How Legal Contract Management Software Enhances Efficiency In Contracting
Legal Contract Management Software – Industry Benchmark For Firms
The legal sector has become a hotspot for widespread legal contract management software, as well as contract and workflow automation, for good reason. According to the 2019 ACC Benchmark Survey, 80.8% of in-house lawyers had to participate in contract management by simply reviewing and drafting documents, two tasks that can easily be digitized and automated. Legal firms are now adopting legal contract management software and contract management technology at massive rates to improve efficiency and streamline mundane legal processes.
According to reports, around half of legal firms in the United States reported utilizing technology, especially legal contract management software to replace human resources, a proportion that has remained consistent over the previous three years.
The same applies to in-house legal staff, with over half of US corporations reporting using technology-assisted document reviews in a 2018 poll and over 30% reporting automating legal procedures. Furthermore, industry reactions to technology appear to be beneficial. An overwhelming majority of top attorneys in Singapore agreed in a 2018 study that legal technology enhances service delivery, lowers costs, and is critical to the industry’s future.
Types Of Legal Contracts – Overview
Presented in either a textual or a verbal manner, legal contracts are binding agreements between two or more people.
Legal contracts are broadly divided into two types:
Bilateral Contracts:
In this type of contract, the deal is agreed upon so that both parties commit something to each other to get their work done. The promise of one party acts as consideration for the promise of the other.
Unilateral Contracts:
A unilateral contract generally involves a deal where one party asks to pay after the other party completes performing the clauses in the contract. Usually, unilateral contracts are most commonly used when a purchaser has a public payment offering for a specific activity.
Contracting Challenges Faced By Legal Firms
Contract management entails numerous challenges for legal teams and firms. Here are the major hurdles involved in governing contracts pre and post-signature.
Business growth overburdens teams with contracts:
Even with a mid-sized legal team of 7–10 people with varying areas of expertise, receiving different types of contract requests in various areas, the lack of a contract management system results in ad-hoc management of crucial legacy contracts.
Lack of transparency:
Legal contracts are often misplaced, and there are instances of mismanagement. Inter-vertical collaboration between sales, legal, and finance teams is also constricted due to a lack of contract visibility and access. The status of the contracts remains unchecked, ultimately hampers the whole process.
Timely Updates and Renewals:
When working with suppliers who demand continuous services, businesses must be informed when a contract ends. This is done to prevent the contract from automatically renewing. Instead, a balanced judgment may be made on whether the contract should be reviewed. Businesses that deal with various contracts frequently experience auto-renewal troubles and may even fail to renew crucial contracts.
Compliance Issues:
Contract managers may find it difficult to keep track of contract term compliance when managing large volumes of contracts. After all, knowing the status of a contract 24×7 might be difficult for a single legal contract agreement. Furthermore, firms must evaluate the ratings and reputation of the providers they are considering.
Legal Contract Lifecycle Management – What Is It & What Does It Involve?
Contract Lifecycle Management is the high-level management of a contract’s journey from drafting & negotiation through to execution & performance, following every stage of the contract’s lifecycle.
The contract lifecycle starts with submitting a contract request, including contract execution, tracking, contract intelligence, and renewal. As it is driven by AI, the software can comprehend what the user is doing in real-time and give ideas, tools, and features to assist in finishing the job in the allotted time.
To elaborate, the steps involved in contract lifecycle management are as follows:
Initiation –
Regarded as the first stage, this contract management stage involves discussing the contract details that are supposed to be drafted, executed, and tracked.
Drafting –
After getting hold of the contract details, the parties involved in the contract start writing the skeleton of the contract from the details that they gathered during the initiation stage.
Approvals –
The drafted agreement is approved internally by organizational stakeholders and then shared with the other parties.
Negotiation –
This usually involves negotiations about the major data between the parties and involves a lot of contact and interaction, which contract management systems can help conduct in real-time.
Signing & Storage-
After approval, the parties finally pen a signature to initiate the contract.
Performance –
Parties agree on and adhere to the extra requirements and the previously indicated rules, guidelines, and practices to avoid late payments and litigation and further block the process.
Extension and Renewals –
If the contracts expire, the parties can visit the repository and look at the contract details and either renew or extend the contract as per their needs.
