It remains true that general counsel and paralegals continue to deal with increasing complexity and volume of contracts. An inefficient legal contract management process makes obstacles for legal services difficult to overcome. Here’s how to leverage seven legal contract management software tools to streamline the legal contract lifecycle, reduce risk, and minimize contract lifecycle bottlenecks.
Legal contract management software
Legal contract management software helps legal professionals efficiently and effectively manage their organization’s contracts and agreements in a secure contract repository. Legal CLM software features include legal document management, configurable fields, workflow management, online trading portal, compliance and audit tools, search and reporting, alerts automated by e-mail and calendar, version history, electronic signature, etc.
#1 – Easy contract request and approval interface
Leading legal contract management software lets you capture legal requests and easily submit them for approval. Data entry for application files is greatly simplified. Communication bottlenecks are reduced with easy-to-use request intake forms that allow users to collect, store, review and approve automated requests.
Plus, you can stay in sync with the routing of approvals to legal workflows for key software areas. You can attach a virtually unlimited number of files and convert contract requests to contract records without data loss or the need for data re-entry. Legal teams are held accountable with built-in document tracking, task assignments, and nearly limitless notifications.
Streamline contract requests with a unified, standardized process that makes it easy for vendors, customers, vendors, vendors, and employees to request new contracts.
#2 – Automated Document Assembly
Reliable legal document assembly solutions can help organizations draft timely, compliant, and accurate contracts. By using automation to dynamically merge data fields with clauses from a library of pre-approved clauses, legal teams can manage multiple document templates and versions for rapid contract drafting and exporting in file formats standard. Document templates can be used repeatedly and easily updated. To better understand the automation of drafting legal contracts, read this article.
#3 – Automation of contract negotiation
General counsel, paralegals, and other legal contract stakeholders no longer need to rely on a contract negotiation process that depends on redlining and communication back-and-forth.
With contract negotiation automation offered by robust legal contract management software solutions, document collaboration and document version control are simplified with numbered version tracking and a detailed document iteration log. documents. You can maintain version control with the ability to easily upload and download up-to-date document versions.
The clause ownership feature allows organizations to assign clause owners. If a party attempts to modify a clause, advanced contract management software can add the owner of that clause to the approval process. Therefore, only the necessary parties are added to the negotiation process, in accordance with the rule-based clause property.
Contract negotiations between internal negotiating parties, external parties, and non-software-using employees are more effective when organizations are equipped to set up a rules-based process. A preconfigured workflow allows contract stakeholders to receive a notification that directs them to a contract collaboration portal. There, the relevant documents can be viewed for review. One of the benefits of this process is that external parties and employees who do not have access to the contract management software can view and edit the contracts assigned to them, but cannot access the basic functionality of the system. and contracts that do not concern them. Necessary documents are isolated so that stakeholders can view or make changes directly from the portal.
Plus, you can engage in approval collaboration in one centralized location and receive alerts about the approval process – with the goal of reducing delays. With an advantageous contract negotiation portal, legal contractual collaboration is efficient and simple.
#4 – Bond Workflow
Diligent adherence to performance of contractual obligations is essential for healthy contract lifecycles. Contract workflow automation that leverages automated alerts, notifications, task escalation, and approval routing helps organizations meet their contracting needs and focus their attention on more strategic aspects of management contracts, such as opportunity fulfillment and data analysis.
The obligations workflow can be configured in the legal contract management software to trigger when specific criteria are met, before contract execution, after contract execution, or both. Flexible obligation management fosters a culture where the right alerts, notifications and approvals are put in place for contracts at the right time.
#5 – Compliance and Audit Tools
Advanced reporting and compliance auditing tools give legal teams visibility into contractual relationships between entities and companies. Legal compliance standards can be easily maintained with robust and user-friendly reporting metrics, key dates and renewals.
The state-of-the-art legal contract management software also offers integration with OFAC research data. This helpful compliance tool verifies supplier, company and employee data and compares it to Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions list data – providing crucial risk analysis snapshots.
#6 – Legal Contract Management Reports
Ad hoc reports provide organizations with upcoming task reports, user-defined status reports, financial commitment reports, and more. Reports can be emailed on a scheduled basis or quickly exported to spreadsheets to be saved locally and distributed.
With an online report designer, general counsel and paralegals can use contract management software to build flexible, easy-to-configure report layouts to display critical contract information. These report designers include many file export options, such as PDF, MS Word, spreadsheets, various image formats, rich text, CSV, and more!
Executive graphical dashboards provide a comprehensive overview of key dates, activities and contract performance. Using advanced financial tracking, search tools, and improved reporting, legal teams can track payments, expenses, and changes to contract data.
#7 – AI-based risk management
Careful risk management is paramount to the successful management of legal contracts. AI-powered contract management software makes risk assessment, analysis, and mitigation more manageable and efficient.
A risk score can hold your legal contract management team accountable by providing insight into how they are (or are not) leveraging their risk management tools. From there, they can act accordingly to establish the best possible risk management process.
The advanced legal contract management software also provides risk assessment and risk mapping functionality. Risk profile ratings can help legal teams visualize risk. Based on the monitored risks, users receive a risk assessment matrix. They can visualize risk probability patterns for events likely to occur in contracts, as well as the risk exposure resulting from those events.
Awareness of potentially damaging risk events can help general counsel and paralegals decide how to move forward with a contract. Risk visualization can help teams make risk management decisions more efficiently and effectively.
Leverage next-level legal contract management tools in 2023
You are now familiar with the industry-leading legal contract management software tools that can help general counsel and paralegals implement a workflow process that mitigates risk, reduces bottlenecks, and helps organizations manage a growing number of increasingly complex contracts for improved legal operations. Therefore, it’s time to select the legal contract management software solution that best suits your organization’s needs.
To see future-oriented legal contract management software in action, click here.
To keep up to date with contract lifecycle management best practices, industry news and legal technology innovations, click here.
Comments are closed.