Becky Holloway
How Contract Management Strengthens Legal Teams
When it comes to contract lifecycle management (CLM), legal operations and in-house counsel carry a heavy burden. In fact, Gartner research indicates that 86% of in-house legal teams own the review of sales agreements. Their contract workload seems to be always increasing, but the resources needed to counterbalance the work doesn’t usually keep pace. On top of that, legal teams face tremendous uncertainty in dealing with the contracts themselves. In many ways, contracts are the life blood of any company, but they often carry risk and the rest of the organization is usually looking to legal to help mitigate those risks. You’re not alone if you’ve ever stayed up at night wondering any of the following:
Questions to Ask Yourself
- Are there upcoming renewals or auto-renew notices that I missed?
- I have almost no visibility into where all the contracts floating out there are.
- Are the terms in this contract actually favorable?
- Did we get all the right approvals from the right stakeholders?
- How much risk in total have we taken on across all our contracts?
- The scariest part is that I don’t know what I don’t know.
In a world of “do more with less”, what is legal to do? They need to keep track of all contracts while creating contracting efficiency. At the same time, they have to be sure they haven’t taken on too much risk or missed any important milestones in those contracts. Furthermore, it’s not uncommon to have colleagues demanding to know why their contract “has gotten stuck in legal”.
Automation to the Rescue
The answer starts with CLM automation that manages the end-to-end contract lifecycle. Such solutions streamline authoring and approval cycles, providing visibility at each stage of review and negotiation, as well as beyond the signature. A CLM solution can also prevent the headache of rogue contracting and the legal exposure of missed obligations. Legal teams are able to control the use of contract language with pre-approved terms and a clause library, and role-based permissions and contract workflows ensure that the right people sign-off on the contract every time.
Taking CLM to the Next Level
But modern contract management takes all of this a step further. Many of these CLM solution features have been available for a while. However, their overall user experience leaves a lot to be desired, and they were very technical in nature with a high cost of ownership. Until now that is! Malbek brings a consumer-style product experience to contract management. With an intuitive user interface, DIY reporting, and contract insights powered by AI, Malbek puts Legal squarely in the driver’s seat. You don’t have to wait for your overworked IT department to help set-up a report. Instead, you can use search and filtering just like what you already enjoy with Amazon or Google. And, best of all, Malbek AI provides a level of insight into contract performance that helps you make informed and profitable contract decisions. With Malbek, you can assemble the ideal contract with the best terms and language based on customer segments, regions, and historical data. You can identify the bottlenecks in the approval cycle and recommend steps to accelerate approvals, and you can de-risk contracts based on language and terms based on historical performance. More importantly, you can easily integrate Malbek with your other enterprise solutions, such as Salesforce.com, ERP, and eSignature tools to further streamline the overall process. That’s contract management reimagined for Legal!