How To Solve Contract Inefficiency With Contract Lifecycle Management
Here’s how legal firms can solve contracting challenges using legal contract management software:
Reduce manual tasks & dependencies involved in contract processing using pre-configured templates, clause libraries, AI-enabled clause suggestions, and pre-defined contract workflows
Streamline pre and post-signature phases by leveraging automated renewals, performance tracking, and improved contract status visibility
Shorten and expedite the review and negotiation cycle by improving collaboration between legal and sales teams using digital negotiation features like change tracking, redlining, and content suggestions
Make the contract process more efficient by leveraging centralized contract storage, contract analytics, and clause tagging
Expedite contract execution using eSignature integrations, scalable upload & eSign workflows, and a virtual audit trail
How Does Smart Contract Management Automate Legal Contracts?
Smart contract management helps the parties review, sort, and maintain contract visibility & access. The benefits of legal contract management software include:
Reduced Negotiation Cycles and Turnaround Times
Businesses normally do not want a contract cycle that takes too much time. With a proper legal document management system, organizations can speed up negotiation cycles, enabling them to go to market faster than their competitors. Smart CLM software helps in this faster internal and regulatory approval routes.
Risk Mitigation
Smart contract management keeps all the records of a contract signed between the parties. It furthermore helps reduce the risk and control liability factors as it allows for monitoring the risk factors before any contract is signed between the parties.
Better Analysis and Reports
Every contract requires reports for improved visibility and analysis that follows. An ideal legal file management software comes up with follow-ups and detailed reports of analysis and insights about the existing contracts.
Transparency and Compliance
Legal department management software helps in gaining more visibility into contractual commitments. Also, it provides transparency to compliance duties and milestones to guarantee ethical product procurement and adherence to packing and delivery timelines.
Access-Controlled Repository
The contracts are stored in a centralized contract repository for easy access and collaboration. Signed contracts are automatically sent to the repository for visibility and easy retrieval.
While some CLM solutions will assist customers at every stage, some solely concentrate on the post-signature phase, which involves the contract repository, post-signature administration, and analytics.
But the finest cloud CLM solutions must provide a range of alternatives to adapt to your immediate demands and allow you to grow as you further organize your company operations.
SignDesk’s Legal Contract Management Solution
SignDesk’s end-to-end contract management toolsallows legal teams to draft contracts and negotiate provisions in real-time using legal contract software. Among the leading legal document management software, CONTR.ACT also offers eSignature integrations and custom notification modules to manage contract execution.
Our legal contract management software is equipped with intelligent approval matrices and pre-defined compliance workflows to help legal teams cut procedural TAT by over 50% and enhance contract efficiency.
Talk to our product experts to learn more about how our legal contract management software works.
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What Is Contract Lifecycle Management? – A Deep-Dive Into Contract Automation
Contract Lifecycle Management- Optimizing Business Documenting Process
The sheer volume of documents processed daily by businesses is exceedingly high, and managing them often becomes tedious. No matter the industry, every business deals with documents like purchase orders, supplier agreements, legal bonds, employee contracts, and many more. Businesses require a solution to make the process simpler.
Contract Lifecycle Management, or CLM, is the answer to the documenting issue all businesses encounter. By integrating with an AI-driven solution, businesses can add efficiency and speed to their contract management system.
What Does Contract Lifecycle Management Mean?
When businesses envision driving efficiency into their documenting process, a question that often pops up is, ‘What is Contract Lifecycle Management, and how can it help my business?’.
CLM is document management technology capable of digitizing contracting procedures such as drafting, negotiation, contract signatures, and even contract tracking. As for how CLM helps businesses, smart contract management optimizes these procedures and makes them easier to complete.
From drafting a contract to its execution, CLM spans the entire documentation journey, including authentication, approval, storage, and renewal. The AI-integrated solution expedites the documentation process and tracks the document’s status throughout its lifecycle.
Contract Lifecycle Management enables businesses to revamp their contracting process flow, which is usually time-consuming and demands several people’s complete involvement when done manually.
By introducing CLM into document management, enterprises can automate the contract process flow and allow employees to focus on the tasks that matter.
Why Do Businesses Need Contract Lifecycle Management?
For several reasons, businesses face numerous challenges when they have to draft, manage, execute, and track multiple contracts. These include – an over-reliance on legacy technology, the utilization of non-scalable procedures involving manual and paper-based workflows, and a profound lack of automation in the documentation procedures of businesses.
