Are you looking for new ways you, General Counsel (GC) and Legal teams, can contribute real value to your organisation? Become a game changer?

Legal transformation provides General Counsel with a great opportunity to make a real difference; by reducing costs, increasing productivity, managing risk exposure and by positioning Legal as a dynamic function instead of a cost centre and risk-oriented function.

Let’s explore one area where you can make a significant contribution: Contract Lifecycle Management.

But first, a question. Do you have a contract lifecycle management problem?

• Are you frustrated when business units send a contract request with little to no information about the details of the agreement, igniting a seemingly endless stream of email exchanges?
• Do you feel like you’re constantly reinventing the wheel with each drafting of a contract?
• Is reviewing, then re-reviewing contracts excessively time-consuming and tedious?
• Do you ever feel that simple contracts (e.g. NDAs) could easily be handled by the business unit itself?
• Do you spend too much time trying to track down a single contract?
• Do you find yourself dealing with complex issues with the pressure to turn agreements around faster?

If you answered “no” to all these questions, congratulations you may NOT have a contract management problem. Also, what’s your secret? 

If you answered “yes” to one or more of these questions like the rest of us, then you may indeed have a contract management problem.

Before you give up your bar license and pursue that pre-law school dream of being an artist, writer, or rock star (I wanted to be all three), there is hope. Life as a General Counsel, particularly when it comes to managing your organisation’s contracts, doesn’t have to be this challenging. There are contract lifecycle management technologies that leverage automation and artificial intelligence. As a result, this helps corporate legal departments increase their efficiencies and improve overall work satisfaction.

What is Contract Lifecycle Management?

For any mid-sized or large company, there is a tremendous pressure on the legal department to stay on top of the organisation’s contracts. Think of the number of potential legal and financial risks and obligations that may exist in any given contract. Now, multiply those risks and obligations by the total number of contracts being handled by your organisation (usually in the tens-of-thousands). See the issue?

Effective contract management will allow you to locate contracts and assess their risks and obligations quickly and effectively. It should ensure contract requests are delegated to the appropriate department and drafted efficiently, leveraging the company’s preferred clause library. When the board of directors wants an audit of all the orgnaisation’s contracts to fully understand revenue, expenses and risk – how quickly can that be done? A few days? A few weeks? Then, when you’ve completed the task, is that data long forgotten and no longer needed? Good contract management should be able to empower the legal department to gather data quickly to better advise on the health of the business as it stands today.

How Contract Lifecycle Management technology makes your job easier

Contract lifecycle management technology leveraging automation and artificial intelligence can improve the sense of tedium and boredom associated with mundane tasks. These are often handled by the legal team, such as:

• Locating a contract in a single repository should be as easy as running a simple word search
• Receiving and processing contract requests should be done on one platform with a complete audit trail of date and time stamps. Say goodbye to those never-ending email exchanges!
• Faster drafting of legally compliant contracts leveraging a playbook/clause library of preferred language
• Reviewing third-party paper can go from pressing “Control + F[ind]” for searching legal words or phrases, to simply uploading a contract and extracting legal concepts in their legally relevant context

Creating effective workflows so that the right contracts are being automatically delegated to the appropriate department.

Starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel?

OK, but won’t some of this technology replace my job?

A magazine headline stated: “Automation’s Really Here; Jobs go Scarce. POINT OF NO RETURN FOR EVERYBODY.”

Whether this magazine was trying to sell more copies or really warning off some impending doom, it’s enough to make you feel uneasy. Funnily enough, that headline is from a Life Magazine issue from July 19, 1963.

Relax. Your job isn’t going anywhere. Might it change a bit? Sure. But you have nothing to fear.

Contract lifecycle management technology can make your job as a General Counsel more important and valuable to the business. Sure, you won’t be able to brag about all that “hard work” you did searching for contracts in emails, zip drives, or in those drawers under that semi-comatose plant. The horror! Is that what you sacrificed your artist/writer/rock star career for anyways? Nope. You got into this work to be helpful, to feel valued, and to pay the bills.

Too often, corporate legal departments are viewed as cost-centres. They don’t generate revenue like the sales team and frankly, you’re never the popular one when all you do is discuss risk and argue over legal and financial exposure. 

