In an era of unprecedented technological change, legal practitioners are now embracing automation for their business processes like contract management. Contracts are the core of any business. Automation greatly benefits businesses that create, negotiate, and execute contracts on a regular basis. If legal teams are still using manual, paper-based methods, then its contracting process results in confusion, inefficiency, and mistakes. It also slows the pace of doing business, increases risk, and causes frustration in customers and employees.
In the digital world, clients expect better service, including a rapid and accurate provision of various documents and agreements. Luckily, the mismanagement of contracts is a legal liability that you can avoid with the right contract management tools.
Now, let’s have a deep look into the ways legal practitioners working in law firms, in-house legal teams, and enterprise companies use contract management solutions to deliver superior business results.
What is Legal Contract Management?
Legal contract management refers to the processes in which legal practitioners in law firms and in-house legal departments manage the flows of contracts held between a law firm and the clients/a legal department and other divisions in the corporation.
Contract management includes contract creation, negotiation, adherence, service level agreements, and documentation.
Legal contract management becomes a must to manage multiple legal operations and to satisfy clients at scale. Without a streamlined administrative process, it is almost impossible for legal teams to complete all their arrangements successfully.
What is Legal Contract Lifecycle Management?
Legal Contract Lifecycle Management (LCLM) refers to the processes of managing contracts from creation to release and is aimed at reaching the biggest cost savings and highest efficiency.
Having a comprehensive understanding of the contract management process tends to minimize time spent working on administrative tasks and maximize strategy to accelerate and automate the deal.
Some of the key stages in Contract Lifecycle are as follows:
1- Contract Preparation
2- Template authoring
3- Review and negotiation
4- Get approval
5- Execute the contract
6- final revision
7- Signature
8- Renewals
Every stage of the contract management lifecycle needs to be carefully managed to ensure successful completion and regulatory compliance.
Clients are now expecting law firms and in-house legal consuls to use legal contract management solutions to minimize human errors and save time during the process of drafting, reviewing, and delivering.
The role of Contract Management automation for legal professionals
Contract management automation is crucial to compete at a business level. Law firms that provide an excellent client experience throughout the contract lifecycle management differentiate themselves from those that don’t. This is also true for the in-house legal teams that drive efficiency in the entire company.
Let’s have a look at how contract management tools are changing the business world?
Boost efficiency & time-saving
Contract management automation has many features such as online redlining and negotiation, approval workflows, edits, e-signatures, trigger emails, and alerts – its implementation becomes smooth. It is nice for day-to-day users and anyone who needs to sign a contract as it provides more efficiency and a core process change.
This all leads to fewer administrative errors and more time-savings. It also creates more value for clients, which of course, gives legal firms and other organizations a competitive advantage.
Easily Search with a Central Repository
The way contracts are organized can affect business productivity. Legal teams need to be able to find contracts quickly so they can respond to client inquiries or process renewals within the organization.
Keeping contracts easily identified and located by relevant stakeholders saves time and boosts efficiency. Having one central repository makes it easy to search and quickly find documents.
By using contract lifecycle management tools like Lexzur, organizations can have a central repository to share and manage documents and contracts ensuring that all teams have all the information in one place.
Streamline legal contract drafting
The automation of legal contract drafting using centralized templates that are automatically filled in with contract details cuts down on administrative overhead.
Using highly efficient contract generation tools like Lexzur legal firms can now have easily customizable smart contract templates that ensure that they always have the most up to date data they might need.
Measure contract approval time
Keeping contract approval time down is key to getting your agreements off the ground quickly. The faster the contract is approved, the sooner the client receives the expected service, and the better is their experience with your service. Locking down the terms of an agreement early also ensures that you don’t waste time going back and forth with the client over changes.
Define approval centers
Using a contract management system improves business cycles. It streamlines the contract process and helps move contracts quickly from one step to the next. With its pre-configured intuitive workflows, it ensures contracts go to the right stakeholders for reviews, approvals, and negotiations.
Users can set a defined approval center where they can set who can approve the contract they are handling whether it is scanned, a PDF, a Microsoft Word doc, or any other format.
Lexzur – The ultimate and robust Legal Contract Management System you should be using
Lexzur is an all-in-one legal practice management solution that offers varied and completely integrated legal contract management features for legal teams of all sizes. It makes it easy for legal teams in law firms and in-house attorneys to manage all agreements and categorize them, define workflows of drafting, set approval centers, and generate advanced and accurate reports on top of contracts.
Interested in learning more about making contract management more creative and collaborative?
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