National Life Group Uses Contract AI to Improve Contract Turn Around Time By 71%
National Life Group is a consortium of financial services companies providing life insurance and annuity products for individuals, families, and businesses.
Overview
National Life Group (NLG) is a 175+ year-old financial services company that offers life insurance, annuity, and investment products across the United States. With 1.1 million+ customers and $40 billion+ total assets, National Life is #1 in fixed indexed annuities in employer-sponsored plans.
Challenge
As with most organizations operating without a CLM, NLG’s contract creation and management practices were largely manual and non-standardized. For example, NLG sourced common provisions from a clause library living in a Word document.
With 98% of their contracts on third-party paper, the legal team struggled to review and approve large volumes of contracts that didn’t follow a standard template.
This resulted in several issues for NLG:
- Extremely slow legal review and contract turnaround time
- Zero visibility into workflows or contract data
- Heightened risk of manual errors
- Difficulty maintaining version control
"We had no visibility into workflow, so our contract turnaround time was around 90 days, but we had no idea what part of the the workflow was causing this. We were hearing that the lawyers take too long. So, we wanted a way to be able to show where exactly the bottlenecks were."
Solution
NLG’s legal and IT teams partnered to find a CLM tool with post-signature and AI capabilities that would improve processes and work within the organization from a technical standpoint.
While AI was relatively new to the CLM space at the time, NLG knew they wanted a partner with strong AI-driven capabilities.
Sirion – built on AI from day one – fit the bill for NLG. The Sirion team stepped in to implement a full-lifecycle CLM for NLG that included:
- Workflow management – that included a place to create a contract playbook and workflows that moved NLG away from using Word docs to source clauses.
- Centralized, searchable contract repository – that used AI to search and extract common contract terms and provisions across contracts and minimize potential value leakage.
- Fully customizable analytics dashboard – to track workflow metrics and identify areas for process improvements.
- Automation of contract authoring tasks – to reduce turnaround time and minimize errors by auto-populating metadata fields and providing real-time prescriptive suggestions.
- Built-in redlining feature – to support third-party contract negotiations and version control
"When we were going through our process, AI was relatively new. Everybody was kind of starting to use it. Sirion was the one that was doing it the best and the most regular."
Impact
Sirion became a trusted partner for NLG and helped them realize the following benefits:
- Contract turnaround time – Automated workflows reduced the time to contract by 71%.
- Workflow and process improvement – Reporting and analytics features helped NLG identify bottlenecks.
- Adhered to compliance regulations – Greater visibility and control over the contracting process enabled NLG to stay compliant.
- Obligation management – Reliable contract data gave NLG insight into third-party paper and contract obligations so they could better hold suppliers accountable and increase contract value.
"Now we’re getting the right data we want. I consider Sirion a huge, incredible partner, and my experience with Sirion has been phenomenal. Sirion was in lockstep with every conversation I had with my businesspeople."
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