If your legal team still relies on manual contracting processes and paper documents, you’re missing out on massive time and cost savings. Modern contract lifecycle management (CLM) software delivers transformative efficiency gains by digitizing and automating contracting from end-to-end. This article explores the myriad ways robust CLM solutions save legal teams and their business stakeholders time and resources.
We’ll look at how CLM tools streamline contract creation, accelerate reviews and approvals, reduce negotiation back-and-forth, eliminate manual data entry, simplify search and analysis, prevent version issues, boost organization, cut administrative tasks, and minimize compliance risks. By leveraging CLM software, legal teams can focus on high-value strategic work rather than routine contracting drudgery. Read on to understand why implementing contract lifecycle management is one of the smartest ways to work faster, smarter and more cost-effectively.
Streamline Contract Creation
CLM tools make it fast and simple for anyone to generate new contracts from clause libraries and templates that incorporate your standard terms. This eliminates the need to manually draft common contracts from scratch each time, speeding up the creation process immensely.
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Accelerate Contract Reviews
Sophisticated CLM systems include automated workflows to intelligently route contracts to all required reviewers and track approvals. This prevents expensive back-and-forth emails and constant status checks to move reviews along. Automated routing accelerates reviews dramatically.
Reduce Negotiation Back-and-Forth
Advanced collaborative editing and commenting tools allow you to resolve contract issues faster by enabling real-time negotiation and change tracking between parties. The transparency cuts down on miscues and repeated exchanges that slow deals.
Eliminate Manual Data Entry
Robust CLM systems can automatically extract and store key contract data like parties, dates, terms and values. This eliminates the need for manual re-entry of data into separate databases after signing. Improving data accuracy saves massive time.
Simplify Search and Analysis
Powerful search, tagging and reporting features provide instant access to your entire contract database. You can quickly surface insights and metrics from contract data that would be impossible with physical documents.
Prevent Version Control Issues
With a centralized contract repository, there are no more uncertainties around which document is the latest, signed version. CLM tools maintain a single source of truth for definitive contracts.
Stay Organized
With CLM software, key contracts are always at your fingertips with robust search features. You don’t waste time hunting down documents saved on shared drives or buried in emails. Staff stay productive.
Reduce Administrative Burden
By reducing the time spent on manual tasks like drafting, mailing, filing, faxing and data entry, your team recoups time for higher-value strategic work that moves the business ahead.
Minimize Compliance Risk
Sophisticated features like expiration reminders, audit trails, and search ensure you have full visibility into contractual risks and obligations so that you can remain compliant. Avoiding fines saves costs.
Summary
Implementing a modern AI-powered CLM solution is one of the most impactful ways legal teams and their business partners can work smarter. The compound time and cost savings positively accelerate business performance.