With effective contract lifecycle management technology, you are:

• Elevating your own role: Instead of being the legal naysayer and being met with boardroom (or is it a “bored room?”) *eye-rolls,* you can now better advise on the health of the business because you have meaningful information extracted from your contracts.
• Helping the company avoid class actions: By having insight into your contract’s legal obligations, you’ll know what duties are owed between you and your business partners.
• Helping the company save money: When you create those important date alerts for your vendors who impose autorenewal clauses, you can get ahead of that and prevent revenue leakage.
• A Peacemaker between the legal team and the business units: There is often tension between legal and the other business units. By increasing effective communications and workflows, you may actually enjoy that happy hour with your colleagues.
• You are helping bring your company into the future by leveraging advanced technology: Artificial intelligence and automation can help you do some tasks faster and we will still need your legal guidance.

Contract lifecycle management for Legal teams is… fun?

Someone recently told me that contract lifecycle management is “fun.” That was a new adjective. The rationale? Contract management allows you to assess risk and obligations.

“Lawyers love researching and fact-finding. Uncovering information from my contracts by leveraging good technology is a kind of fun adventure! And if I can find information that is meaningful to my job, and helpful to my company, then it is fun and rewarding!”

While I’m not expecting Steven Spielberg to start the production of “Indiana Jones – Raiders of the Lost Corporate Contracts” anytime soon, contract lifecycle management can indeed be an interesting, rewarding, and indeed, fun process.

We’ve talked about some of the company-wide benefits that contract lifecycle management can offer your team. However, does it provide any benefits to you?

What about the benefits it offers you?

The contract lifecycle management solution will do your grunt work. This will allow you to focus on the things you enjoy doing more.

You can draft contracts with consistent and legally compliant language. That may let you sleep a little better. Other benefits include:

• Real-time analysis. Your legal expertise is going to be more valuable when you’re able to advise on the health of the business as it is today, not 3 months ago.
• Improved communication. Your job will be more rewarding when technology helps improve communication and workflows between you and your colleagues.
• Fun! You became a lawyer to research, write, think critically, and to be a trusted advisor. When you have good data upon which to draw and not spending an inordinate amount of time digging, you get to do the fun stuff.

To the Life Magazine issue from 1963, you were right: contract lifecycle management that leverages automation and artificial intelligence is here to stay. Although with all these benefits to your company and professional life, I’m not sure it’s something to fear. Just think: this emerging technology could free up some time for you to pursue a side hustle as an artist/writer/rockstar. Worst case scenario? You’re the inspiration for the next “Indiana Jones” film!

After two years of remote and hybrid work, one thing is clear: a distributed workforce is the ‘new normal,’ forcing corporate legal departments and companies to ‘go digital’ and online – almost completely.

But consider for a moment the multitude of files and the thousands of agreements – often still in paper formats – contained in every business. No wonder in-house corporate counsel still struggle to manage documents efficiently and effectively, particularly while working from home (WFH).

Fortunately, legal technology solutions can help general counsels (GCs) and legal teams stay on top of contracts and related documents; and maintain business continuity during these times. In fact, the latest digital tools can change the way GCs and legal teams operate for the better. They allow them to streamline the contract management process – and even eliminate manual contract review altogether – so that they can focus on higher-value, strategic work. They are as cost-effective and they are time-saving, too.

According to a recent survey by Artificial Lawyer, 42 percent of GCs and chief legal officers (CLOs) plan to adopt legal technology solutions to improve contracting efficiency in the next year or so. Here we explore the reasons to consider adopting and implementing legal technology solutions for your own legal team and organisation.

4 reasons to adopt legal technology

1. Collaborating more with your Legal team

As the COVID-19 pandemic and remote working continues, companies have grown accustomed to collaboration tools, like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Slack. Although these tools are great for contacting team members rather quickly, it is equally important to have the right tools for proper document review.

A legal technology solution like a contract lifecycle management (CLM) system keeps all contracts and associated documents in a single digital repository. That means your legal, sales, and procurement teams can access the same agreements – from any one place, at any given time.

What is more, such solutions allow amendments, changes, and errors in contracts to be reviewed on the system. And that means preventing agreements from being sent out through SharePoint or emails – and perhaps finally getting rid of fax machines!

