As contracts of every shape and size underpin our successful business partnerships, it’s not surprising management across every stage of the contract lifecycle is becoming more and more important for the legal profession.
The ongoing impact of cloud
The complexity brought by cloud and globalisation to our professional relationships makes our contracts more important than ever before. And we’ve also seen a significant increase in the speed of business transactions, which isn’t going away any time soon. So there’s a more pressing need for contract understanding and creative problem-solving. All of which puts greater pressure on you – as a legal professional – to ensure smooth negotiations and contract management.
And it’s not just legal knowledge you need. To negotiate the best contracts, you also need a good grasp of finance, relationship management, project management and performance management. Which naturally increases the pressure you face. This is where contract management software can help take some of the strain of your daily workload.
Visibility reduces your risk
And this is where Contract Insight comes in. Not only will it help you manage your contracts, but it can also help increase your understanding of the practical, operational and business impact of contract negotiations. Contract Insight mitigates the risk around IP issues, indemnities, warranties and limitation of liabilities by making all details visible to all your stakeholders.
SOWs, (statements of work) SLAs, (service level agreements), pricing and transition plans tend to be the areas where business disputes arise. With automated, in-depth reporting, it will highlight any risks you might face. Contract Insight also enables you to carry out due diligence and performance management on all your suppliers.
Easy access wherever you are
Delivered on-demand, via the web, you can access Contract Insight whenever you want, wherever you are. You don’t have to download any software and everything is included in your subscription. You’ve got secure access at your fingertips. And we’ll provide full deployment including installation, configuration and support.
We’ve outlined a typical day in the life of a legal contract manager, to demonstrate how Contract Insight might help you out…
- Hold a meeting with your account managers and sales teams to understand what possible contracts may be in the pipeline, and what legal documents you might need.
Contract Insight stores all documentation used across contracts in a central repository so you can quickly find what you need when you’re authoring new contracts.
- Following on from your sales calls, start to draft a new contract for a new client. Kick start the contract lifecycle by accessing the appropriate NDA for all parties.
By selecting from a range of pre-defined templates stored on the Contract Insight database, you can quickly find the correct contract type and identify the risk for your fledgling agreement. The contract creation options available will help you produce consistent, accurate contracts.
- Schedule a meeting for a new client, and set up e-mail notifications for the relevant tasks, milestones, and action items. Send automatic reminders to key stakeholders.
Contract Insight has a sophisticated alert and notification system that helps you keep all users up to date, and assign responsibility to track and manage workflow processes.
- Spend some time reviewing the terms and conditions of the live RFPs, so that if you win you’re well placed to negotiate the most favorable terms for your company.
Contract Insight helps you easily access your library of previous contracts and you can ensure negotiations progress in line with your corporate guidelines. You can run reports on all the historical working files you’ve stored in your central repository to agree the terms and conditions that best protect your business.
- Review status of all current contracts – whether in draft, out for signature, up for renewal, automatic term rollover or contract expiry.
Contract Insight can give you – and all other authorised users of the software – all of this info at a glance. And you can track versioning by viewing all historical versions as you work towards the final signed-off version.
- Review access permissions to all contracts across the organization.
With Contract Insight you can centralise time-sensitive data so you can limit your risk. All of your departments, such as Sales, Procurement, Compliance, IT – with the right permissions – can instantly access every contract on your contract repository.
- While running reports, track organisational cash flow back to specific contracts and print out a summary of your organisation’s contractual liabilities at a customer’s request.
The reporting facility that comes with Contract Insight means you can drill deep into your data and run off specific, time-saving reports. So you can quickly answer specific queries and ensure favourable terms and conditions in all your contracts going forward.
Take some of the pressure off
There’s a lot you can do to streamline your contract management with Contract Insight. And we can customise the software to add specific reporting capability, tailor data fields and develop workflow functionality as you need it.
Once we know what Brexit will ultimately mean for Europe, it’s very likely that businesses are going to lean more heavily on their legal professionals. We think Contract Insight will help relieve some of that pressure you’re going to face.
To find out more, why not contact me at [email protected]?
