General Counsel and paralegals face growing contract volume and contract complexity. The lack of an efficient legal contract management process can render obstacles that legal departments encounter nearly impossible to overcome. As such, here's how to utilize legal contract management software for a shortened legal contract lifecycle.
A User-Friendly Contract Requests & Approvals Platform
Advanced legal contract management software allows users to create legal requests and submit them for approval with ease. Request data entry is significantly streamlined. Bottlenecks and communication delays are reduced with easy-to-adopt request intake forms that help users gather, store, edit, review, and approve automated requests.
Furthermore, legal teams can stay in sync thanks to automated approval routing for legal workflows. Contract management software users can attach nearly unlimited files and convert request records to contract records without the need for data re-entry. Legal departments can hold themselves accountable with integrated document tracking, dynamic task assignments, and virtually unlimited notifications and alerts.
Enhance contract requests with a standardized and centralized process that equips counterparties, vendors, suppliers, customers, employees, and providers with an easy and streamlined process.
Document Assembly Solution
Reliable legal document assembly solutions can assist organizations in writing timely, accurate, and compliant contracts. With the help of future-minded document automation, users can dynamically merge data fields with clauses from their organization's pre-approved clause library. As such, legal teams can manage multiple document versions and templates for fast contract authoring and simple exportation into standard file formats. These document templates can be used as needed – and edited/updated without issue.
Learn more about contract writing to attain a more comprehensive understanding of automated legal contract authoring.
Simplified Contract Negotiations
No longer do general counsel, paralegals, and other legal contract stakeholders need to rely on manual contract negotiation processes involving disorganized, back-and-forth communication.
With streamlined contract negotiation – available with leading legal contract management software platforms – document collaboration and version control are simplified thanks to numbered version tracking and detailed logs of contract document iterations. Contract parties can maintain version control with the power to track relevant and up-to-date document versions with ease.
Clause ownership tools allow organizations to assign specific subject-matter experts to each section of a contract. If a contracting party attempts to change a clause, that clause's owner is added to the approval process. Thus, only necessary parties are added to a given contract negotiation process – per rules-based clause ownership.
Contract negotiations between internal parties, external parties, and software employee non-users are made more efficient and streamlined when organizations are empowered to configure a rules-based negotiation process. A pre-configured legal workflow allows contract stakeholders to receive alerts that take them to a state-of-the-art contract collaboration portal. In that portal, relevant documents are easily accessible for review.
This process is beneficial because external parties and employees who are not granted access to contract management software can review and edit contracts that they are assigned to but cannot access core system functionalities and contracts to which they are not assigned. Necessary documents are isolated so that contract stakeholders can view and access straight from the portal. Additionally, contract parties can undergo approval collaboration in a unified location and receive notifications about the approval process – thus promoting the reduction of bottlenecks and delays.
With a robust contract negotiation portal, organizations are empowered with straightforward and efficient legal contract collaboration.
Better Obligations Workflow
Careful observance of proper contract obligation fulfillment is crucial for healthy contract lifecycle management. Contract workflow automation processes that leverage automated notifications, virtually unlimited alerts, dynamic task escalation, and robust approval routing help organizations meet, and even exceed, their legal contract management needs and focus more on their contract management's strategic facets. These aspects include data analytics and advanced opportunity realization.
Contract managers can set up obligations workflow within legal contract management software systems to trigger when specific criteria are met, prior to contract execution, following contract execution, or both. Enhanced obligations management promotes a culture of punctuality and timeliness.
Advanced Compliance & Auditing
Robust compliance reporting and auditing functionality can give legal teams visibility of contractual relationships across businesses and entities. Scalable and easy-to-use key dates, reporting metrics, and renewals can make legal regulations and compliance standards easy to adhere to.
Credible legal contract management software systems also proffer OFAC search data integration. This helpful compliance functionality checks vendor, employee, and company data and compares it to OFAC's (The Office of Foreign Assets Control) official sanctions lists – providing important risk analysis snapshots at a glance.
Legal Contract Management Reports
Organizations using an ad-hoc report functionality can take advantage of reports on upcoming tasks, information on financial commitments, user-defined status reports, and much more. These reports can be emailed on a pre-configured, scheduled basis or expeditiously exported to spreadsheets.
With the aid of an online report designer, general counsel, paralegals, and other legal stakeholders can easily utilize contract management software to configure flexible report layouts to show critical contract information easily. Such report designers can include various file exportation options, such as MS Word, PDF, different image formats, spreadsheets, CSV, rich text, and much more!
Executive graphical dashboards can deliver a comprehensive overview of activities, key dates, and contract performance.
AI-Based Risk Management
Comprehensive risk management is essential for effective legal contract management processes. AI-based contract management software systems make risk assessment, risk mitigation, and risk analysis more efficient and sensible.
A risk score can help keep organizations accountable by offering an outline of how effectively (or how ineffectively) they are using their software risk tools. They can then act accordingly to form the best possible risk management procedure. Watch the video below to learn about CobbleStone Software's leading contract intelligence engine - VISDOM®.
Leading-edge legal contract management software also offers risk mapping and risk rating functionality. Risk profile rating features can assist legal teams in more effectively visualizing risk. Based upon tracked risk variables, users are given a risk assessment matrix. With it, they can analyze risk probabilities for events that could occur within contracts and risk exposure that could result from those events.
Full awareness of possibly detrimental risk events can help general counsel and paralegals decide how to proceed with a given contract. Risk visualization can assist teams in making risk management decisions more effectually.
Enjoy a Next-Level Legal Contract Management Process!
Now that you are aware of the robust legal contract management software functionality that can aid general counsel and paralegals in implementing a workflow process that reduces bottlenecks, mitigates risk, and assists organizations in managing a growing number of complex contracts for better legal operations. As such, it is time to choose the legal contract management software platform that best suits your organization's unique needs. That needed solution is CobbleStone's Contract Insight®.
CobbleStone has the right legal contract management software tools to help your organization oversee the full legal contract lifecycle. For over two decades, CobbleStone's legal contract management software suite has been acclaimed and trusted by General Counsel, paralegals, and legal departments. With CobbleStone's complete document assembly, fast implementation, legal workflow management, and easy-to-understand user interface, Contract Insight is the leading solution for successfully managing contracts and committals.
Don't waste money and time on disjointed legal contract lifecycle management. Centralize documents, streamline compliance and approvals, increase your ROI, and much more with Contract Insight.
Experience a free demo of CobbleStone's esteemed contract management software suite today!
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