3 Benefits of Automating Contract Management Workflows

Contracts require attention at their creation and conclusion, but the middle demands the most time and resources. That’s because contract management involves not just creating and archiving your legal agreements but tracking, sharing, reporting, and monitoring those contracts.

Managing contracts comes with time-consuming, manual tasks required to track and coordinate contracts through approvals and review, across emails, spreadsheets, hard drives and even filing cabinets. As the volume of contracts increases and businesses grow, legal teams can’t keep up with the contract management demands.

That’s where automation comes in—with a digital contracting platform, legal teams can keep up with increasing demands and scale with technology, rather than headcount.

Let’s start with contract workflows— which describe a contract template and the business processes connected to it. Contract workflow automation refers to using software to run your contract workflows instead of needing your in-house legal team to manually move contracts through each step of the process.

With automation, legal teams and other teams (sales, procurement, HR, marketing) involved in contracts can save time, improve collaboration and make smarter business decisions by leveraging contract lifecycle management (CLM) solutions that enable:

• Quick and efficient contract creation: empower business users to launch contracts on their own and easily build your own no-code contract workflows.
• Improved collaboration and negotiation: keep everyone on the same page with redlining, editing, and commenting in one place.
• Instant access to contract data: automatically capture the right data and surface insights in real time.

Automating your contract workflows directly benefits valuable business resources.

Many legal teams get bogged down with time-consuming and redundant tasks. Automation eliminates repetitive and manual tasks so your team is free to focus on higher value work and strategic initiatives and sales activity that drive your business forward.

Legal teams are only pulled in when necessary and non-legal teams are empowered to run their contract processes.

Automation features that help fast-track your contracts:

• Ability to build and launch contract generation and approval processes in minutes with no-code, self-serve tools that don’t require implementation time or technical expertise
• Self-service contracting for business users
• Approval and signature conditionality for any contract type

Contract management workflow automation improves communication for faster approvals and bypasses bottlenecks. By bringing emails, ad hoc convos, redlines, etc. into one place, team members across departments can work together to create, review, negotiate, manage, and approve contracts.

With real-time access to the latest version of an agreement, companies reduce risk because everyone is on the same page.

Automation improves collaboration and negotiation:

• Built-in redlining, editing, and audit logging capabilities
• Accept/reject changes and @mention colleagues in your contract editor
• Word/DOCX native editor for seamless negotiation with counterparties

With an automated and centralized contract repository, the data in your contracts is searchable and always up-to-date. Organizations have instant access to contract data to find new opportunities, identify risks and create effective reporting.

By decreasing the risk of mistakes and standardizing your contract’s content, language, and application, automation helps you create better contracts and opens up the opportunity to make smarter business decisions.

Automation unlocks contract data:

• Initiative search, including full-text and structured search
• Contract relationships, such as parent/child
• Process metrics and contract data reporting

From sales contracts to NDAs and service agreements, automated contract management workflows allow companies to create and maintain a single source of truth for contracts.

With contract workflow automation, organizations unlock the benefits of faster, smarter and more collaborative contracting. This results in:

• Better Sales: Closing deals quickly, expanding pipelines, and driving sales.
• Solid Agreements: Creating quick, easy, and secure NDAs
• Improved Compliance: Baking company compliance standards directly into the contract processes
• Enhanced Insight: Consolidate contracts into one organized and easily accessible database.
• Faster Onboarding: Reduce turnaround time with “Legal-approved” guardrails for quicker onboarding and straightforward agreements.
• Reduced Risk: Use standardized provisions for intellectual property rights, data handling, and liability to minimize risk and ensure employees follow all regulatory and company standards.
• Enhance Contract Relationships: Use contract data to find and monitor key performance metrics, including scope of work, billing schedule, performance milestones, and deliverables.

Ready to automate your contract workflows? See how Ironclad enables businesses to automate their contract management and make business faster.