These factors result in numerous challenges and problems. Some of the issues concerning document management that firms face are:
Unmitigated complexity in document management: The average business produces several tonnes of documents annually and makes several billion copies of the same documents. Complex stakeholder relationships, contract lifecycles with numerous touch-points, and regulatory compliance requirements further exacerbate the pure scale of contracting. This situation is especially dire for businesses in the finance, insurance, and retail sectors which contract several vendors and distributors to streamline their operations and are also heavily regulated. These businesses all require a smart way to manage their contract lifecycles.
Challenges in collaboration between teams: Business contracting is a collaborative process between sales, legal, operations, and finance teams. However, due to the massive scale at which contracts are drafted, negotiated, and executed in modern businesses, collaborating on contracts is among the biggest team challenges. A lack of good version tracking also contributes to the siloing of teams and results in lowered efficiency.
Duplication & multiple manual entries: Businesses need many copies of a single contract for different purposes. With the absence of CLM software, a need arises to spend considerable amounts of time creating multiple copies of the same contract. It, in turn, reduces workspace productivity which is undesirable for the business’s growth.
Missed renewals: Business contracts require timely renewal to keep a project running. The chances of missing out on renewing a particular contract are considerable as employees manage an excessive number of documents each day. This unnecessarily slows down the project and impacts the business, leading to both loss of reputation and discontinued contracts.
Unorganized storage: Relying on contract storage methods like paper documentation and filing cabinets make maintaining all the contracts in order challenging. A cluttered digital storage system makes managing and accessing business contracts difficult.
Contract tracking becomes strenuous: When a firm’s contract volume increases to thousands and more, manually tracking the status of each contract becomes laborious. This problem can lead to missed deadlines, and carrying out audit trails also becomes challenging.
High levels of contract risk: Without a secure and smart contract management system, contracts can easily get into the hands of unauthorized persons or simply end up being misplaced. This is a major threat as business transactions must be maintained safely to preserve confidentiality.
Contract drafting errors & delays: Drafting documents from scratch can lead to numerous manual errors that can simply be eliminated through contract management software.
Readily available templates, clause suggestions, and enterprise-wide contract standardization through CLM make creating and managing contracts easier. In addition, smart tracking, centralized storage, and automated renewals make the task more manageable for business owners and employees.
Features To Look For In Contract Lifecycle Management Software
Contract Automation Through AI: Contract Lifecycle Management employs artificial intelligence (AI) to automate major documentation processes that help employees focus on high-value tasks. Through CLM, businesses can automate their contract lifecycles to drive efficiency through their documenting process.
Quick Contract Creation: With an AI-powered CLM tool, creating contracts from scratch becomes fast and efficient. CLM solutions offer numerous pre-configured templates & workflows that can be used to draft any type of contract that the business or situation may require.
Collaboration Made Easy: Through CLM technology, multiple parties can work on a contract simultaneously. Negotiating parties can leave suggestions, redline clauses needing change, and track changes to digitally conclude negotiations. With real-time negotiating, parties can also quickly reach a settlement whenever a difference arises.
Organization-Wide Contract Uniformity: CLM tools unify business contracts and contracting processes on a single, smart platform. Centralized contract repositories and version tracking enable smooth collaboration and place control of contracts squarely in the hands of the relevant teams and stakeholders.
Integrated eSignatures: Implementing a business contract becomes easier with an eSign feature embedded in the digital contracts. Through electronic signing, executives and other stakeholders can authenticate the contract in no time, leading to high levels of contract efficiency. By eSigning documents, businesses can also ensure that all contracts are tamper-proof and verifiable. This makes eSign-enabled CLM technology essential for confidential business transactions.
Strong Audit Trails: A CLM system guarantees every contract’s integrity by capturing every annotation and agreement change made in the document. This paves the way for easy audit trails whenever a requirement demands reviewing previous contract versions. Additionally, strong audit trails ease compliance burdens for businesses functioning in highly regulated industry segments such as finance, healthcare, retail, and the pharmaceutical sector.
Compliance With Regulatory Regimes: With an AI-assisted contract management process, businesses can ensure that all their contracts’ terms comply with government and industry regulations. Smart CLM helps businesses maintain a virtual audit trail for all their commercial transactions and contract changes, making compliance even easier.
Controlled Access: Contract management software offers excellent security to business contracts that are often highly confidential. By providing role-based access models to provide different user permissions for contract stakeholders, & facilitating a multi-tiered approval process via an approval matrix.
