playbooks, templates, workflows and standardized processes from intake on through drafting, redlining, negotiating, execution and post-execution support, as well as leading training and change management processes.

Morae partnered with Onit to deploy the Onit Apptitude platform that included a web-based “legal front door” for incoming service requests and a contract lifecycle management system for end-to-end processing of contracts. With Onit’s technology, Pearson gained a platform to drive automation, greater standardization, ease of access to information and increased process transparency.

The result: Pearson launched an innovative shared service center that supported commercial transactions worldwide for more than 10,000 users. Its ROI for contract lifecycle management included a 35% cost reduction and 30% improved contract turnaround time.

Bob Mignanelli, senior vice president, chief operating officer, legal, and associate general counsel for technology, strategy and operations for Pearson plc, discusses the project in this on-demand webinar.

Next Steps

We have information to help you through every stage of considering a contract lifecycle management solution.

To start, visit the previous two blog posts in this series on contract lifecycle management:

Next, download our white paper that outlines what to look for in a solution:

Hear what other customers have achieved with Onit contract lifecycle management solutions:

Finally, contact us to:

Driving Business Value and Growth, App by App

Posted on August 25, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

Mark Cuban once famously said, “We are going through the process where software will automate software, and automation will automate automation.” Apps powered by platforms are a big part of this evolution. Corporate legal departments (and most other businesses) are on a quest for technologies that help drive growth, add value and speed up processes. Many have already discovered that a platform approach helps them reach these objectives efficiently and quickly.

The Platform Advantage

The platform approach is a cloud-based service that empowers departments to build their own solutions or apps to address process and workflow problems. Saving time and money in turn allows businesses to focus on building apps that ultimately benefit their customers.

A cloud-based platform is an innovative and flexible tool that makes it easy to create, modify and deploy new software with robust workflow, transaction management and reporting capabilities. It helps solve real business problems without the need for costly support, training or IT infrastructure. This allows businesses to develop both very simple and very complex processes and workflows to drive everyday business functions and operations—in legal and other departments. These apps can be connected to other related apps to form a suite of cross-functional integrations to support complex operations. For example, this could include the creation and approval of matters, the drafting and review of non-disclosure agreements, and many other everyday activities.

Leading with Workflow

A workflow-centric approach is another important feature in a platform that seeks to transform matter management or other legal operations technologies into independent, collaborative and functional lifecycles that lawyers and operations managers use on a regular basis.  An a la carte model empowers users to add capabilities and components as needed. The ideal platform includes a modern architecture that showcases class-leading technology and a decidedly SaaS-based approach to legal business application management. Flexible and agile, these platforms are designed for rapid deployment and results.

Why You Should Consider a Platform for your Corporate Legal Department

Now that we’ve discussed the platform approach, here are reaons every legal operations professional should consider it.

  1. The Apps and Solutions are Easy to Create – Some workflows can be created in less than 30 minutes. A no-code platform is highly configurable and scalable and visual interfaces allows users to build and manage business logic and workflows using a drag-and-drop interface. This makes it easy for even non-technical professionals to create apps.
  2. You Can Reduce Costs – Solve business problems without the need for costly support, training or IT infrastructure. Software as a service (SaaS) frees up your team members to focus on meaningful contributions, not administrative tasks.
  3. Implementation Times are Lightning Fast – With a platform, most implementations take weeks – not months. A corporate legal department will spend less time waiting for an app and more time using it, meaning time to value is realized quickly.
  4. A Platform Creates Business Transparency – Business teams have real-time visibility in processes, such as sales quote approvals, NDA requests or contract negotiations.

When it comes to building apps for your business you must have the workflow, process and collaboration platform that is the best fit for the way your teams work. Equally important, balancing business needs with long-term growth has now become much easier with cutting-edge platform solutions.