2. Narrowing down the search

Today, the average company has 20,000 to 40,000 active contracts. As a result, GCs and legal teams without legal tech must go through abundant agreements filled with countless clauses to find keywords and dates, and other pertinent information.

In addition to keeping contracts accessible and secure, CLM software allows legal departments to not only see all contracts at the same time, but also search for a keyword or date, and filter out contracts that are unneeded. A system with OCR search, for example, goes a long way in finding legal obligations in agreements, and driving collaboration and consensus within companies. Legal technology solutions with this feature can therefore change the way organizations operate altogether.

3. Retaining your competitive advantage

As stated above, with the changing circumstances around work comes brand-new responsibilities. Many legal departments now struggle with an increased volume of contracts and documents. And agreements that are not digitised in the first place are rather difficult to keep track of in companies.

So, due to pandemics and other possible crises, legal can no longer afford to stick to manual, linear ways of working. In fact, legal tech will be essential for business continuity moving forward.

CLM systems, with the features and capabilities noted above, eliminate the stresses intrinsically tied to contract management. They provide GCs and legal teams with a huge competitive advantage. They help them to advance on their digital transformation journey and excel during especially challenging periods.

4. Choosing the right legal technology solutions

Let’s face it, then, the legal tech industry is booming: there are hundreds of technology vendors on the market today.

However, the right technology solution not only involves an advanced system, but also a short implementation process, ongoing technological support, and a simple user interface. That way, all departments that need the solution can use it to its maximum potential.

According to the same survey mentioned above, contract management remains the number one legal tech priority for most legal professionals: 67 percent choose to focus investment on this specific area. And this makes sense given contracts are the “lifeblood” of the business. They tell everyone involved how to interact, operate, and conduct the company’s relationships.

Nevertheless, beginning a legal digital transformation project can be difficult at first. And looking for a reliable solution like a CLM system can be overwhelming.

With this in mind, feel free to contact our team to discuss the technology that could support your team. We take a people-centric approach to recommending modern workplace solutions. We explore what they need to work effectively, be more successful in the things they do, the technology they use (and like or dislike), and the technology deployed throughout the organisation as a whole. We also explore your security and compliance risk posture, to make sure that our recommendations are aligned with your organisation’s needs.

Please get in touch if you’d like to discuss further.

Inefficient contract management can cause organisations to lose up to 40% of the value of a given deal, depending on the circumstances or challenges encountered. Thankfully technological developments like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are helping in-house legal teams and law firms overcome many challenges related to contracting.

How are these revolutionary technologies helping the world of contract management? Let’s first have a look at some of challenges associated with it.

What are the challenges in contract management?

The main challenge firms face with the process of contracting is the volume of contracts they must track. Organisations often have difficulty organising, managing, and updating their numerous contracts. As a result, inefficient contract management can cause firms to lose 5-40% of value on a deal.

Without a central database of contracts, there’s no efficient way to see how a specific topic is worded across different divisions. Or, how complex agreements have been written in the past.

It takes an enormous amount of people-power to create, edit, and finalise contracts. Also, to manage the facilitation and processing of them all. In fact, in one study, over half of the legal professionals pointed to the administrative tasks of contracts as one of their biggest pain points.

Furthermore, inefficiencies related to traditional contract management can lead to several issues. This includes unauthorised access, missed deadlines, and compliance and regulation violations. 

How can AI and ML help you address the challenges of traditional contract management?

Harvard Business Review says the use of AI via a contract management solution “has the potential to improve how all firms contract – and it will do so in three ways: by changing the tools firms use to contract, influencing the content of contracts, and affecting the processes by which firms’ contract.”

The change, influence, and effect of a contract management solution built on AI and utilising ML can best be described in one word – consistency.

1: One common tool

With one common tool for everyone in an organisation to use, employees have a shared solution. Better yet a shared solution with a core set of rules and best practices built-in.

A CLM built on AI allows for designated access controls to make sure the right contracts are seen and approved by the proper people. This approval process can be as rigid as you want it to be.

2: A set of ‘eyes’ on every contract

The capacity of a contract management solution built on AI is almost limitless. First, the solution retains the knowledge of hundreds of thousands of contracts. Then, it uses the information gleaned from each when reviewing new agreements. The capacity of a contract management solution built on AI is almost limitless.

