The ever-present challenge that your legal professionals encounter is the growing volume and complexity of contracts. A sub-par legal contract management process makes obstacles for your legal department tough to overcome. Ideally, you should establish a legal workflow that streamlines the contract lifecycle, reduces risk and cuts delays and bottlenecks. Contract Insight can help.
What is legal workflow?
Legal workflow is an evolutionary process under which a legal contract is drafted, reviewed, signed, and executed. An typical example of legal workflow is as follows:
- Request for legal review: Contract stakeholders lay out what they expect from a new contract, amendment, or renewal.
- Legal review: The request for legal review is approved (additional information may be required to move forward), and involved parties agree to move forward with a contract.
- Contract authoring: Involved stakeholders put the terms, conditions, and expectations of a contract into writing. Parties are defined, and pending terms are specified.
- Negotiation: Parties negotiate regarding the parameters that were drafted during the authoring phase. Conditions agreed upon provide insight into the expectations of involved parties after negotiations and redlining.
- Contract approval: A review with parties occurs. Approval time depends upon how far up the command chain a party must send approval requests. An up-to-date record of changes that are made to the contract is a necessity, so an audit trail recorded with contract management software is critical for efficient contract lifecycle management.
- Signatures: An authority with high clearance or a chief employee signs a contract to ratify its enactment. Software with e-Signature capabilities allows for the signing of contracts one-off or in bulk, in or out of the office – in a mobile landscape where wet signatures are inefficient and time-consuming.
- Compliance: Parties agree that in addition to terms laid out in a contract, general standards, practices, and contractual rules are to be complied with. Effective compliance management helps reduce late fees and delays, setting the stage for future contracts.
- Obligations: Parties acknowledge and define responsibility, key dates, milestones, deliverables, and payment windows.
- Risk mitigation: Measures are put in place to avoid risk occurrence and exposure.
- Renewals: Parties can revisit discounts, negotiate terms, and leverage new contract opportunities.
Enriched legal workflows with Contract Insight
Contract Insight streamlines and structures your legal workflow, thanks to an abundance of user-friendly tools to help with every stage of the legal contract process – from requests to renewals. Here’s how to transform your legal workflow with Contract Insight.
Simplify contract requests and request approval
Contract Insight enables you to enter legal contract requests and submit them for approval easily. Request record data entry is streamlined and simplified. Communication bottlenecks are avoided with easy-to-use intake forms for users to collect, track, review and approve contract requests from counterparties, staff and employees.
Contract Insight keeps your team in sync with approval routing to workflows for main areas of the software. You can attach files, convert contract requests to in-system contract records without losing or re-entering data. Your team is held accountable with task assignments, integrated document tracking and notifications.
Streamline contract requests with a standardised, unified process that gives employees, customers, vendors, suppliers and providers the ability to request new contracts.
Optimise contract authoring
The legal document assembly solution that Contract Insight offers can help you to produce compliant, timely and accurate contracts. With the power to merge pre-approved clauses and data fields, your legal team can manage multiple document templates and versions for the streamlined generation of documents and convenient exportation to standard file formats.
Enhance your negotiation process
Contract Insight simplifies legal contract tracking, notifications, review, and revision processes during negotiation. The system allows for online negotiation with internal and external parties, clause and section ownership, and section-based notifications regarding dynamic approvals.
Expedite approvals
The legal approval process can be a vexing one because chains of command are often variant and intricate between involved parties. Contract Insight offers a standardised approval process.
Notifications and alerts pertaining to changes in chain-of-approval mean that stakeholders can quickly obtain updates regarding who needs to approve certain facets of a contract.
Manual approvals force contract managers to personally oversee the assignment of tasks and remind involved parties to perform their assigned duties. Task delays stall the approval process.
Contract Insight’s legal workflow automation makes in-house approval collaboration much easier, cutting approval time by reducing potential bottlenecks and helping involved parties perform the right steps on time.
Manage obligations
Diligent adherence to obligation fulfillment is essential for healthy contract lifecycles. Clerical organisation helps your legal team meet its contractual requirements and focuses attention on the more strategic facets of legal contract management such as data analytics.
Obligation tasks can be configured with Contract Insight to execute when certain criteria are met, before execution, after execution or both. Flexible obligations management assures that the proper approvals, alerts and notifications are enacted for contracts at the right time.
Get the most from compliance
Maintaining compliance is essential in building trust and upholding a positive image. Contract Insight offers a diverse pool of tools for legal compliance. Advanced compliance reporting offers you visibility of contractual relationships with full audit trails that detail every contract change.
Legal, regulatory, and other compliance standards can be met thanks to advanced reporting metrics and system notifications of key date and renewal requirements. Contract Insight’s online report designer allows users to customise the way they absorb important information.
Experience next-level risk management
Diligent risk management is critical for successful legal contract management. Our AI-powered contract management software makes risk mitigation, analysis and assessment more manageable and efficient.
A risk score can keep your legal team accountable by providing them with an outline of how well (or poorly) they are using their risk management tools. In turn, your team can act accordingly to promote the greatest possible risk management process.
Contract Insight also provides risk mapping and rating features. Contract risk profile ratings can help contract managers to visualise risk. Based on the risk that is tracked, Contract Insight provides a risk assessment matrix. Not only can users view risk probability patterns for events occurring within contracts, but also the exposure that results from risks.
Awareness of possible detrimental consequences of a risk event can help legal teams to decide how to proceed with a contract. Visualisation of the results can help legal teams to move forward with risk management decisions more quickly and effectually.
Seamless renewals
Contract Insight helps legal teams to capitalise on renewal opportunities by identifying renewal candidates, notifying employees about these contracts in time to make business decisions, and assisting employees in drafting and creating new contracts based upon existing ones.
Additionally, renewal requirements are identified and presented to legal teams in advance, providing the necessary time for parties to review and make decisions on a process to follow for renewals, amendments, terminations, or other actions.
Master your legal workflow
Contract Insight helps you manage the entire legal contract lifecycle. With end-to-end document assembly tools, legal workflow management, a friendly user interface, and fast implementation, it’s your go-to solution for the efficient management of contracts and committals.
Stop wasting money and time with disorderly legal contract lifecycle management methods. Amalgamate documents, expedite approvals and compliance, increase your ROI, and much more with trusted legal contract management software.
Contract Insight from Four
Contract Insight is a cloud-hosted (SaaS) or deployed (on-premise) contract management solution. The acclaimed platform is trusted by thousands of professionals for their contract management, legal document management, procurement and sourcing needs. Used by many Fortune 500 companies, Contract Insight gives you real time visibility into your contracts. It doesn’t just shore up your security; it will help you meet contract compliance regulations, centralise your contract management and improve your overall contract administration process.
For more information, contact John O’Brien, CEO at Four Business Solutions, global business consultants and software integrators providing business processes improvements in Finance, Supply Chain and Operations, across a broad range of industries.