Interview with Praful Saklani
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raful Saklani is the co-founder and CEO of Pramata. Over the company’s 15-year history, he has held fast to its original mission: to maximize the value
of signed contracts by empowering access to critical contract information for those who need it. Today, that vision has been honed into an essential, effortless solution known as Repository as a Service (RaaS). In this interview, Praful shares his perspective on the value of contract management, why traditional approaches get it wrong, and how Pramata makes maximizing contract value effortless for B2B companies.
How has traditional contract management technology failed to solve the post-signature problem? Current contract lifecycle management (CLM) approaches tend to conflate and combine the pre-signature drafting/approval process with the post-signature repository and data access process. This is a mistake. They are related but different problems and should be solved using different strategies. When you attempt to solve pre and postsignature challenges through a single, rigid approach, it creates a situation where the contract management process works against you instead of for you. This “closed system” approach forces you to standardize the entire contract generation and inflow process before you can get usable contract data to the people who need it when they need it. Imagine if Google required all web pages across the Internet to be standardized for their search engine to work. That would be very slow, expensive and not very useful! BACK TO CONTENTS
Post-signature contract management is critical. People across the organization need to know what terms are active and inactive. What are the current obligations and commitments? And they need to know in one click. They can’t afford to waste time hunting them down when they are trying to engage customers for renegotiations. Companies need to solve contract access and visibility broadly as a cross-functional problem, not simply a legal problem.
If post-signature contract management has impacts far beyond the legal team, what role does legal play? Things are changing at a faster pace than ever before. Markets are evolving rapidly, customers’ needs are constantly transforming, and each executive’s role needs to change accordingly. Every general counsel we work with is examining these questions: “What is my role within the larger organizational mission? What responsibility does legal have to enable the MAY 202 2 TODAYSGENERALCOUNSEL.COM
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