The ever-present challenge that your organization’s General Counsel and paralegals encounter is the growing volume and complexity of contracts. A subpar legal contract management process makes obstacles for your legal department tough to overcome. Your team must establish a legal workflow that streamlines the contract lifecycle, reduces risk, and cuts delays and bottlenecks. CobbleStone’s Contract Insight® can help.
What is Legal Workflow?
A legal workflow is an evolutionary process under which a legal contract is drafted, reviewed, signed, and executed. An example of a workflow that an organization may follow 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 from the requester 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 organization’s 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 & 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 reentering data. Your team is held accountable with task assignments, integrated document tracking, and notifications.
Streamline contract requests with a standardized, unified process that gives employees, customers, vendors, suppliers, and providers the ability to request new contracts.
Optimize Contract Authoring
The legal document assembly solution that Contract Insight offers can help your organization 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.
Leverage advanced contract authoring with the ability to swap clauses through an approved clause playbook and expedite the creation of your contracts.
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. Enjoy easily navigable contract changes and editing and consume updated contract details without confusion or bewilderment.
Expedite Your 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 clarity regarding approvals. A standardized approval process with CobbleStone expedites the approval process.
Notifications and alerts regarding when a document needs to be approved streamlines the approval process. Updates pertaining to changes in chain-of-approval make it so 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 organization aids your legal team in meeting its contractual requirements and providing attention to more strategic facets of legal contract management such as data analytics and opportunity realization.
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 will be 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 provides your organization with 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 customize the way they absorb important information. Maintain your organization’s reputation and feel confident that you are consistently following laws and standards with the help of Contract Insight.
Experience Next-Level Risk Management
Diligent risk management is critical for successful legal contract management. CobbleStone’s 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 visualize 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. Visualization of the results can help legal teams to move forward with risk management decisions more quickly and effectually. Enjoy end-to-end risk prevention tools with Contract Insight.
Seamless Renewals
Contract Insight helps legal teams to capitalize 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. Be prepared for what comes next after a contract’s expiration with Contract Insight’s user-friendly renewal tools.
Master Your Legal Workflow
Now that you know how CobbleStone Software can help your legal team to implement a workflow process that reduces bottlenecks, mitigates risk, and helps you manage a growing number of complex contracts for improved legal operations, it’s time to make the switch to Contract Insight.
CobbleStone’s Contract Insight helps your organization to manage the entire legal contract lifecycle. Since 1995, CobbleStone’s acclaimed legal contract management suite has been trusted by legal departments and General Counsel. With end-to-end document assembly tools, legal workflow management, a friendly user interface, and fast implementation, CobbleStone is 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.
CobbleStone's Contract Management Software, Contract Insight, is lauded by thousands of legal professionals worldwide. Enjoy a free demo of our award-winning contract management platform today!
