Over half of legal departments see contract management and collaboration with business as requiring urgent improvement, according to the report by Wolters Kluwer and the European Company Lawyers Association (ECLA), Legal Departments on the Move.
As contracts are the core of business, a poorly managed contract process carries major legal and financial risks which might affect your company’s future. It can lead not only to missed opportunities and lost revenue, but also trigger compliance issues resulting in unnecessary costs, and hinder inter-departmental collaboration.
To improve your contract management processes, you need to implement a systematic transformation of both tools and processes to use.
Investing in the right contract management tools is paramount, not only to foster efficiency but also to help ensure business continuity and mitigate business risks.
In today’s fast-paced business environment, with large volumes of contracts coupled with the increasing complexity of the legal landscape, how can you manage the contract process from start to finish? Currently, thanks to technology, managing the contract lifecycle in each phase has become easier and more efficient than ever before.
Here are the top 4 benefits of a digital contract management system:
- Improve efficiency
Traditionally, contract management has been a time-consuming, manual process, which can result in errors, delays, and miscommunication, making it a true challenge for in-house lawyers. A contract lifecycle management (CLM) software solution enables you to eliminate repetitive tasks and accelerate the entire workflow, significantly reducing the time and effort required to initiate, draft, negotiate, approve, sign, and store contracts.
By using contract templates and automation tools, legal ticketing platforms and e-signatures, your legal teams can manage contracts faster, with fewer errors.
- Gain real-time visibility and enhanced transparency
Digital contract management systems offer real-time visibility into contract status, history, and key terms, providing an accurate picture of the organisation’s contract landscape.
Document collaboration tools will notify users of any new changes in contract versions before they continue editing them. This gives you a completely transparent view of the history of every edit and reduces the potential for mixing up different versions.
- Speed up contract negotiations
A higher level of transparency ensures that stakeholders across the business have access to accurate information they need to make informed business decisions, enabling faster, more efficient contract negotiations and approvals.
The legal department can can set up dynamic workflows that automate the distribution of the document to the relevant stakeholders. There is no need to chase after colleagues when it’s time for a contract to be signed.
- Enhance collaboration
When multiple stakeholders are working remotely to review contracts manually, they will be comparing and correcting different versions of the same document, creating unnecessary work.
With contract collaboration tools you can streamline the contract review and validation process. These tools make it easy to track changes, communicate feedback, and stay organised throughout the entire process. This greatly reduces the time and effort required from the legal team, allowing them to focus on more strategic tasks.
In conclusion, going fully digital for contract management is the way forward in an increasingly complex and ever-changing business environment.
With the right technology, processes, and strategies in place, legal departments can optimise their operations, reduce risk, and directly contribute to business success. By removing bottlenecks and empowering the business to self-serve, you ensure compliance while strengthening the position of the legal department as a competent business partner within the company.
Read our whitepaper to discover the must-have solutions to invest in to manage your contracts fully digitally, and how contract management software can help you work more efficiently and contribute to the growth of your business
