Contract management software and legal operations tools are becoming buzzwords across the industry. Large and small departments alike are looking for ways to improve performance, store their documents, and meet the ever-present goal of “doing more with less.”
So, what can contract management software do for you? Below, we go into a few elements of your work that are supported with these tools:
Increase your productivity
Contract management software increases employee productivity. Not only is efficiency boosted with historical data being stored in one place so your employees aren’t losing 10 hours a week searching through emails, but your team can also get more done. Automation, clear lists of priorities, one-click reporting, and more enable your team to produce more in less time, with less effort.
Reduce administrative costs
Let your legal team work on revenue-generating contracts, and pay them to do legal work, rather than them spending so much time on administrative tasks.
This capability comes from several features:
- Approval workflows: we’ll talk about this more in the section below on compliance
- Filing of documents: Our product ALOE automatically stores final contracts in a central, searchable location
- Request processes: Intake requires certain information from the requestor so your attorneys aren’t spending time chasing down basic details for contracts
- Reporting: cut down on the time spent building reports, prepping for meetings, and updating internal clients on the status of your documents. Use dashboards for your teams, send weekly automatic email reports to departments heads so they know the status of their requests, and pull reports for meetings in moments.
Improve compliance
Contract management software can improve compliance in many ways, one of which is through approval processes. Criteria for different types and levels of approvals can be set in your system, so if a contract relates to IT, Marketing, or IP, it is sent to certain approvers. Additionally, Finance might need to approve a contract if it hits a certain threshold, and higher level approvers may be needed for higher dollar amounts. These can all be set to automatically flow to the right person so there is less opportunity for human error.
Boost transparency
Transparency is helpful for many reasons, all of which I won’t argue to you today. We don’t have the time. One reason we like the transparency that contract management software provides is related to staff changes. When staff changes, whether temporarily or permanently for vacation, leave, promotions, job transitions, etc., you want to keep the details of your negotiations in a place where the person taking over can find them. Transparency in ALOE makes sure you don’t lose that information when the previous staff member’s email is shut down or they aren’t available while on leave. Keeping information in ALOE makes sure that no matter how quickly another staff member needs to take over a contract or negotiation, all the historical information they need to work with this client is available to them.
Another reason transparency is very helpful is in the rise of remote work. Collaboration is simple in contract management software. It’s easy for team leaders to see what their team is working on, celebrate successes, and see where someone is stuck and might need help.
Provide a central repository
Like I mentioned above in the section on reduction of administrative costs, contract management software automatically stores documents in a central, searchable repository (if you have the right one!). These repositories can be OCR-enabled, store supporting documents along with executed contracts, have filters so you can narrow down your search to find specific subsets of data, and more.