Building Success, App by App

The Onit Nation, which includes customers, partners and employees who build on the Onit Apptitude Platform, have created impactful apps and solutions for legal operations. You can hear more about Apptitude successes by listening to the following webinars:

If you’re interested in driving business value with a platform approach, here’s how to learn more about Onit Apptitude:

 

5 Tactics for Reading Legal Contracts

Posted on August 21, 2020 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

A contract is a collection of legally enforceable promises between two or more parties. Contracts can be full of “legalese” terminology, the rough size of a short story and intimidating to review. No matter how scary reviewing a contract can be, it is important to always understand what exactly you’re agreeing to.

Here are 5 tips you can use to learn how to read a contract:

  1. Examine the Contract

Reading a legal contract is as much about learning as understanding. There will be language that you understand at a first glance, and items that you want clarified further. Use the headings in the contract to understand the theme of the section, and the rights and responsibilities that fall under it.

As you read the contract, ask yourself if you know what each sentence means, and how it might affect you. You want to consider what happens when things go wrong.

  1. Understand What to Expect

Contracts usually start by stating parties and context — the “who” and “what.” For example, employment agreements will say that the employer will pay the employee for services.

A definitions section usually follows. This section spells out the defined meanings of words for the purpose of the contract, such as what “Effective Date” means. Definitions like “Default Event” might say something like “any event set out in section X.”

Another common contract feature is cross referencing: when one section or legal clause references another (sometimes on a completely different page of the agreement). This can make contracts hard to read, going back and forth or yo-yo-ing the scroll bar to read one section in the context of another.

  1. Make Notes

Take note of anything you aren’t sure about so you can look it up later or seek legal advice. It helps to print out a contract and use a pen or highlighter on it like you are studying for an exam. It’s a good idea to write notes or jot down questions in the white space of a contract to remember where you came across that issue.

  1. Google Some Legal Terms

Legal terms and jargon can make contracts feel impossible to understand; however, these terms can be easily googled. There are plenty of legal dictionaries available online. Some words, like “default,” mean something different in a legal context. Try googling “default meaning legal” or “default meaning contract” to get the legal definition of these words. It’s important to have a concrete understanding of what you’re agreeing to.

  1. Ask Questions

Once you are comfortable with the meanings of words and clauses, read the contract again and note any further questions or concerns you have. In particular, ask the other party whether there are any implied terms, and ask for clarification on any broad or ambiguous terms. It is important that the contract clearly state the parties’ intentions.

Bonus: Use a Legal AI Tool

Use our AI-powered contract management software, ReivewAI, to boost your confidence when reviewing your contract. Click on the defined terms or cross references in your agreement to pull out their meaning in the side bar of Word — allowing you to read your contract alongside the extra details. This helps you understand the contract better and alleviates eye strain!

How to Select a Contract Lifecycle Management Solution

Posted on August 20, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

In the first entry in our series detailing the value of contract lifecycle management solutions, we shared signs that indicate you need a new approach to the contracting process. In this blog post, we will discuss the items your company should consider when deploying the ideal solution for its needs. 

Businesses that implement a seamless contract lifecycle management process compress their time to revenue, mitigate risks by having fewer contractual exceptions and increase customer satisfaction. While the opportunities are plentiful, the path to finding the right solution for your company can be challenging.

With the numerous contract lifecycle management solutions available, how do you determine which one is the best fit?

First, adopt a platform approach. A platform approach combines a set of software and a surrounding ecosystem of resources. Its value comes not only from its own features but also from its limitless ability to connect external tools, teams, data and processes. It offers growth that comes from a highly scalable, seamlessly deployed and continuously updated technology.

One more platform benefit to consider: Timeliness of implementation. Instead of taking months and months, you can employ a quick-start implementation package that streamlines the contract process so you’re using it in less than 30 days.

Second, the most effective solutions make critical tasks easier and more accessible with automation. With this approach, a contract can be requested via an online portal that gives access to standard verbiage and templates. Automation within the system ensures the appropriate people and processes are assigned and notified of the request. It also allows the easy building of configurable workflows, so you know you can change workflows as needed as a company grows.