Status Tracking: Through custom notification modules & timely reminders, smart contract tools notify users about various contract functions such as updates, renewals, payment dues, expiration, and more. This feature enables businesses to effortlessly track a contract’s status in real-time throughout its lifecycle.
Insights Delivered Instantly: CLM implements contract performance tracking to regularly deliver statistical data related to its operations and contract functions. This aids businesses in making key decisions regarding the processes implemented through the said contract.
Contract Learning: AI features in CLM solutions analyze contract performance and offer ready information to key stakeholders. These data are packaged & presented to enable better business decision-making and help businesses learn from their contracts.
Deadlines Aren’t Missed: Through CLM Contract Lifecycle Management integration, corporates can be assured they do not miss strict project timelines and stay updated with their procedural workflows.
The CLM Process Flow: How Does Contract Lifecycle Management Work?
By integrating contract automation software into their documenting workflows, businesses can encounter minimal errors and receive timely insights that can provide an edge over their competitors. The contract lifecycle process involves multiple steps in an orderly process flow, all of which are automated through a CLM platform.
Business Profile Creation: The company’s profile is created on the CLM software dashboard to help the firm gain quick access and find all its contracts. Businesses can monitor their contracts’ status through their designated profile set up on the CLM tool.
A Contract is Requested: Once the business profile is created, the business requests a new contract on the CLM platform. This request is assigned to team members on the CLM platform.
The Contract is Drafted: Legal or sales teams utilize custom templates to draft contracts instantly or compose contracts with the help of the software’s content libraries. Drafts can also be uploaded and templatized for later use. Tokenization is another useful feature of CLM software, allowing users to simply indicate the type of content required in any contract section and leaving this to be filled by the appropriate parties.
Parties are Invited: Businesses can invite multiple parties to work on a contract based on their projects’ requirements. Parties can easily negotiate and draft the contract by including suitable clauses and terms. Users can configure the templates to suit their requirements and create the contract from start to finish.
Contract Approval: The invited parties must now approve the contract contents hierarchically. Contract Lifecycle Management software offers advanced approval features that automatically send contract drafts for approval in a pre-programmed order. This is accomplished using intelligent approval matrices that significantly reduce approval times.
Online Negotiation: A CLM tool enables parties to collaborate seamlessly through real-time online negotiation facilities. Users can leave suggestions, track changes & redline content using the CLM software’s negotiation features. This benefits all parties involved as it helps develop relevant clauses for the contract and conclude negotiations quicker.
Clause Locking and Contract History: Once negotiations are completed, clauses are locked to prevent changes. Contract lifecycle management software enables users to customize their contracts to suit their needs. The clause-locking feature ensures parties do not edit non-negotiable clauses. Furthermore, all edits, suggestions, and changes to the contract are recorded for future reference.
Authentication Through eSign: The next step in a contract’s lifecycle is contract execution. With electronic signature integrations, contract lifecycle management software can aid businesses in executing contracts from anywhere in no time. The feature also adds a layer of security to the contract and ensures contract validity and security.
Contract Storage: Once eSigned, the contract is moved to an access-controlled repository. Moving contracts from filing cabinets to a secure, digital repository helps preserve the integrity of legacy contracts while also enhancing documentation efficiency. Smart CLM solutions allow employees to collaborate smoothly on contract workflows by enabling easy access to the latest versions. Additionally, smart CLM offers high security for confidential business contracts to be stored safely.
Timely Notifications: Businesses are notified of all upcoming events as contracts approach expiry or renewal. CLM provides users a custom notification module to configure timely reminders regarding contract updates, payment timelines, and renewals. Automation ensures businesses never miss a contract deadline and easily manage the otherwise tedious manual process.
How Do CLM Tools Streamline & Expedite Business Contracts?
With an AI-enabled contract management system, businesses experience many benefits pertaining to their document workflows that would otherwise require great attention to detail and consume time.
The advantages that contract lifecycle management software offers over a manual contract management process are:
End-to-End Process Standardization: With a CLM platform, businesses carry out all documentation procedures in one place. In addition, the tool offers regularity on all the documents created and executed by the firm. Staying compliant with rules and regulations also becomes easier when businesses implement a software-based CLM solution to their process flows.
