Leverage Technology to Boost Your Legal Team’s Status

Welcome back to the blog series all about boosting your legal team’s reputation. If you missed the first posts in this series, start here. Finally, here’s the last step: Let technology work for you. 

We’ve seen that when legal teams put technology to work, department status is immediately elevated. And since legal’s reputation rides on internal optics, contract lifecycle management (CLM) software is the perfect antidote: It facilitates speed and productivity and surfaces once-unknown insights. 

Let’s explore how this step flows from the data-finding efforts discussed above. In an example scenario, assume you surfaced the following four challenges among your business partners:

• Manual addition of contracts into a CRM, including key phrases or clauses, is relied on by multiple departments.
• Time-consuming contract drafting that depends on manual spreadsheet review to find preferred language.
• Limited view of company-wide KPIs, particularly revenue and expense figures.
• Complicated M&A due diligence processes, especially understanding revenue reliability and hidden liabilities.

By contrast, here’s how a contract lifecycle management platform solves the issues:

• Automated CRM updates, with contracts pushing automatically from a CLM to a CRM – while critical, reportable fields auto-update.
• Centralized standard language in a clause library, speeding up drafting, reducing risk, and supporting self-service. 
• Simplified revenue, renewal, and other contract term reporting including one-click dashboarding or exportable insights into auto-renewals, payment terms, and revenue-sharing clauses.
• Accelerated due diligence by pulling data room documents into a CLM for AI-powered analysis, extraction, and reporting.

As you evaluate technology for your legal team, remember that not every CLM is built equal. Take capabilities like LinkSquares’ API connection, for example. 

With integration to any third-party app, teams like finance, sales, or customer success can automatically import (or get access to) the contract information they need. Forbes suggests that a hallmark of a high-performing legal team is its ability to deploy “fit-for-purpose tools” to serve business units within the enterprise.

We believe the best way to serve your internal customers is to help them help themselves: no more wild-goose chases and no more bottlenecks. You do this with technology. If you’re ready to write better contracts, close deals faster, and understand every aspect of every contract, contact LinkSquares today.