Third, the solution must provide the ability to sign electronically. This eliminates the need for paper and enables anytime, anywhere signatures. When the contract is signed, it is automatically stored in a central repository that is the single source for all contracts and related documents.

To view more suggested features for a contract lifecycle management solution, download our white paper here.

Final additions

As contract lifecycle management solutions grow in prominence, the discussion has shifted from whether adoption is necessary to the best solution to adopt. If you want to learn more about Onit and these solutions, feel free to read our whitepaper “What to Expect from a Contract Lifecycle Management Solution” or contact us directly.

How Artificial Intelligence and Automation Augment ReviewAI

Posted on August 18, 2020 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is disrupting every industry, including the traditionally paper-based legal sphere. While it’s taken time, lawyers are getting on board with the idea of ditching red pens and legal pads in favor of technology that will help them complete work more efficiently.

Reviewing and drafting contracts is manual, repetitive work that takes up to 70% of a legal department’s time. With increasing pressures on teams to do more with less, improving contract management efficiency and document consistency can be a serious cost issue. Contract automation, fueled by AI, helps teams spend more time on customer-facing tasks, improve business performance and reduce business risk.

But where do you start? AI might seem like a daunting technology to learn and integrate into your everyday work life, but in reality, it doesn’t take long to become proficient. You just need to find the right product. We recommend looking for the below items in a contract automation solution.

It Allows You to Manage Contracts in Microsoft Word

First things first. We believe that lawyers shouldn’t have to completely change the tools they use or download separate software. Lawyers primarily use Microsoft Word to review contracts, which is why we created an AI contract review solution as a Microsoft Word plugin so lawyers can edit legal documents right within the software they are already comfortable using. Got a PDF that needs to be redlined? Not an issue. Microsoft Word automatically converts PDFs into Word Documents when opened with the MS Word software.

The ReviewAI Word plugin opens on the right pane of your document and lists alerts, clauses and details that it automatically detects in your legal contract that you should pay attention to.

It Includes Contract Templates

ReviewAI ships with a range of preconfigured contract review templates to help you get started quickly, including legal document reviews in areas such as general supply, construction, employment, confidentiality, supplier agreements, due diligence, services and consulting agreements, etc.

It Offers the Ability to Customize

While legal contract templates are the easiest to use, different clients, contract values or work type might require different legal standards for you to adhere to in your contract management process; so your solution should include the ability to easily customize it to fit your needs.

Taking the time to create a playbook of reviews for different matters will allow you to use AI tools more efficiently across a greater range of work, while ensuring consistency across your team. These work similar to the pre-configured reviews, but are customized with your firm’s own standards.

It Allows You to Set up a Clause Bank

Don’t worry, you don’t need to have double majored in Computer Science to customize your own “review playbook.” One of the most important ways you can tailor your own legal contract review templates is by updating a central Clause Bank that stores your firm’s standard clauses, enabling you to draft and review contracts more efficiently with AI.

Any legal AI tool worth its salt will have out-of-the-box, pre-configured checks for different contract review use-cases across multiple industries. These contract review templates speed things up so that the legal team doesn’t have to customize their own review templates for run-of-the-mill agreements.

By using ReviewAI, you can capture new clauses while working on documents by simply highlighting the clause you want to capture, going to the Draft Tab and clicking on the “Create clause” tab. Entering relevant tags along with the clause language helps team members effortlessly find your work within the easily accessible ClauseBank available to the entire team.

If you need ideas, we provide sets of sample clauses that users can modify for their own use. In light of the global COVID-19 crisis, we have added extra sample clauses to the ClauseBank to help with your new drafting challenges. The sample clauses are pandemic tagged and include Force Majeure Delays, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan, and Pandemic Preparedness and Definitions.

It Allows You to Jump to Legal Concepts and Details

Another way that AI comes in handy is being able to easily identify legal concepts, clauses and details within clauses without having to scroll back and forth.

