Simplify. Automate. Digitize. These are the strategies successful legal organizations employ when it comes to managing contracts. How can you keep track of the status of your contracts if they are all scattered across shared drives that aren’t searchable?
A legal case management system provides real-time visibility and automated features that transform your typical way of managing contracts. Rather than searching for contracts in multiple locations, you can access them from a single place. The ability to find documents from all stages of the contract lifecycle is one way you can significantly increase team visibility and productivity.
With the variety of contractual agreements that occur in the government, university and insurance sectors, it’s no surprise that legal teams are moving towards a better way to manage contracts online through software to make their lives easier. A legal case management system with contract lifecycle management features built-in can track the entire process across:
- Contract initiation
- Negotiation
- Approval
- Service level agreements
- Documentation
- Renewal
A legal case management system makes every stage of the contract lifecycle more efficient and effective. To select the best system for your organization, look for providers who offer the following benefits/features.
Five Contract Features You Want in a Legal Case Management System
- Templates
Contracts can be tedious and time-consuming to create. Each word matters — and might be the determining factor in whether a contract is legal or not.
The best contract lifecycle management software offers built-in templates that allow you to automate the process with standard language so you can prevent human error. Virtually any data stored in a case in the contract lifecycle management system can be used as a merge field for contract creation.
You can create a single template for contracts, and then automatically merge documents based on that template using data from within the case. This contract creation feature has thousands of data fields available to create templates.
- Repository
When you create a variety of contracts on a weekly basis, it’s important to have a central location where they’re all stored. With a legal case management system, you can keep important documents in one place to create a contract knowledge base for easy access. That way, every contract or file anyone has created or copied into the software is stored along with the appropriate case and creator ready at your fingertips.
Each contract in the system should contain a document profile, which is a link that provides important information, such as document name, created date, modified date, creator, author, type or classification. The information on the contract profile then becomes search parameters to find the document, edit or use in a different case.
- Reminders
Contracts often require many moving parts with multiple pieces of time-sensitive information. With an automatic reminders feature, you can ensure the process stays on track and important deadlines are never missed. Once you create a contract, you can set alerts to have documents signed, reviewed, edited, renewed or approved.
Reminders also let you know when a contract needs intervention before it can move on to the next step. This reduces the chances of missing deadlines or letting contracts stall. That way, you can save time, ensure easier renewal of contracts and keep things progressing in the right direction.
- Workflow
Contract lifecycle management software with workflow features automatically assigns tasks and due dates to users based on their role in a contract. The workflow feature standardizes each step of the process into a task with an assigned role, ensuring nothing will be forgotten. The workflow then assigns the tasks to the appropriate user in one simple step. Once all tasks are populated within the workflow, they are linked together so if a change is made to the contract, the user will be notified.
Workflows let you define conditions that trigger an email to notify specific users that a condition within the contract has been met. There is no limit to the number of user-defined workflows you can establish to help ensure all your important contract tasks are followed and deadlines are met.
- Compliance
Gone are the days of searching through emails for a missing attachment. Contract lifecycle management provides extensive tracking and monitoring to greatly reduce organizational risk with an audit trail available at a moment’s notice. The software connects all your critical business systems (including email) to ensure your cases and contracts are connected with:
- Automation features to provide a digital record of key signatures and each action taken.
- Reporting features with details on each supplier’s compliance with regulations and service level agreements.
- A template library that ensures contracts adhere to corporate standards to ensure compliance from professionals across the board.
Streamlining Your Most Important Contracts Through Legal Software
If you want to simplify your approach to searching for, drafting and storing contracts, legal contract lifecycle management will help you streamline your contracts, freeing up your team to better practice law than complete manual tasks.
Through automation and alerts, you can configure a system that works for you, ensuring you never miss an important contract deadline date, and all your critical contracts and cases are connected for the utmost compliance.
It’s this tailored approach that sets Legal Files apart from other legal software providers. With a dedication to customer feedback and continuous improvement, Legal Files ensures your legal contract lifecycle management software works the way you want it to no matter what your needs are.
“Our contract people love Legal Files because it keeps all the relevant email and documents in one matter file. It’s great for searching documents too, because we can search one file automatically and don’t have to manually look through hundreds of emails to see who said what.”
Crystal Clean, a Legal Files Client
With more than 30 years of experience supporting organizations across a number of industries, Legal Files gives teams the customization and personalization they need to focus on accomplishing more activities each day with less resources and time.
Request a demo to learn more about how we help organizations like yours manage what matters most.