Contract lifecycle management (CLM) is back in the spotlight, post-pandemic. A Forbes article notes that CLM is enjoying its heyday once again thanks in part to the “eye-opening amount of money to be made in the market” with CLM. On the money side, CLM offers legal departments major cost-savings and great value on investment, if CLM is implemented correctly.
Although companies may have integrated CLM as part of their legal departments’ processes, they will need to upgrade when they run into the 5 signs we share in this article. Every good thing gets better when it’s updated and upgraded, and the same goes for CLM. According to JD Supra, “manual contract management can cause roadblocks and revenue leakage”. It’s only with the latest CLM tools that legal departments can accelerate their contract processing speeds, fine-tune their budget, and stay efficient.
Mismanaged Contracts
It’s in the name – management! CLM solutions should be able to create, manage, share and archive business contracts for you. They should also automate contract management processes, and extract business intelligence and data points from contracts. If you can’t find a contract when you need it, you should consider upgrading your CLM tools. Several cutting-edge options allow you to search and open relevant contracts, as well as apply filters and more.
No Visibility
Contracts provide parties involved the means to identify what activities they need to do and what value they offer the other. JD Supra states that companies can suffer “revenue leakages of more than 9% annually” if legal operations and stakeholders do not have visibility into contracts. Being able to access and view contracts can help departments involved in the contracts assess and mitigate risks for all parties involved. New CLM tools come equipped with handy essentials like risk analysis dashboards. These offer visibility into contracts for better risk management.
No Value from Investment
The initial CLM investment should provide ongoing value for money. Companies that find CLM solutions have become rote task managers can consider upgrading with a mix of new technology and current CLM processes. A solution that not only upgrades your CLM strategy but keeps it relevant is including automation and integrating artificial intelligence (AI) processes. AI-powered CLM solutions offer capabilities such as redlining contract minutes!
Missing Deadlines
Missing a deadline is bad, but missing a contract deadline is super bad and can result in disastrous outcomes for parties involved and their companies. By automating CLM processes to auto-renew, alert when contracts are about to expire, and notify when contracts need to be reviewed, legal departments can remove one task off their list and rest easy knowing their CLM platform has deadlines handled like a pro.
Legal Department as a Silo
CLM can be an essential part of the business operations if all departments collaborate on CLM processes. Cross-department collaboration across teams like sales, legal ops, and the legal departments, ensures that all departments have the same visibility and transparency that the legal teams do. Collaboration tools offer multi-department functionality so that authorized teams can make edits for other teams to review, and accept. This makes the overall contract process streamlined and helps the organization stay on the same page.
LegalEase Solutions offers legal departments CLM services from selection to implementation and beyond. Looking for a CLM solution? Check out our CLM solutions for a customized fit for your legal department.
We’ve got a CLM webinar happening soon, where you can explore more about upgrading or launching a CLM strategy. Join our CLM webinar, “How to Propel Your CLM Transformation Journey” on February 8, 2023 from 11:30 AM to 12:30 PM EST!