Your legal contract review tool should automatically flag key contract issues and suggest edits that match successful precedent legal contracts. The more you use your chosen tool, the better the alerts and suggestions the AI provides for your given industry. In the case of ReviewAI, blended natural language processing, linguistic and machine learning techniques create an AI that learns faster from far less data with higher generalized accuracy.

At the end of the day, the legal AI tool you use should standardize the way your team identifies and remedies contractual issues and improve collaboration efforts overall by widely sharing standard and fallback positions when drafting and negotiating contracts.

But don’t take our word for it …

“This technology has become an indispensable tool for everyday contract work. It has enabled greater consistency across our corporate practice area.” (Tom Maasland, MinterEllisonRuddWatts)

If you’d like to learn more about our ReviewAI legal AI tool and how it can help your legal team improve, set up a free, 30-minute demo today!

Five Signs Your Company Needs a New Way to Manage Contracts

Posted on August 13, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Contract lifecycle management solutions have seen wide adoption over the last five years, so much so that they’ve developed a market capacity worth more than a billion dollars. By 2024, the global market for contract lifecycle management software is estimated to increase to $2.9 billion*.

Why is there such a substantial increase?

Contract lifecycle management solutions offer a significant return on investment. They allow companies to capture, automate and analyze the entire contract lifecycle from initiation through approval, compliance and renewals. By eliminating data silos, automating workflows and reducing the overall time spent, a contract lifecycle management solution drives business value.

In this first of three blog posts, we dissect our latest whitepaper and look at what to expect from a contract lifecycle management solution. The posts will discuss everything from signs that you need one to how to select the right solution for your business.

If you’re the type of person who likes to skip to the front of the line, you don’t have to wait. You can download the entire whitepaper here. For everyone else, let’s begin.

Is it Time to Change How you Handle Contracts? Consider these Indicators.

Contract lifecycle management poses significant challenges, especially when you consider that the process for most companies extends across multiple departments, geographies, versions and external participants. Complex processes that are handled manually can lead to risks and too much time spent on low-yield tasks like following up or locating a contract version. The cumulative impact of these factors can cost your organization an immense amount of time and money.

Here are five signs that your company should explore a new approach.

  1. Inability to Make Changes

How does your company manage changes over the entire lifespan of a contract, from the first draft through renewals? Are the processes and technologies involved flexible enough to anticipate and accommodate renewal data, pricing changes and emerging legal requirements?

  1. Information Silos and Manual Processes

A business can impair contract management progress if it lacks a centralized, accessible location for contract information that tracks changes in real-time. Human error, bottlenecked contract cycles and limited process control – typical in many corporations when it comes to contract management – increase risk dramatically.

  1. Inconsistent Legal Language

Contracts depend on approved and consistent language. Gaps in standardized language introduce risk and confusion. If your contracts consistently have language consistency issues, it may open the door to unexpected risks.

  1. Struggles between Timeliness and Risk

Lawyers, who work to reduce risks, prefer to review contracts in detail. Sales professionals, who have the job of closing deals, have an interest in getting contracts through quickly. If your company is experiencing friction like this, it likely needs a better approach to contract lifecycle management.

  1. Lack of Insight into Contract Processes and Variables

When corporate legal doesn’t have insight into contract terms, obligations and value, it cannot ensure the business is getting the right value for deals, and money may be lost.

The Benefits of Contract Lifecycle Management Solutions

A contract lifecycle management solution – a combination of software and services – gives businesses unparalleled visibility into and control of their contract portfolio without sacrificing speed or time. It illuminates the journey of individual contracts from the initial request to managing obligations. It also applies technology and business best practices to the process to such as financial reporting, operational efficiency and overall contract compliance.

Ready for more information? Our next blog post of this series, coming out next week, will cover how to choose a solution. Until then, here are ways to explore these solutions and how they will impact your company:

 

* Markets and Markets: Contract Management Software Market by Component, 2019