Collaborative Contract Management With Ironclad

Collaborative contract management within your business can often feel impossible, like each step in the process happens secretly and separately from your colleagues. Instead, it’s often a disjointed and siloed process. 

While most areas of business have undergone a digital transformation, with procurement getting cloud ERP and teams getting Zoom, Slack, and Google Docs, contracts have yet to fully go digital. Contracts are extremely varied, require complex collaboration, and can be hard to understand and analyze for computers and humans alike.

However, contract management doesn’t have to remain this way. With Ironclad Editor, contract management can actually be adaptable, searchable, and most of all, collaborative.

The first negotiation and collaboration tool specifically designed to help in-house legal teams manage the revision and redlining process all at once, Ironclad Editor allows you to collaborate with your colleagues on any kind of contract, whether it’s an HR agreement, a complex NDA, or a sales agreement.

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Collaboration isn’t just when people work together to manage contracts. It’s also:

• Looping in the right people to review or approve the contract at exactly the right time
• Involving key stakeholders
• Aligning your team and achieving your goals cross-functionally
• Maintaining clear boundaries to ensure sensitive data isn’t exposed to the counterparty‌

Negotiation is when you control the commercial terms and deployment of a contract. This is what your in-house legal team should be focusing their energy on, rather than on redlines and editing. 

Ironclad empowers your in-house legal team by automating these repetitive tasks. Our Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) platform will empower you to build a collaborative contract management process and gain transparency into each step of the process. Here’s how.

Ironclad offers a wide variety of tools as part of our transparent and collaborative contract management process. Ironclad’s digital contracting platform streamlines the contract process by extending control and access beyond the legal department to the rest of the company, from Procurement to HR to Sales.

Our software offers a centralized contract management collaboration hub that allows for oversight, collaboration, and access across your company. This means managers, stakeholders, and decision-makers will be able to review, track, edit, and manage contracts anywhere, anytime.

Ironclad integrates with the tools many companies already use, including:

• Dropbox
• DocuSign contract management
• Salesforce
• Google Drive
• HelloSign
• Adobe Sign
• One Drive

And Ironclad offers a public API, allowing you to integrate with your custom apps.

These innovative collaborative features make the contract review and management process much easier than before. ‌

Previously, contract management was done piece by piece. You attached a PDF to an email, sent it to others for approval, and waited for their response. This led to poor communication and inefficiency. What if they missed your update and were responding to last month’s version? 

With Ironclad, you no longer need to send contracts to anyone. Instead, all parties are able to access contracts from a central contract hub. From there, they can flag, comment, and discuss contract terms.

Ironclad also gives you the following:

• Improved visibility and transparency: Since Ironclad gives you a centralized contract repository to work with, you’ll be able to ensure better compliance, standardization, and communication between all parties involved.
• Better auditing: Ironclad’s contract hub will allow you to review the entire history and lifecycle of the contract you’re working on. This makes it easy to track, manage, and report on contracts, even after they’re signed.
• Milestone alerts: Important deadlines and other milestones can be flagged using automatic alerts, so that you never miss a date.

Faster approval: Customizable automated workflows make reviewing and negotiating contracts much less of a hassle.

Ironclad offers the following collaborative features and tools to help you and your team gain insight into each step of the contract management process:

• Advanced search capabilities
• An easily-accessible contract hub
• Automation, like milestone alerts, and audit reminders that remind stakeholders about the status of a contract
• The ability to create templates, which make it easy to duplicate your successes while still allowing you to adjust and tweak as business needs change‌‌

Ironclad Editor also offers the following features:

While traditional contract management tools limit users to choosing between desktop plugins and basic in-browser editing, Ironclad Editor allows you to work on .docx files while collaborating with colleagues across a shared platform. 

With Microsoft Word, you have to redline and edit contracts by yourself and attach them to emails for approval. Ironclad CEO Jason Boehmig is very clear: Word is becoming outdated. 

