Contract Insights

As a lawyer, you manage a variety of contracts that involve ranging stakeholders and processes.  Yes, you may have help from paralegals and legal assistants to coordinate the contract groundwork.  However, when it gets down to the nitty-gritty of negotiations, approvals, signatures, and post-award contract management processes, you need a trusted and streamlined system in place to grant you optimal control over your contact management process.  Read on to learn how you and your legal team can significantly improve legal contract management software procedures.

Managing various types of entertainment and media contracts from varying locations, often internationally, with multiple departments and roles can be an arduous process - especially when relying on disparate methods such as postal mail, wet-signatures, filing cabinets, emails, shared network drives, and lengthy paper-based negotiations.  Dealing with and tracking a high volume of contracts – from intellectual property contracts to option agreements, among many others - can be tremendously challenging without the right contract management system in place.

In contract lifecycle management, efficient collaboration between stakeholders is a must.  Contract requests, renewals, and almost everything in between can involve many moving parts – with a high potential for inefficiency if adequate measures are not introduced.  In the interest of avoiding communication delays and contract lifecycle bottlenecks, organizations should leverage robust contract collaboration tools offered by leading contract management software.  Here are four steps to foster healthy and productive collaboration and expedite the contract lifecycle.

As technology evolves and organizations shift to adapt, business process changes should increase productivity rather than hamper it.  Contract managers who primarily utilize manual methods with their team may encounter difficulties in efficiently managing contracts.  Contract mismanagement can decrease productivity, hinder communication regarding task responsibility, and increase avoidable inefficiencies.  As contract administration changes for the future, organizations can attain greater control over their contract management processes by avoiding the following pitfalls of contract mismanagement.

CobbleStone Software’s leading-edge contract management software solution - CobbleStone Contract Insight® - allows users to centralize and navigate the contract lifecycle in one simple, configurable system.  The final stage of contract lifecycle management - contract signatures - can be streamlined with the use of eSignatures.  IntelliSign® - CobbleStone Software's proprietary electronic signature software tool -  significantly expedites and simplifies signing, tracks each step in the process, and can cut send-to-sign time by up to twenty percent.  Users can be notified when a contract is ready for signing through automated workflows and real-time status updates.  A seamless eSignature integration with Adobe Sign makes the process even easier!  Here's how.

Electronic signatures are a must to streamline your contract management process.  They allow organizations to create efficiencies that expedite preexisting processes and reduce financial costs.  However, there are still individuals and organizations that question whether or not contract electronic signatures are legal and whether eSignatures will hold up in court.  The question is valid; potential litigation is a serious threat to any organization.  Judicial decisions and legal precedent in the United States have left very little ambiguity on whether or not contract electronic signatures are equivalent to handwritten signatures.  Organizations that use eSignatures should take comfort knowing that the courts have been on their side since 1869.

Revenue generation is the front line for all for-profit organizations.  The less efficient an organization’s sales team is, the less customers an organization will acquire; the less customers, the less revenue.  Most companies have goals oriented around maximizing revenue.  In order to maximize revenue, companies need to maximize their customer or client acquisitions.  The best way to help reach those goals is to have the most efficient sales team possible.  Contract Management Software can make any organization’s sales team more productive and more profitable by leveraging these tools:

Electronic signatures have been legally equivalent to handwritten signatures since Congress passed the ESIGN (Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce) Act in 2000.  With advances in encryption technologies, and the growing prevalence of the electronic marketplace, e-signatures are safer and more convenient than ever. 

The cynics of the past focused the argument around what electronic signatures were missing to be as acceptable as traditional signatures.  The debate has shifted to what efficiencies your organization is missing by not utilizing electronic signatures.