In-house counsel, paralegals, and other legal professionals are eager to streamline legal operations with lower cost and increased ROI. As such, they should be happy to know that there is a way to optimize and centralize spend management, efficiency and productivity, communication, contract lifecycle management processes, contract data analytics, and more. Here is how to improve legal ops with leading legal contract management software.
Contract Requests Done Better
Reliable legal contract management software enables those working in legal operations to enter legal requests and subsequently submit them for request approval without much hassle. Data entry for request records is markedly streamlined and simplified. Request communication delays are reduced with a user-friendly contract request form functionality that allows contract software users to gather, store, review, and ultimately approve automated contract requests easily.
Furthermore, teams can keep in sync with seamless approval routing to legal workflows for main areas of contract management software. CLM software users can attach virtually unlimited files, and easily convert contract requests to contract records without lost data or the need to re-enter data. Legal operations resources can promote and maintain accountability with integrated document tracking, task assignments, and virtually unlimited notifications.
Document Assembly Software Excellence
Leading legal document assembly software can equip organizations with paramount legal operations technology to swiftly author compliant and accurate documents. Using document assembly system automation to dynamically merge contract data fields with clauses from a pre-approved library, legal teams can oversee multiple templates and document versions for expedited contract authoring and exportation of documents into standard file formats. Document templates can be used repeatedly and easily updated.
Read our Contract Insights blog on contract authoring to gain a deeper understanding of legal document assembly with legal operations automation.
Simplified Contract Negotiation
Legal operations professionals no longer need to rely upon a contract negotiations system that hinges on back-and-forth communication and document redlining.
With robust legal operations technology available through leading-edge legal contract software solutions, document collaboration and version control are made easier with numbered version tracking and a full log of document versions. Collaborating parties can maintain version control with the ability to access the newest, most up-to-date document versions with efficiency. This process can be further optimized with a seamless cloud document integration with Google OneDrive and MS Office 365.
Clause ownership functionality improves legal department work by allowing organizations to assign clause owners. If a legal party attempts to edit a clause, a leading legal operations platform can add that clause’s owner onto the approval process. As a result, only necessary parties are included in the negotiation process, according to rules-based clause ownership.
Contract negotiations between internal parties, external parties, and employee non-users of legal operations technology such as contract software are more efficient when teams are furnished to configure a rules-based contract process. A pre-configured contract workflow allows contract stakeholders to receive an alert that takes them to a user-friendly contract collaboration portal. There, relevant contract documents can be reviewed. A benefit of this process is that parties and employees without access to contract management software can still view and edit contracts that are assigned to them but cannot access unnecessary core system features and contracts that are not relevant to their legal operations processes. Necessary documents are isolated so that stakeholders can view or edit them right from the portal. Additionally, parties can undergo approval collaboration in a unified location and receive notifications about the approval process – in the interest of cutting delays.
With such a helpful contract negotiation portal, legal department work and legal contract collaboration are made straightforward and efficient.
Obligations, Task Management, & Spend Management Excellence
On the post-execution side of in-house legal operations and external collaboration, organizations can leverage legal operations technology such as contract lifecycle management software for a more unified, tight-knit, and punctual process. The life of a contract and its relationships can continue to be maximized post-execution with automated alerts, streamlined workflow processes, optimized spend management, and future-minded obligations management offered by a leading legal operations platform in contract software.-
- Better Spend Management: Take advantage of easy contract pricing and budget tracking. Track and monitor costs, line items, and overall financial reporting, and receive advanced budget alerts.
- Modernize Obligation & Task Events: Workflow processes for obligations and tasks can be targeted to execute when certain criteria are met, prior to execution, after execution, or both. This flexibility virtually ensures that the proper approvals, notifications, and alerts will be initiated for contracts at precisely the right time.
- Advanced Notification & Alerts: Email and system calendar alerts can be configured and delivered by the system. Both of these are designed to alert key business users and stakeholders to process assignments, information, requirements, and deadlines.
