Contract lifecycle management: improve efficiency, gain insight, reduce risks

• Your contracts are on paper and stored in people’s desks
• Digital contracts are scattered across computers and departments, with no central repository
• You have no clear overview of your contractual rights and obligations, or insight into the associated risks and opportunities
• You have no structure people can use to pass on insights and information regarding contractual rights and obligations
• It is unclear who is authorised to negotiate and execute different types of contract and no workstream to ensure the right people are involved in the process and sign-off
• You regularly get asked to draft and review contracts when that’s not your job
• Negotiating contracts and obtaining approvals and signatures is taking up too much of your time

Lower your risks, create insights and move faster with contract lifecycle management
Contract lifecycle management is a fast-growing business concept that improves compliance and efficiency while reducing risk. It further ensures that stakeholders within your company who need contract insight have it. Good contract lifecycle management makes your business faster and more flexible. It ensures you can identify your obligations, assess your risks, spot opportunities and develop mitigation strategies quickly.

Legadex can help you take control with contract lifecycle management
As a specialist in contract lifecycle management, Legadex combines consultancy services (advice on processes, authorisations, technical infrastructure, flows, alerts, metadata and more) with implementation. We can advise on, deploy and run your contract management lifecycle system. And if you only want help in part of the lifecycle, we can assist too. We define six phases in the contract lifecycle:

• Contract Generation
• Negotiation & Drafting
• Approval Flow
• Signing & Execution
• Retention & Audit (Repository)
• Obligation Management

Contract Generation
Contract generation involves centralising the contract creation process. Instead of people reusing old contracts or contract templates to create new ones (which can increase risk and reduce compliance), Legadex can fully automate the generation of contract drafts. The result is that business users can create a fully completed contract simply by answering a couple of questions. You can use these tools to build any contract you want. Legadex can define the most effective questions to include, structure them and build them into your contract management system of choice.

Negotiation & Drafting
The vast majority of contracts are relatively simple agreements that require only limited negotiation. This means you can automate their review. In a contract management system, you receive marked-up versions of the proposed contract. Contentious issues and proposed changes are handled and managed by sending alerts to the people who need to see them. This keeps the legal team’s involvement to a minimum while still ensuring that everything is checked and that the contract is fully compliant with your internal policies. And for simple, recurring agreements, we can review any comments and look after specific clauses. This way, your legal team only needs to look at high-risk changes.

Approval Flow
The vast majority of contracts are relatively simple agreements that require only limited negotiation. This means you can automate their review. In a contract management system, you receive marked-up versions of the proposed contract. Contentious issues and proposed changes are handled and managed by sending alerts to the people who need to see them. This keeps the legal team’s involvement to a minimum while still ensuring that everything is checked and that the contract is fully compliant with your internal policies. And for simple, recurring agreements, we can review any comments and look after specific clauses. This way, your legal team only needs to look at high-risk changes.

Signing & Execution
Like approval, contract signing can be automated within your organisation. Just set an authorisation schedule for every agreement and ensure the signing tool includes the correct signatories within your company. We can help you set this up and implement this in your contract management system of choice.

Retention & Audit
Retention and audit, also known as the repository of contracts, is where the legal department collates, structures and creates an overview of all contracts and makes these visible to everyone who needs them. This is the traditional contract management element within the total contract lifecycle. The repository is a mine of information covering end dates, obligations and risks. The repository is also where you define what metadata to include with your contracts (automated or not). These data fields are the basis for creating alerts and notifications. As this is an ongoing need, we can manage contract retention and audit as part of a Legadex managed service.

Obligation Management
Most companies do their own obligation management. However, by creating suitable fields, filters and alerts, Legadex can help you to increase and maintain your control over your contracts, prices, renegotiation windows and so on. We can help identify what metadata to include and how to structure the alerts so that the relevant people receive the alerts they need on time.