Reduced Contract Approval Time: By setting up an automated contract creation and execution process, businesses can reduce the time spent on approving any document. CLM notifies the respective parties of their pending approvals, ensuring the contract’s successive steps are carried out without delay.
Minimized Time and Cost: Through automated contract generation, approval, storage, and renewal, corporations can significantly reduce the hours and the money they would otherwise spend to manage business contracts physically. Introducing a smart contract management lifecycle process also reduces the number of employees required to focus on this task.
Greater Contract Visibility: Through CLM technology, businesses can store all their documents in a central repository that allows for enhanced contract visibility through extensive reporting. The facility also enables remote teams to easily access a contract throughout its lifecycle without requiring their presence on-premise. Authorized parties can access the required document instantly through the presence of standard storage space for all business documents.
Contract Success: With the analytics tools provided by contract software, firms can measure their contracts’ success rates to make key decisions about their business process. The smart performance tracking feature of CLM software plays a vital role in enabling businesses to review the status and success of their contracts.
Enhanced Business Value: A business can deliver enhanced value to its clients/customers by fulfilling and exceeding their expectations. An accurate and reliable contract lifecycle management system enhances a business’s value and paves the way for continued business with the client.
SignDesk – Total Contract Automation For Seamless Contract Lifecycle Management
Businesses can introduce ease and efficiency to managing their contracts through SignDesk’s AI-driven CLM software. Firms can access smart contract management solutions on a single platform that can help them automate all their documenting procedures.
Contract lifecycle management creates a well-defined and customizable contracting process that offers efficient document administration with measurable results. With features like clause libraries, configurable templates, eSign integration, tokenization, company profile creation, digital repository, and many more, users can create, execute, and manage contracts the smart way.
Smart contract lifecycle management has enabled businesses across segments to make their contract cycles more than 50% faster and save between 60-85% of document expenses. Additionally, firms can utilize smart contract management tools to reduce drafting & processing errors, store contracts safely, and maintain a strong audit trail for key contract functions.
SignDesk offers simple and innovative solutions to help businesses ease and expedite their complex document-related workflows.
Learn how to integrate our CLM tool into your contract process flows to initiate automation in your contract lifecycles with a free on-demand demo.
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Contract Management Software – Automate Business Contract Lifecycles
What Is Contract Management Software?
Contracts are essential for any business. They span a wide range of documents like forms, agreements, notices, etc., concerning customers and employees and are crucial for the business to keep track of all its daily transactions.
Since the average business produces several thousands of contracts every month, streamlining contract-related processes using software is a no-brainer for businesses. Contract management is now becoming indispensable for businesses for a variety of reasons.
Primarily, contract management software is a versatile tool that helps business teams carry out all their contractual obligations and functions across different areas of document management. Contract automation software is also highly beneficial for businesses across industry sectors as it injects ease and efficiency into typically complex contract workflows.
Contract lifecycle management software is quickly becoming a pre-requisite for any business, from medium-sized companies to large enterprises, looking to improve workflow efficiency and scale operations. As contracts are essential for any business, it is imperative to implement a software-based approach to managing them.
Does Managing Contracts Manually Impede Business Efficiency?
The traditional system of drafting, executing, and managing contracts manually comes with a lot of shortcomings. Undefined user roles, limited visibility, absence of status and performance tracking, drafting errors, and lack of process standardization are some of the many problems businesses face when dealing with their contracts the manual way. These issues are grave and can lead to inefficiencies and cause losses to the business.
Many organizations believe they can do without a software-based contract management system. However, the way contracts are managed impacts the business, and it’s now a best practice for firms to adopt an automated solution to manage all of their contracts.
The solution to documentation issues is legal software designed to manage business contracts throughout their life cycles. The software is set up to automate corporate contracts and align its document workflow into an organized and efficient process.
As the contract management software market is forecasted to grow up to 2.9 billion US dollars by 2024, software that can seamlessly manage contract workflows is in high demand across the globe.
Drawbacks Of Manual Contract Management
Manual contract lifecycle management brings several complexities that prevent businesses from efficiently supervising the creation, execution, and implementation of voluminous formal documents.
Security is Compromised: A business contract is highly confidential, and its security is jeopardized when no robust storage solution is used. Folders and filing cabinets compromise the security of such documents containing sensitive information. Physical storage can also increase the chances of unauthorized access to contracts, putting the process at risk.
