Why Legal Departments Need Better Contract Management

Today’s modern legal departments are focused on finding the balance between their core duty to safeguard their organization while also working to help maximize the competitive advantage of their business. To secure a competitive advantage, contracts are key, and many organizations cite deal delays due to contracting as a problem.

Many legal departments are often struggling with key contracting challenges, including:

• Contracts not being securely stored in one central place in a workable format.
• Key information living in a variety of spreadsheets, shared drives, desktops, and email.
• Slow drafting due to lack of templates, playbooks, and clause libraries.
• Greater risk from using previously negotiated agreements with out-of-date terms.
• Slow routing for business approval or signature through email.
• Lack of any contract key performance indicators (KPIs) like turnaround time, workload allocation, or volume.
• Limited transparency with business leaders on contract progress.
• Lack of contract tagging and meta data to search for existing contracts and clauses.
• Attorneys wasting time drafting boilerplate documents like non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) that could be easily handled by automated self-service forms.
• Enterprise-wide system not designed for—or flexible enough for—meeting the needs of the legal department.

How to find the best contract management solution

To understand how to improve legal department contracting, legal departments must first look to their existing process.

1. Understand the biggest pain points that also map to the strategic priorities of the law department
2. Interview business stakeholders and understand their needs
3. Process map to understand the current people, processes, and systems in place
4. Plan the next steps—often a technology roadmap can ensure everyone is on the same page internally

When it comes to looking for new contract management solutions, legal departments should focus on products that are easy to use, solve their pain points, and ensure a quick return on investment. Tools should be quick to deploy, require little to no IT involvement, and be end-user friendly. They should also provide workflow automation in a low-code/no-code way, so your legal team can continue to automate documents and processes to increase deal velocity and ensure the ultimate competitive advantage of your organization.