Best-In-Class Compliance & Auditing Tools
Advanced auditing tools and compliance reporting give legal ops professionals greater visibility into contractual relationships across companies and entities. Legal compliance standards of legal department work can be easily maintained with user-friendly and robust reporting metrics, key dates oversight, and renewals.
Leading-edge legal contract management software also supports seamless integration with OFAC search functionality. This useful compliance technology checks company, vendor, and employee data and compares it to data within OFAC’s (The Office of Foreign Assets Control) national sanctions lists – contributing crucial risk analysis snapshots.
Next-Level Legal Contract Management Reports
Ad-hoc reports equip legal operations professionals with user-friendly reports on incoming tasks, user-defined status reports, reports regarding financial commitments, and more. Reports can be emailed on a scheduled basis or rapidly exported into spreadsheet format to save locally and distribute.
With an online report designer on legal contract software, a legal operations manager and their team can use future-minded legal operations technology to establish highly configurable and flexible reports to demonstrate critical contract information at a glance. These report designers include many file exportation options, such as PDF, MS Word, spreadsheets, various image formats, rich text, CSV, and more!
Executive graphical dashboards deliver a comprehensive overview of key dates, activities, and contract performance.
With the help of advanced financials tracking, better searching, and top-of-the-line reporting tools, legal ops professionals can track payments, spend, and contract data changes.
AI-Based Risk Management & Enhanced Risk Oversight
Meticulous risk management is crucial for successful legal contract management and legal operations. AI-based contract management software simplifies, centralizes, and automates risk assessment, analysis, and mitigation.
An easy-to-understand risk score can keep your legal operations team accountable by equipping them with an outline of how well (or, conversely, how poorly) they are utilizing their risk tools. From there, they can act accordingly and institute the best possible risk management procedures.
Watch the VISDOM® AI video.
Advanced contract software for legal operations also features risk rating and risk mapping tools. Risk profile ratings can help legal ops professionals to visualize risk. Based on tracked risk, legal operations technology users are provided with a risk assessment matrix. From there they are able to view risk probability patterns for events within contracts, as well as risk exposure that can result as a consequence of those events.
Awareness of potentially harmful risk events can help legal operations professionals to decide how to progress with a contract. Risk visualization functionality can help teams make important risk management decisions more efficiently and more effectively.
Experience Next-Level Legal Operations Technology!
Now you know the cutting-edge legal operations technology tools that can help general counsel, paralegals, and other legal ops professionals to realize a workflow process that decreases risk, lessens bottlenecks, and assists organizations in overseeing a growing number of increasingly complex contracts for heightened legal operations. Therefore, it is now time to choose the legal contract software solution that best suits your organization’s needs. That solution is CobbleStone Contract Insight®. With all the tools mentioned above and more - including swift electronic signatures with IntelliSign® to cut send-to-sign time by up to twenty percent - it's no wonder why Forrester names CobbleStone a Leader in CLM software!
CobbleStone® Software's Contract Insight has the tools to assist your organization in managing the whole legal contract lifecycle. Since the mid-1990s, CobbleStone Software’s leading legal operations platform and comprehensive contract lifecycle management software suite has been trusted and lauded by General Counsel and legal departments. Thanks to end-to-end document assembly, legal workflow management, rapid implementation, an easy and sensible user interface, and more, CobbleStone Contract Insight is the best solution for the effective management of contracts, agreements, and committals.
Stop wasting time, money, and precious legal operations resources on disorganized legal contract management. Start centralizing document management, expediting compliance and approvals, boosting your ROI, and more with CobbleStone Contract Insight.
Discover why thousands of contract managers trust CobbleStone Software with their contract management needs. To learn more about CobbleStone’s unparalleled contract management software, book a free demo with a CobbleStone Contract Insight expert today!
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Are you interested in future-minded contract management software tools? In our blog - 6 Critical Contract Management Tools for 2021 – learn how to leverage industry-leading CLM software tools for streamlined, user-friendly, and low-friction contract lifecycle management success!
