3 Ways for Legal to Become More Strategic With Contracts

July 26, 2018 • Legal • 3 minutes

Legal has the power to position themselves as a strategic leader, and contracts can help with this.

More and more in today’s business world, legal teams are becoming strategic anchors of an organization. With automation in almost every business process, Legal has the opportunity to lead by working faster and smarter.

The first step in this process is ensuring that contracts are managed effectively. A contract lifecycle management platform will use contract metadata to inform future decisions and roadmaps. Once a platform is in place, Legal can begin moving towards an action plan that will set a company up for success. These are three things that Legal can use to become more strategic and work towards company goals.

Reporting and Analytics

Contracts are comprised of thousands to millions of dollars worth of revenue for an organization. With such a large impact on a company, contracts store a lot of valuable information. Yet working with these contracts on paper or using multiple tools strung together won’t deliver all the insights Legal needs. Managing contracts should be done using a platform that has the capabilities to provide comprehensive reports that can show risk, number of contracts at every stage, renewals, and much more. Without analytics as proof points for planning, goals can be more difficult to map to and accomplish.

Visibility

With the old processes used to manage contracts, there was no way to get a clear picture both of all the contracts in an organization and any information around them. For Legal to be fully effective, they need to be able to see what contracts are renewing, expiring, have certain clauses, and more. Finding any contract in a matter of seconds helps speed up Legal workflows and eliminates time wasted looking for the actual deliverables needed to be effective.

Having visibility is also a money-saver. By knowing what deadlines are coming up, Legal is able to work with teams to see what spend is adding to revenue goals and what resources aren’t necessary. Additionally, saving needless costs such as cancellation fees will improve metrics on costs and the effectiveness of the Legal team. Increasing margins is always appealing, especially to an executive team, so positioning Legal as the keyholders to this goal is significant.

Collaboration and Improved Workflows

The old way of doing things meant Legal was in a bubble and often the “no” group in a company. This is no longer the case. Having a contract management platform in place allows Legal to collaborate more closely with other teams so they’re able to give a “yes” more easily. By getting a perspective into what’s going on in every team earlier rather than later, Legal is able to be proactive, not reactive.

With this increased collaboration comes improved workflows. Setting up approvals early on in the process ensures Legal will be included in every contract, from the beginning. Additionally, having preset templates allows Legal to have more confidence from the beginning that terms and conditions have been appropriately set.

As automation, streamlining, and innovative technology all become priorities for all teams, Legal has the opportunity to focus on company strategy and how they can help an entire organization work towards progress and better meet—or even exceed—its objectives.

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