As contracts are the core of business, a poorly managed contract process carries major legal and financial risks which have an impact on the bottom line. It can lead not only to missed opportunities and lost revenue, but also trigger compliance issues and unnecessary costs, and eventually hinder inter-departmental collaboration.
Implementing a systematic transformation of both tools and processes, allows legal departments to manage contracts effectively.
First, investing in the right contract management tools is paramount, not only to foster efficiency but also to help ensure business continuity and mitigate business risks.
Increasing workloads, together with the risks associated with managing contracts manually, contract management systems become “critical to survival” and help legal departments reduce risks while improving collaboration within the business.
Here are a few examples of best practices to use when implementing contract management tools:
1. Automated contract creation tools to streamline workflow and mitigate risks
An effective document automation tool significantly reduces effort and risk associated with manually drafting contracts and legal documents.
You can create and maintain a library of Word-based templates for contracts and colleagues in other departments can select a template for the type of contract they need to create.
By standardising contract language, clauses and design in the templates that you approve for use, you ensure compliance across contracts used by the business.
As any updates you make are automatically shared with users. New laws, policies or regulations are incorporated immediately, reducing the likelihood of legal and financial risks.
2. Collaboration tools to accelerate negotiations, reviews and approvals
To optimise collaboration, improve reliability, manage time better and get rid of inefficiencies, it is important to optimise and accelerate contract review, editing and management.
With a contract collaboration tool, you can invite stakeholders to access a contract, make changes, add comments and decide whether to accept or reject suggested edits from others and obtain a comparative summary of the versions.
The legal department can set up dynamic workflows that automate the distribution of the document to the relevant stakeholders. By transforming the draft into a PDF document and activating the validation workflow, in-house lawyers avoid having to follow up with stakeholders for approval, thus saving time and increasing efficiency.
3. E-signature tools
If you are looking to digitise contract processes, it is nearly impossible to keep e-signature tools out of the tech implementation plan.
With an effective e-signature tool, you can execute contracts quicker, and abolish the legal department bottleneck. You can collect signatures on contracts, agreements and legal documents quickly and securely anywhere on any device, while protecting confidential information.
E-signatures cut the costs of printing, faxing, scanning, express delivery, and the risks involved with “print-sign-scan” by always keeping your data secure and private.
Going fully digital for contract management is the way forward in an increasingly complex and fastpaced business environment. By removing bottlenecks and empowering the business to self-serve, you ensure compliance while strengthening the position of the legal department as a competent business partner within the company.
Tasken eOffice, researched and built by Opus Solution, a Business consultant in Vietnam, is an internal task management system as well as automatic approval processes, an online and user-friendly system, allowing businesses to operate more efficiently than ever before. Using new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data, blockchain technology, available on multiple platforms and integrated with tools that businesses already, Tasken provides access to all employees, making it easy for them to keep track of their assigned tasks, necessary documents or requests that need to be approved, with just a few simple steps on the computer, can be done at any time, anywhere.
Lexology