Disorganized Storage: Storing physical copies of business documents takes up a lot of space. In addition, physical contract storage can make retrieving contracts more challenging and time-consuming at the same time. Manual storage can also lead to lost contracts, bringing legal implications and extra costs to the firm.
Human Errors: Drafting and contract management errors are often unavoidable with manual contract drafting. Employees can unintentionally make errors on the document, some of which can lead to severe problems later on. Errors can happen during the contract’s drafting and amendment stages when employees overlook something, forget to add a clause, etc. The presence of errors decreases the effectiveness of the terms of a contract.
Risk of Non-Compliance: The very purpose of a contract is not achieved if it does not uphold the terms. If a contract is non-compliant with the industry standards and government regulations, it causes major problems to the business’s functioning. In addition, it also imposes penalties, delays market entry & poses a threat of reputational damage to the business.
Unnecessary Delays: The process of managing contracts is quite a tedious one since it requires valuable time and attention to every minor detail. Right from curating a contract to approving and executing it, the procedure slows down when carried out manually. As a contract needs to be physically transmitted across different departments for approvals, often in the form of copies that aren’t uniform, delays are a frequent occurrence for businesses that haven’t automated their contract management procedures.
Unavailability of Real-Time Tracking: Managing contracts throughout their life cycles is often neglected when done manually. This leads to missed deadlines, unfulfilled commitments, and missed opportunities for revenue generation. Without a proper contract tracking facility, companies can miss out on receiving crucial data related to projects. The lack of contract tracking in real-time also leads to project milestones being missed or overlooked by the firm.
Lack of Clarity and Visibility: A manual contracting process makes it difficult for multiple parties to work on a single document simultaneously. Also, communication and coordination become challenging as there will be no clarity on the changes occurring on the document. Lack of visibility also makes it difficult for businesses to track contracts throughout their variations, leading to each party ending up with different versions of the contract.
Lack of Process Standardization: When there is no established process for creating, executing, and monitoring contracts, many complexities arise. These processes consume a lot of time without an enterprise-wide standardized process flow. Without a systemized process, there will be silos across the organization, making collaboration more taxing for every contract requirement.
These challenges make the workplace productivity go for a toss as employees will have to look into each step involved in contract management multiple times. By employing legal contract management software curated specially for corporates, businesses can cut costs and time spent managing their contracts.
Innovative Solutions Offered By Contract Lifecycle Management Software
A contract management software solution brings forth an array of features that eliminate the limitations that come with manual contract management. The software can be deployed across businesses of all sizes to make the process quick, streamlined, and efficient.
Complete Contract Security: By means of selective access and eSign integration, a contract management software system adds multiple layers of security to a business contract.
Convenient & Secure Cloud Storage: Contract repository software offers a common cloud-based storage solution where employees can easily store and access any document they require.
AI-Enabled Document Drafting: With the utilization of Artificial Intelligence (AI), CLM software powers effortless contract creation. Template libraries and clause suggestion features eases the contract drafting process.
Compliance With Business Regulations: Contract compliance software is designed to make documents’ clauses and terms compliant with the regulations implied by the government and the industry.
Accelerated Approvals: By integrating electronic signing, intelligent clause approval, and multi-user signing, the concerned parties can authenticate the contract quickly through a CLM platform. In addition, it allows them to authenticate the document remotely.
Contract Status & Performance Tracking: Contract tracking software provides critical information and statistics regarding the contract’s status and performance, which is essential for businesses to take further action pertaining to the project/transaction.
Complete Contract Clarity & Visibility: With contract management software, user roles and responsibilities are clearly defined, helping users perform actions and managers oversee team members conveniently. Contract management software also provides visibility to the required stakeholders and parties, adding transparency to the process flow.
Enterprise-Wide Process Standardization: CLM software acts as a productivity tool, standardizing the document creation, validation, implementation, and post-deployment supervision processes across the entire organization.
Contract management for small businesses can help such firms focus on revenue-building and business expansion, as the entire document management procedure will be automated through AI-based software solutions.
Smart contract administration software helps large businesses introduce efficiency into their document workflows. Since the volume of documents contracted every single day in these firms is significantly large, the need for an AI-driven document management system becomes essential.
How Does CLM Software Improve Business Efficiency?
Poor contract management can put businesses at risk and lead to unnecessary revenue losses. It hinders the smooth running of the business and also makes this regular workflow process inefficient.
