Corporate legal teams, as we interact with them more on a daily basis, are exhausted by growing workloads. Still, several organizations continue to remain mindful of increasing legal department resources, which is driving attention in legal tech adoption manifolds. With the growing change businesses dynamics, general counsels are led to prioritizing legal tech and legal automation in order to manage increasingly complex demands, as per the Gartner report on Legal tech predictions
In a Gartner survey, 68% of corporate legal attorneys said they struggled to manage their workloads in 2020. Since then, rising business activity has only heightened these pressures. To help organizations stand on the precipice of digitalization and navigate through the complex process of narrowing down on the technology priorities, we are listing some of our top observations through the eyes of our customers and enterprises we help.
1. CLM will be in top 4 enterprise legal tech’s must have stack:
CLM which was once viewed as an ancillary function has become a mission-critical tech since the pandemic as more enterprises are becoming truly global in nature. By 2025, 90% of the enterprises will implement a contract management software as in-house legal leaders can no more afford to rely on point solutions to cater their contract management modernization demands. Remote collaboration has pressed the necessity of increased contract visibility for the global stakeholders wherein CLM plays a vital role in filling these gaps and helps businesses navigate through the large-scale growth.
2. In-house legal departments to achieve higher CLM Maturity with automation.
As per the Gartner survey Gartner survey, Legal departments will have automated 50% of legal work related to major corporate transactions. The most progressive approach to CLM will be adopting it as part of an enterprise-wide strategy that considers the interdependencies among contracts, business processes, and operational/financial results and indicates a high level of maturity. This is typically achieved by having holistic automation, data and integration strategies.
Majority of the workflows will be automated, making the matter intake from multiple teams much more organized. The contract creation process will be intended to be faster with the help of automation and utilization of pre-approved templates and clauses stored in a clause library, which ensures uniformity throughout similar contracts. At this level of maturity, the CLM system allows AI-based parsing and metadata extraction, thereby ensuring quick, accurate, and efficient authoring of contracts.
3. Data strategy for performance management
Post-Award Contracting will gain more and more popularity with the rising needs of bottom-line protection for organizations. Meaning, tracking every dollar spent and the revenue leakages possible. It also means ensuring that the legal team doesn’t have to put too much effort into tracking contracts after their execution.
Aim will be to automatically evaluate contract performance by tracking milestones and KPIs and the users be notified regarding important deadlines, renewal, or expiry dates, and so on. This eliminates the risk of unwanted auto-renewals and missed expires. It will Improve compliance through performance monitoring against obligations and entitlements to keep the organizations always audit-ready with a detailed history of changes made to contracts.
4. Making use of practical AI to reap value in contract analytics and reducing the cycle time
Embedding Artificial Intelligence into CLM helps drive efficiencies in the contracting process. It also improves the depth and breadth of information captured about the contract assets. This information further leads to reduced contract turnaround time and better decision making. Other benefits include increased visibility into contract performance and a clearer view of potential risks. Contract data discovery and contract review will continue to stay on the top of the in-house legal’s contract management process efficiencies.
Zycus Merlin Experience center shows the excellence in transforming your contracts from static documents to living breathing files with Insta Review along with Merlin Contract Discovery for excellent contract data analytics.
5. Need of the hour – Simple yet comprehensive approach to choose a CLM vendor.
Having a buy-in from your organization’s stakeholder for a new CLM software is one thing, but its successful implementation and user-adoption will be whole another thing. For that, it will be extremely critical to have to correct requirements of your CLM needs as per your organization. Because there is no on-fit-for-all. Believe it or not, your entire CLM initiative will be dependent on how you choose your Contract Management Software vendor.
Zycus iContract has created this very easy step wise process to choose the best-fit contract lifecycle management software for your organization.
- Compare vendor RFPs across a comprehensive list of features
- Prioritize must-have vs. good-to-have features
- Zero-in on a vendor based on their ability to meet features
- Make a business case to your stakeholders
Legal professionals, with a lot of pressure to protect their organization from market volatility by building inflation-proof and sustainable contracts at the global level. As per PwC Pulse Survey 2022, businesses are frustrated by inflation, the pandemic and a talent shortage and executives are uniting to prioritize investments like legal tech that accelerate growth. The price rise due to inflation will influence consumer spending habits impacting multiple industries such as manufacturing, retail, transportation, logistics, etc. Considering this period of economic uncertainty, contracts will be a powerful strategic lever in the legal arsenal to ensure the sustainability of businesses.
