Managing Contracts Successfully – Combining Expertise and Technology
April 28, 2021
contracts consulting law firm consulting enterprise legal management elm law department consulting business of law consulting contracts services manage contracts contract management
Managing contracts can seem like a big black box with more questions than answers. How are contracts managed? How are obligations tracked? What is the risk level in each contract? How are new contracts created, and do they follow a standard process?
Law departments around the world struggle with these questions. As reported by Artificial Lawyer, the latest Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) 2021 survey of Chief Legal Officers (CLO) tells us what technology they consider most important to fund in the near term. Contract management is at the top of the list, with 67% of respondents saying they are looking to invest in contract management technology in the next 24 months. The best solution, however, does not stop with technology. People are critical to the process, not only in terms of internal and external resources (implementing the solution) but also the buy-in from those expected to use the system in some capacity, whether it’s reviewing, approving, or managing.
Two recent examples illustrate how Elevate customers were able to leverage our technology and people to successfully transform their contract operations with a combination of our contract software and services.
An international motor company needed their contracts from multiple countries to be organised and a playbook created. This company functions in a highly regulated industry so a very specific knowledge base was developed. Doing so required not only technology but also legal consulting to determine the customer’s specific needs. (This has now evolved into Elevate’s knowledge base feature set within Manage Contracts, available for custom development according to a customer’s specific knowledge base needs.) Elevate’s Contract Services also leveraged Analyse Documents’ machine learning technology to analyse, review, extract, and organise the hundreds of agreements from multiple countries. The Manage Contracts dashboards showcased the master records, historical versions, and auditable changes and also allowed permission-based access and reporting according to organisation level and region.
In Australia, a large law firm needed their contracts organised and a structure implemented to maintain the new configuration. The solution required a repository and dashboards so that supplier and client contracts could be maintained separately. Reporting from the repository was also important. Fortunately, they had the Elevate ELM’s Manage Contracts software module to rely on. Manage Contracts allowed key data to be extracted and then tracked through a dashboard and exported into Excel for reporting purposes. These reports include contract statuses of reviewed, duplicate, removed, expired, or live-signed. All new contracts are now submitted via Manage Contracts, automatically organised, and tracked for expiration or renewal.
As shown by these examples, there is a company that possesses the crucial combination of technology and legal professional services, and that has used this combination to achieve success for law departments. Elevate Services has years of experience implementing change management into legal departments and law firms using our legal expertise and technology solution.
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