What Is a Contract Repository?

A contract repository is used to store and organize the contracts that your business runs on. A modern contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution offers more than a filing cabinet ever could. 

A contract repository should be the only place your company stores contracts and agreements. A CLM solution serves as the contract repository for your entire organization, making it a single source of truth for your team.

Contract Management Best Practices 

To ensure that all your contracts are consolidated into your contract repository, your contract management solution should seamlessly integrate with every other tool that reads, edits, transfers, or otherwise interacts with your contracts. That way, storing contracts within the repository is automatic. For example, if your contract repository integrates with DocuSign, every contract you execute via DocuSign will be saved to your contract repository.

Integrations can separate a truly legal-centric contract management solution from other document sharing and management tools. Solutions like Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Drive make it easy to sync and share contracts across devices and team members. Still, they don't natively connect to the rest of your CLM suite. You'll need a solution that can integrate them. 

Your repository should help move contracts through the lifecycle stages and reflect those changes on a dashboard when you have a defined contract workflow. Dashboards provide an intuitive, real-time snapshot of your contracts, giving you full visibility into legal commitments.

A contract repository needs some form of optical character recognition (OCR) to convert images into text files. The best CLM solution will have OCR that is trained on standard legal terms. Without OCR, manual review of non-digital contracts can be incomplete and costly.

With LinkSquares' Smart OCR process, you can easily run a full-text search of any document and create customized reports. Digitizing contracts enables LinkSquares AI to extract and identify over 100 key pieces of contract data, which we call Smart Values. 

Above all, a contract repository should be integrated with your contract drafting and contract analytics tools. When you use automation to write better contracts and analyze existing agreements, every contract benefits from the powerful AI behind that automation. 

If you're going to invest in AI tools, you don't want any contracts to be denied analysis because the AI couldn't find them. A centralized contract repository solves that problem. Every legal team and legal practice needs a contract repository. If you're ready to get your contract storage in order, contact LinkSquares today.