Each Legal Ops team has its own goals and focuses. Your biggest challenge may be streamlining contract creation. In another business, Legal Ops may need to improve data management for better collaboration with other internal teams.

Still, no matter your goals, these tips will help you prioritize your legal operations tasks and build out workflows that support your unique objectives.

Here are 10 best practices for Legal Ops’ contract management:

1. Be Honest About What You Need

As you develop your legal ops function, be careful not to jump into the deep end too quickly. If you try to tackle everything all at once, your team can find themselves stretched too thin and overwhelmed. 

Listen to your legal department’s concerns. Speak to the other teams Legal works with. Take note of concerns that continuously come up and prioritize those areas first. Then, build out your strategy from there.

2. Centralize Your Contracts

Before you can optimize your legal contract management process, you need to get all your documents in one place. 

Gather your contracts from your various ERP, CRM, Finance, and IT platforms and local storage drive. Don’t worry if they’re PDF scans from legacy agreements —AI contract management can ingest and review contracts in any format. 

Once all your documents are in a centralized contract repository, your CLM platform can analyze those millions of pieces of contract data. From there, you’re ready to standardize and automate your contract life cycle management. 

3. Standardize Your Templates

Think about how long it takes Legal and Legal Ops to author contracts from scratch. Too long. 

You can streamline contract creation by developing templates that allow you to author new contracts in seconds. From NDAs and SLAs to employment contracts, you’ll save yourself plenty of time and effort by grabbing those contract templates and editing them as needed.

You can even take it one step further and build out a contract clause library that uses Legal-approved language. Need to add an indemnity clause to an incoming contract? Search for it using regular language, and it’ll pop up immediately. 

4. Set Up Document Management Protocols

Your contracts are living documents that have a big impact on your business. So don’t just toss them into your CLM and forget about them. The right document management protocol ensures your contracts work for you.

For security measures, only a few people in your company need free reign of your entire contract portfolio. Decide who can view and edit certain types of contracts, set those permission controls, and prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data.

From there, you should also use version controls and audit trails to track contracts at every stage. This way, you have a clear line of sight into all communications surrounding each contract, facilitating an effective contract management audit.

5. Define Your Contract Review Processes

Contract review is one of the most time-consuming, tedious, and extremely necessary tasks within the contract lifecycle. So, it’s safe to say there is a lot of room for improvement here.

Leverage contract AI to enforce your playbook, get guidance on legal aspects of contract management, and review contracts 80% faster.

To further streamline contract review, build out clear workflows that alert the necessary parties of tasks so you can execute deals efficiently.

6. Measure Metrics That Matter

To ensure the processes you’re putting in place are working, you should take a lot of contract metrics into account—maybe ones you hadn’t even considered.

Are your efforts focusing on vendor and spend management? Of course, you should track external metrics like obligation fulfillment, service levels, and supplier performance. 

But you also need to keep track of internal metrics. Look at how many hours lawyers spend working on certain types of contracts. See if teams keep needing to add certain clauses that aren’t saved in your library to incoming contracts.

You can use that data to tweak and improve your processes over time.

7. Offer Education to Non-Legal Teams

You can set up processes and workflows for forever and a day. Getting the rest of your company on board is a different story entirely. 

When it comes to change management, a little explanation goes a long way. Clarify your reasoning for implementing new procedures to other teams. Offer them training on contract management best contract practices, terms, and compliance issues so they have the knowledge needed to self-service contracts. 

Not only does this help streamline contract processes, but it also reduces friction along the way. 

8. Collaborate with Your Stakeholders

Any Legal Ops team knows your interactions aren’t limited to just working with the company’s lawyers. So whatever best practices you implement to solve legal contract management issues won’t apply to just Legal either.

Discuss contracting concerns with Sales, Procurement, and IT teams who are also involved in contracting. Use their feedback to influence the decisions you make and streamline processes across your entire company.

9. Revisit Your Processes Regularly

What works today may not (probably won’t) work a year from now. As your business evolves, so do your contract management needs—and the processes you use to keep things running smoothly.

Review your processes regularly. It may be every six months or every year. No matter the frequency, identify areas that still work and others that may need updating.

10. Do Your Research for CLM Solutions

There are a lot of different contract management software for legal teams out there. Why? Because they all have different capabilities and are training differently. The key is to find the platform that best suits your unique needs. 

Do your due diligence when exploring CLM software to solve your legal contract management issues. Ask the right questions about capabilities, security, and AI training to find the solution that best suits your needs.