Contract review is one of the most critical stages in the life of a contract. Unfortunately, many organizations are using obsolete contract management methods. Manual and entirely paper-based contract review methods can lead to missed key dates and deadlines, missed opportunities, costly and damaging contract language oversights, and other harmful consequences and contract lifecycle bottlenecks for your organization. Luckily, this blog post will examine the contract review process – as well as how one can improve contract review with AI-based contract management software.
What Is Contract Review?
Contract review is the process of drafting, revising, negotiating, and signing a contract. The contract review process involves internal and external collaboration with in-house legal operations resources and external contract counterparties and stakeholders. Contract review is crucial for a complete understanding of all parties regarding terms and conditions and what is expected from a contract.
Contract Review System
The contract review process of drafting, reviewing, negotiating, approving, and signing a contract is essential. As such, organizations must make sure they have methods in place for a streamlined, precise, and seamlessly collaborative process. This is where legal operations technology comes into the picture. Leading-edge contract management software can automate and secure contract review and collaboration.
Enhanced Contract Review With Contract Management Software
Contract review can be significantly streamlined and centralized with a contract management software platform built on a foundation of contract intelligence with machine learning. Contract AI can transform static contract documents into dynamic contract lifecycle management assets for enhanced contract oversight, proactive opportunity identification, and better contract review collaboration from contract drafting to contract signing.
Contract Review Excellence With Contract Intelligence
Contract intelligence within a trusted contract management software platform can automate and streamline contract management. Organizations can “drag and drop” contract documents into the CLM software system to automate data extraction and the process of classifying contract data.
Robust contract intelligence software for contract review is also equipped with natural language processing (NLP) functionality to automate data extraction, pre-processing, and the auto-fill of crucial contract data within an organizations’ contract records. With automated contract document clause detection, organizations can compare the similarity of newly introduced clauses to those within their pre-approved contract clause library. From there, clauses can easily be added to the clause library or training data – promoting an evermore intelligent contract drafting process for contract review.
Organizations can also locate existing clauses within a document - such as force majeure clauses - to virtually ensure an understanding of clauses and contract language within a contract being reviewed.
Intelligent workflow automation for contract review allows automated business rules to be configured by users to make sure contracts and agreements are moving through all of the required approval channels. This can virtually ensure oversight of contracts managed within a CLM system - promoting task awareness, key date and milestone awareness, and organization-wide accountability.
Contract Management Software Integrated With MS Word & MS Outlook
Robust contract management software that seamlessly integrates with mission-critical applications such as MS Word and MS Outlook can positively transform contract review processes.
CobbleStone Software, for instance, offers seamless integration between their award-winning source-to-contract lifecycle management software suite – CobbleStone Contract Insight® - and MS Word.
CobbleStone® users can leverage an MS Word plugin to:
- easily upload documents to their CLM software system from MS Word.
- locate clauses and copy clauses into contract documents.
- access their contract management system clause library.
- import and update records for the core areas of their contract management software system.
- link contract documents to system record information pages.
- easily send emails for improved contract collaboration and task awareness.
- access customer, vendor, and partner documents.
- leverage seamless PDF and MS Word file format conversion.
- compare contract documents.
- intelligently summarize track changes with full version tracking.
- find lowercase usage of key terms.
- & Much More!
CobbleStone users can leverage an MS Outlook plugin to streamline the uploading of emailed documents into their contract management software system. They can also extract contract record information from an emailed document to be added, updated, or opened in a web page within the CLM system.
Improved Contract Review With Online, Web-Based Document Editing
Organizations looking to improve contract review by embracing digital transformation can utilize a leading-edge contract management software platform to collaborate on contract documents online.
For instance, CobbleStone Contract Insight supports proprietary online document editing functionality that affords organizations low-friction and centralized document management. Organizations can:
- initiate new documents straight from one of their in-system contract record information pages.
- import new .docx and PDF contract documents straight onto an in-system contract record information page.
- and edit or modify existing contract documents within an in-system contract record information page.
During the contract document editing phase within contract review, organizations can seamlessly insert clauses from a pre-approved clause library into a contract document. Relevant files are then automatically attached to contract record information pages – while consequent edits made to documents are automatically tracked as the most updated versions.
CobbleStone also offers seamless integrations with MS Office 365 and Google Workspace. These integrations support a web-based, concurrent online document editing and document management for contract review. Organizations are afforded a low-friction process - which is especially useful for the likely event of working with multiple disparate stakeholders!
Contract Review - eApprovals & Electronic Signatures
The endgame of contract review can also easily be streamlined and improved with leading contract management software.
A trusted contract review system can keep key business users abreast of contract approval events and milestones with automated notifications and alerts. Organizations can configure assigned contract approval tasks for users – and task alerts can be automatically sent to assigned users’ email inboxes and calendars for approval in the office or on the go. Organizations never need to miss a step in the contract review and contract approval processes again!
For a better signing process for contract review, organizations should leverage a highly configurable, user-friendly, and swift document collaboration and electronic signing tool. Seamlessly integrated contract management software and electronic signature software can keep organizations’ signing processes moving in the office or on the go. Organizations can keep collaboration and electronic signing processes running smoothly thanks to:
- rapid signing tools.
- easy one-off signatures.
- rules-based eSignatures.
- & Much More!
Learn more about CobbleStone Software's leading eSignature tool - IntelliSign® - by watching the video below.
Transform Contract Review With CobbleStone Software
To improve contract review from contract drafting to contract signing, you must enlist a complete contract lifecycle management software solution that automates the contract process. The only solution that offers all of the tools mentioned above is CobbleStone Software.
CobbleStone’s long-trusted, critically acclaimed, seamlessly integrated contract management software platform streamlines contract review and every other stage of the contract lifecycle with improved governance, low friction, and high flexibility. CobbleStone Software has been a visionary developer of contract software for over 20 years – and continues to innovate legal operations. CobbleStone’s user-friendly, robust, and easily scalable solution seamlessly integrates with many mission-critical applications for centralized contract management. It's no wonder why Forrester names CobbleStone a Leader in CLM Software!
Discover why thousands of contract managers from a variety of industries trust CobbleStone with their contract management needs. To learn more about CobbleStone’s unparalleled CLM software, book a free demo with a CobbleStone Contract Insight expert today!
To stay up to date on best practices, industry news, and CobbleStone Software updates, be sure to subscribe to our blog and YouTube Channel.
