It’s winter again. The clocks have turned back and the daylight hours shrunk. That means you’re probably getting tired earlier and have an unexplainable urge to can some vegetables. Even though your body may want to hibernate, contract requests are at their peak of the year.
The end-of-year push is in full swing, so there are a ton of MSAs that need review, redlines to make, and an evidently neverending pile of contracts waiting for a signature.
At a time of year when resources and energy is low, legal teams need to work smarter, not harder. There’s no better way to maximize output and increase outcomes than with great technology. Technology gives a big boost to lean legal teams who have to do more with less. Specifically, artificial intelligence (AI), Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM), and eSignature solutions are just a few of the things that help legal teams automate tedious tasks and do more meaningful work faster.
Here are some examples of how legal teams can use technology to do more with less.
Automate Contract Creation and Review
If you have to draft new contracts as they come in, you’ll be here until next year. This can become nightmarish at the end of the year, particularly for businesses that process a high volume of contracts.
Using CLM, your team can quickly draft contracts from templates and use pre-approved language to ensure consistency across your agreements. This way, you can move faster without incurring additional risks.
You can even take it one step further and automate contracts below a certain dollar amount to ensure that your team spends more time creating and reviewing contracts that will improve your company’s bottom line.
Sign Contracts More Quickly
Everyone knows that redlining can suck up valuable time in getting a contract over the line. But one of the unspoken villains of contract execution is getting a signature on the dotted line.
Too often, companies send contracts as PDFs via email to signers who are expected to print and review them, append a signature, and rescan it before sending them back. With all these manual steps, it’s hard to know where your contract is in the signing process at any given time.
An excellent alternative for this is using an electronic signature, or eSignature, to collect autographs from your vendors, partners, and clients. Electronic signature solutions eliminate the need to print bulky agreements and rescan them by allowing you to sign within your contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution. As an added bonus, CLM makes it easy to track whether your contract has been sent, opened, viewed, or signed. Not only does this save legal time, but it makes finance happy to recognize the revenue more quickly.
Use AI to Analyze Your Contracts
A big part of legal working smarter not harder is making data-driven decisions to optimize your efforts. Since your contracts hold some of the most important business data, using technology to parse and sort the data within your agreements can help you gain strategic insights more quickly.
Legal teams across industries have been using AI technology to speed up tasks and execute them with more precision. Judges, law firms, GCs, and other legal personnel use AI to find patterns in legal documents that humans can’t discern on their own. In-house teams, for example, use AI to organize contracts, check whether or not the terms are consistent across agreement types, and keep up with autorenewal dates.
Takeaway
For legal teams, technology can help you get a handle on the end-of-year contract work. Use it to automate some of the more tedious aspects of your contract process and watch contracts that used to take weeks to execute take days or hours instead. Interested in how CLM can help you put more hours back into your day? Request a demo of LinkSquares.