In addition, it discerns the patterns from agreement to agreement. It then uses these assumptions to create, edit, and finalize future contracts. So, it becomes ‘the expert,’ eliminating any bias or arguments over who is the authority.

3: One standard process to follow

By removing the need for tribal knowledge in an organisation, AI-powered CLM becomes the source for the efficient workflow of contracting. Also, without the need for employees to manage the process of the contract, time and money will be saved.

A clearly defined procedure for your contract management will consistently and accurately allow for the movement of the contract. So, when employees are freed from the administrative and repetitive tasks identified as pain points, they can focus on higher-value work.

An AI-powered contract management system is continuously learning

The CLM system is designed to get smarter the more it is used. Artificial intelligence is the platform on which ContractPodAi; our recommended CLM is built. Machine learning is the training process used for this platform and the reason why the solution can ingest hundreds of thousands of contracts from legacy systems and retain something from all of them.

Technology such as AI and ML allows us to meet the needs of the rapidly transforming legal industry. So, as the role of legal professions evolve, the need for tools such as an intelligent contract management solution becomes critical.

If you have questions about the role AI and ML can play in transforming your contract management process, we’d be delighted to help. Please get in touch or learn more about technology for legal teams below.

GUILDFORD, UK. 1 FEBRUARY 2022 – Cloud Business, a specialist cloud technology and managed services provider, today announces a new partnership with fissara, a technology company designing, developing and delivering Operational Management Software. 

The partnership’s combined offering of consultancy services, managed support and workforce management solutions will see Cloud Business and fissara help customers empower their mobile teams and bring them on the digital transformation journey. 

Cloud Business customers, working in partnership with fissara, will benefit from solutions like fissara Manage, which streamlines operations management. fissara removes the need for paper-based working with easy-to-use desktop and mobile apps, enhanced digital job management, intelligent scheduling, asset management and job-by-job stock control.​  

“We are very excited to be partnering with Cloud Business, who have an extensive knowledge of digital working. We specialise in connecting people, objects, locations and events focussing on the needs of a mobile workforce. This has become even more important over the last two years as businesses strive to digitally transform a dispersed workforce, whilst driving efficiencies and wasting less. Our experience in building innovative mobile centric solutions coupled with Cloud Business’s knowledge of the digital transformation will create very compelling propositions for any modern business.”

Jon Holttum, CEO, fissara

Customers, like Motorola and O2, save time and money when their mobile workforce, including engineers and line managers, use fissara Manage. Complex processes can be automated, and real time data enhances decision-making and resource planning. Combined with Cloud Business’ award-winning managed support, end users get technology to transform the way they work and the support they need to get real value from their apps and services. 

“The mobile workforce, like many frontline workers, can be overlooked when organisations embark on digital transformation. Productivity and collaboration solutions are often designed for desk-based information workers, not end users out in the field. Partnering with fissara gives our customers access to transformative solutions that make a real difference to mobile teams. Helping them work more efficiently, improving communications and collaboration, and ensuring they’re getting the benefits of cloud technology and the modern workplace.” 

Gary Duke, Cloud Business

For more information about fissara visit fissara.com 

About Cloud Business 

Cloud Business is a specialist cloud technology company delivering modern workplace solutions. The team takes a people-centred approach by putting customers’ end users at the heart of everything they do. It’s an approach led by people and their objectives rather than technology. 

Founded in 2012, Cloud Business’ expertise in IT Strategy, Digital Transformation, IT Support, Infrastructure, and Network & Security has helped hundreds of ambitious companies – like ASOS, Tui, and Everyman Cinemas – modernise and innovate. 

Cloud Business’ success is driven by its customers’ success. Services are aligned with their customers’ objectives to help their businesses grow, increase agility and sustainability, and compete in challenging markets. 

About fissara 

fissara is a dynamic software organisation focusing on developing and delivering modern cloud software. Its products are designed for any size of business and are scalable, flexible, expandable and more importantly affordable.

The solutions enable the management of services, assets, processes, customers, schedules, data and people within one single environment. fissara’s business approach is to change the buying behaviour of organisations and move them from a large initial capital expense solution to a low cost of ownership highly flexible subscription service.  

fissara typically works with businesses that provide vital support to important specialist and national infrastructures, critical services, field-based engineering and those involved in delivering and maintaining sustainable energy in the UK.