- September 5, 2024
- 15 min read
- Nia balbo
Introduction
Let’s go back 30 years. If you asked anyone in the corporate world who handles contracting, without missing a beat, they’d say Legal. Jump back to today, and contracting is no longer siloed in that one team. Legal Operations has joined the party.
As these teams split up contracting responsibilities, it’s become more important that they have the tools and technology that allow both sides to do their jobs effectively and efficiently. Enter contract lifecycle management software.
But here’s the catch—not all CLM is the same. To truly reap the benefits of this tech, you need to invest in a solution that delivers the capabilities your teams actually need.
Let’s take a look at how Legal and Legal Ops live without this solution and the specific things they need from a CLM to be successful.
On average, enterprises lose 45 minutes locating a contract and 84 minutes looking for the relevant section or language – a total of more than two hours – before they can analyze or apply the information.
A Quick Legal vs Legal Ops Refresher
While they can have some overlapping tasks, Legal and Legal Operations make up two distinct roles within your in-house legal function.
Legal focuses on using their legal knowledge and expertise to tackle the legal aspects of contracting, reduce risk, and act as strategic partners for the business.
Your lawyers and paralegals want to speed up contracting cycles and keep contracting tasks in-house, lowering overall costs.
Legal Ops focuses on the business and process aspects of contract management, including technology, data, and cross-department coordination.
This team consists of people with finance, procurement, IT, and project management backgrounds. They aim to improve processes to empower attorneys, increase efficiencies, and boost cost savings.
Now, with different responsibilities comes the need for different capabilities.
Life Without CLM
Imagine a life where you still needed to rely on paper maps to navigate road trips.
Where you had to flip through dozens of cookbooks to find a single recipe for dinner.
Where you had no option but to assume your checkbook was correct and what you wrote was actually where your money went.
While all that was the way of the past, technology offers a better way to do things.
The same applies to your in-house legal function if they’re left to work without CLM.
For Legal
Without contract lifecycle management, your legal team struggles with the chaos and stress that comes from having:
- No Clue Where Contracts Are — “Are they in that drive or this CRM?” “Who knows?”
- No Clue What’s In Them — “Does that contract have the payment schedule?” “Not sure.”
- Backed Up Bottlenecks — “I’ll review that contract after I get to the 19 others on my plate.”
- Zero Executive Reporting — “Sorry, I can’t tell you the total contract value.”
- A Reputation As The “Department Of No” — “You absolutely cannot agree to that language.”
For Legal Ops
Until they implement a CLM platform, Legal Ops muddles through the day with:
- Scattered Contracts — “That contract could be in one or more of seven locations…”
- Inaccessible Data — “I can’t confirm that information because I don’t know where it came from.”
- Wasted Time Via Process Bottlenecks — “Yes, this 20-minute task took two days.”
You can solve all these problems by introducing a contract lifecycle management tool that delivers everything Legal and Legal Ops needs to succeed.
Five CLM Must-Haves for Legal
Don’t go onboarding any old CLM platform. Make sure you’re only looking at solutions that empower your legal team with:
1. Visibility
Legal needs a holistic view of your entire enterprise’s contract portfolio, past and present. They need to be able to see obligations, compliance, requirements, payment terms, and more at any given time.
2. Control
Lawyers require more power over the language and terms they use to create agreements. From stronger templates with unified language to contract clause libraries, the more control they have over contract language, the better they can reduce contract risk and protect your business.
3. Efficiency
There’s no time to spend days reviewing a single agreement. Your legal team needs a CLM that lets them author and negotiate contracts much faster without relying on (and paying) external counsel.
4. Insight
Legal needs a CLM that will easily deliver contract intelligence from past agreements. They can use this information to improve contract clauses, draft stronger agreements, and maintain a competitive edge in contract negotiations.
5. Answers
When the executive team asks, lawyers need to be able to answer. By having greater control, contract visibility, and insight into the entire contract portfolio via contract AI, lawyers can answer larger business questions at the drop of a hat.
Your choice of CLM also needs to provide your legal operations team with a few key capabilities.
Five CLM Must-Haves for Legal Ops
As they work to improve processes and efficiencies across the organization, your legal operations team needs a CLM that delivers:
1. Centralization
Organization is the key to improving any process. Legal Ops must gather your entire legal portfolio into a secure, central contract repository that allows them to search for agreements on demand.
2. Automation
Your legal ops team needs a way to ditch the manual work at every stage of the contract lifecycle. Therefore, your CLM solution needs to allow for workflow automation of contract authoring, review, negotiation, and optimization.
3. Accuracy
Strong data is the foundation of good processes. If they’re going to help improve vendor and financial management, Legal Ops needs to trust that your CLM will deliver accurate contract data in real time.
4. Responsiveness
You don’t want to implement new tech that takes just as long to do a task as a person does. Legal Ops requires a CLM that responds to their queries and workflows in seconds so they can drive efficiency.
5. Scalability
Your technology solutions need to grow right alongside your business. Give Legal Ops a CLM platform that can handle the increase of contracts that is inevitable as you expand your enterprise.
Find a CLM That Works for Both
To truly succeed as a legal function, you need to leverage a CLM that has the capabilities needed by both Legal and Legal Operations. You get it all with Sirion.
Sirion’s full-lifecycle contract ecosystem helps get the most out of every phase of the contract lifecycle. That means you maximize realized contract value and minimize risk across the board.
See how you can use our end-to-end CLM solution to make better deals and protect your company’s bottom line.
Additional Resources
Legal Ops Best Practices to Solve Contract Management Issues
Legal vs. Legal Operations: What’s the Difference?
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