FEATURE
Consider Contract Management Software for Legal Departments By SEAN HECK
T
he contract negotiations process can be daunting, to put it lightly. The back-and-forth nature of negotiations can feel like a never ending game of chess. In turn, general counsel can face confusion and contract life cycle management inefficiencies internally and with external stakeholders. Without a centralized procedure, both sides of the contract negotiations chessboard can become befuddled — unsure of their next move. There are several reasons that manual or obsolete contract management methods can lead contract parties in negotiation to reach a stalemate, unaware of how to proceed with contract collaboration. These reasons often include: • Inclusion of high-risk contract clauses. • Time-consuming contract drafting. • Too many unaccounted for revisions. • Unclear and disorganized contract versions. • Incomplete or untimely contract negotiation tasks. • Missed key dates and milestones. Thankfully, there is a resource at the disposal of general counsel to leave contract negotiations stalemates behind and make headway with streamlined, automated, and
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user-friendly contract collaboration. That resource is contract management software for legal departments.
CONTRACT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE FOR LEGAL DEPARTMENTS Contract management software for legal departments can allow general counsel to centrally manage the contract life cycle, and offer in-demand legal operations tools, including: • Easy-to-use contract request intake forms. • Intelligent clause extraction and text extraction. • Automated contract authoring and assembly. • Version tracking with comprehensive audit trails. • Clause ownership. • Intelligent workflow automation and task management. General counsel and legal departments should consider contract management software for better clause management. General counsel can leverage intelligent clause extraction within webenabled contract management software to easily extract clauses and other legal text. AI-based contract life cycle management software offers natural language processing with fuzzy language
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matching for clauses, legal phrases, and terms. Contract intelligence can identify positive, negative, or neutral contract language based on easily configured rules. General counsel can merge clause language with contract templates within their pre-approved clause library. Additionally, the more contract documents are introduced to AI-based contract management software, the more contract intelligence can recognize different types of clauses — presenting a confidence percentage in clause recognition each time a contract clause is introduced during data extraction (Figure 1). This way, general counsel can be ever more confident in a system that exponentially learns from contracts!
LEGAL CONTRACT AUTHORING Contract authoring is a crucial aspect of contract negotiations – so general counsel should consider investing in contract management software that can streamline contract writing. Leading contract management software can allow general counsel to streamline the contract creation process by merging mission-critical data fields with templates from an organization’s pre-approved library. Documents can easily be exported in MS Word, PDF, and other file formats. BACK TO CONTENTS