In contrast, Ironclad allows you to redline and edit DocX contracts with your colleagues in real-time, so you won’t have to rely on multiple apps for creating or editing, saving you the time and energy that would have been spent toggling between different platforms and sending emails.

Like Google Docs, Ironclad gives you the ability to loop in colleagues by highlighting parts of the contract that you’re flagging for review.

This enables you to bring your colleagues into workflows, so they will always be looking at the most recent copy of the contract. You’ll save time and energy that you would have spent attaching the latest version of the contract to an email and waiting for your colleague’s response.

Ironclad allows you to accept and reject tracked changes by other parties. As with Google Docs and Microsoft Word, you’ll see what the other party has suggested, inserted, changed, or removed, and the changes are clearly highlighted or struck out in different colors.

Ironclad’s Dynamic Repository is an intuitive search system that lets you find important contract data in real-time. One of the problems with traditional ways of managing contracts was that it often took too long to find important information, leading to fines, late payments, and litigation. The Dynamic Repository changes that — it’s like Google for your legal team, making contract management collaboration as easy as searching.‌

With Dynamic Repository’s structured and full-text search, you’ll also be able to create detailed data reports and process metrics.

Your entire organization can also use Ironclad to build and customize contracts in minutes by:

• Crafting workflows to boost your business’s agility
• Ensuring contracts comply with legal requirements and organizational policies.
• Enabling business groups to take active roles in managing contracts

With Workflow Designer, your in-house legal team will no longer be isolated from the rest of your organization. They will be able to work in tandem with the rest of your organization to create and edit contracts that will empower your organization’s business process.

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Ironclad also stands out from other CLMs because of our dedicated deployment team. 

Our deployment teams feature experienced Customer Success Managers, Legal Engineers, and more, and they’ll be available to you as your needs require. Each team member’s goal is to make sure that you reach your goals, and they’ll help you get the most out of your Ironclad subscription. 

If you have any questions about how to integrate your business apps with Ironclad, or you want to find the best KPIs for sales contracting, you can ask your deployment team to help you find the most effective and efficient answers for your organization.

Our Legal Engineers have extensive experience working for companies like Zendesk and Salesforce, so they know that flexibility and planning are integral to successful software implementation. They work with you to understand your organization’s objectives and needs, and they’ll create a custom deployment plan to help you achieve your goals.

When Ashlee Best, the head of legal operations of the project management company Asana, implemented Ironclad, she was immediately struck by how collaborative the digital contracting platform truly is. She was able to loop the entire sales team into the contracting process without a hassle.

“User adoption is the key signal that you did something right,” Best said. “Everyone in our sales org is using Ironclad.”

With Ironclad’s streamlined contract process, tasks that would’ve taken the organization weeks now takes a few minutes, giving their legal team more time to focus on bigger legal issues and deals. 

At Ironclad, seeing is believing. That’s why we let you test-drive our software before you commit to it.

You can use our sandbox demo to learn how to configure and deploy a contract template and workflow, and you can test out our other functions. You’ll also get a feel for what the Ironclad user experience is like, so you can compare the end-user experience of Ironclad against other CLMs — we think we’re better, but don’t take our word for it. Try it yourself.

Additionally, you can give our sandbox demo to users in various departments of your organization, allowing you to compare the experiences of various users and gather feedback to assess product usability and implementation risk.

Our demo will also give you a chance to meet Ironclad’s deployment team, so you can see what it’s like to work with them when you choose Ironclad.

Ironclad is the premier choice for in-house legal teams seeking a collaborative solution for contract management.

Unlike other CLMs, Ironclad allows all parties to comment, edit, search, and interact with a contract in one platform. It can be part of any team’s workflows, and integrates with Microsoft Word and email. With automation, a powerful workflow designer, an intuitive search system, and many other features, Ironclad will help you and your organization revolutionize contract management.

If you’re interested in trying Ironclad out, you can request a demo here.