Not all contract management is created equal.
One method leans on spreadsheets, emails, hope, and prayer. The other is a centralized contract management system where everything from contract creation to storage and renewals happens in one place.
The former often leads to increased risk from scattered contracts and ad hoc processes, and tends to cause more headaches than it cures.
The latter makes legal’s job easier by automating repetitive processes and streamlining internal and external communication. Centralized contract management allows the legal team to be more organized and gives them more time in their day to do more innovative work that drives the business forward.
Here are three ways a centralized contract management system benefits legal teams.
Save Time with Templates and Automation
Let’s face it, a lot of legal’s work, while extremely important, is also immensely tedious. Drafting contracts, negotiating with the partner or client, and waiting for stakeholders to review and approve the agreement can take weeks or sometimes months, which is time that lean legal teams don’t have to spare.
With a centralized contract management system, legal teams can cut that time in half. With templates that make contract creation a breeze, workflow automation that moves contracts through their lifecycle seamlessly, and built-in eSignature for digital signing, legal teams can use CLM to automate and increase visibility into their contract management process. This way, everything you need is in one location.
Streamline Communication
Jumping from your inbox to Slack to the redlines in your Word doc can cause disruption in communication, which leads to tasks and information falling through the cracks of your process. It means sales won’t know the status of a pending deal, legal teammates can miss (or misinterpret) crucial context of a contract, and external stakeholders redline the same terms over and over again.
Inside a centralized contract management system, you can chat with collaborators, automate notifications to signers, and respond to redlines inside a single platform. Plus, with real-time updates and integrations with Salesforce and other CRMs, you have up-to-date access to all the customer, vendor, and partner data and previous communications needed to ensure everyone is on the same page.
Reduce Contract Risks
The core of legal’s work is protecting the business from risk. But without proper systems, repeatable processes, or centralized storage, legal teams might introduce unnecessary risk.
Centralized contract management means no more scattered contracts. It enables centralized contract storage, making it easy to find, fulfill, and update any contract at any time. Given the volume of data privacy and other regulations that legal needs to comply with to protect the business, seamless access to your entire database of contracts is essential to reducing risk.
Takeaways
A centralized contract management system is an absolute must for modern legal teams. Not only does it streamline time-intensive processes, but it makes for better customer experience with internal and external clients while helping legal protect the business.
See how LinkSquares CLM can help you centralize your contract management process. Request a demo today.