In addition, there are compliance issues, poor communication across parties, and the possibility of lawsuits without enterprise contract management software. These issues can bring down the business’s reputation in the industry and lead to high churn rates and low customer retention
Integrating the best contract management software into their documenting process flows can enable organizations to streamline the document management process across their departments.
Contract Management Software – In Action
Due to immense growth in the digital contracting space and the subsequent inundation of the contract management market by dedicated and function-specific solutions, businesses are left with an abundance of options for contract automation, not all of which are equal.
The majority of contract management software caters to niche procedures and does not offer a comprehensive solution to the complex challenges businesses face when contracting en masse and at high speeds.
The best contract management software tools offer businesses the ability to automate every aspect of their contract-based procedures.
Here’s how.
Contract Drafting
Top contract lifecycle management solutions encompass all the functions of contract drafting software and combine these with templatization and smart clause suggest features to enable expedited contract drafting.
SignDesk’s contract management software offers pre-configured templates and a comprehensive clause library for legal teams to quickly draft contracts.
Contract Approval
Getting contracts approved is an integral part of contract administration, but contracting software that automates administration without offering businesses a smart way to conduct approvals simply doesn’t cut it anymore.
SignDesk CLM is integrated with intelligent approval matrices, which can be leveraged and customized to fit the structure of any organizational hierarchy. Businesses input the roles of stakeholders and SignDesk CLM automatically transmits contracts to the appropriate stakeholders in order.
Contract Negotiation
Negotiations take up the most time among the steps involved in a contract’s lifecycle, with a typical negotiation period lasting anywhere from 4 to 6 weeks. Contract negotiations are drawn out for so long as the negotiating parties typically need to meet and engage in prolonged discussions for every contract negotiation session.
SignDesk’s legal contract management software enables parties to negotiate contract clauses and terms digitally via tracking changes & redlining. Users can leave suggestions, accept or reject changes, and restrict contract access to just the appointed negotiators using role-based access models.
Additionally, all parties can view the entire negotiation and comment histories pertaining to the contract under negotiation, boosting transparency and enabling increased trust which further expedites contract lifecycles.
Contract Execution
Signatures are the finishing touch to a well-negotiated contract; however, contract management software whose primary focus is execution risks missing the forest for a tree.
Businesses require flexible contract execution workflows that allow them to invite multiple signers, get contracts signed at scale, and track signature status all while offering a wide range of eSignature types to suit any scenario.
SignDesk CLM is integrated with eSignatures and customizable eSign workflows for businesses to get contracts signed on the go. Additionally, strong audit trails and evidence creation using digital signatures offer a high level of authenticity and security to contracts.
Contract Repository
Contract storage and repository software specializes in safely and securely storing legacy contracts, while also allowing executives and managers easy access to contracts whenever they’re needed.
But contract repositories fail to improve business efficiency if they don’t unify contracts across business verticals. Contract management software that doesn’t provide a single source of truth creates roadblocks to smooth collaboration and is a source of friction between teams.
By offering a centralized contract repository, SignDesk CLM ensures that all teams are on a level and have access to the same versions of contracts. SignDesk’s contract repository is also searchable, enabling seamless collaboration and retrieval.
Contract Tracking
No contract management software is complete without a means for executives and managers to track and stay on top of contracts throughout their lifecycle. Contract tracking becomes especially essential when the contract is being performed.
SignDesk’s contract management software offers high-level contract tracking capabilities and AI-driven analytics for executives to make informed and smart decisions pertaining to contract performance.
SignDesk’s Simple Contract Management Software: A Smart Tool For Expediting Business Documentation
Some of the most essential features businesses need to look for in contract automation software are:
Business profile creation
Pre-configured templates & workflows
Smart clause suggestions
Real-time negotiations
Electronic signature integration
Complete contract security
Total contract transparency to authorized parties
Centralized repository
Custom notification modules
Businesses can productively manage their documents if the CLM software leveraged supports these features. SignDesk offers businesses the best CLM software, complete with time-saving features and automated functionalities.
SignDesk’s contract management software is among the top contract management software solutions offered for businesses of any size and provides a multitude of smart features that streamline and automate the documentation process flow throughout contract lifecycles.
The software is designed to automate contract management systems across business teams, cut down cost and time, and introduce much-needed contract efficiency.
Get in touch with SignDesk to learn how you can manage contracts the smart way with a free on-demand demo.
