According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, the average Fortune 2000 company holds around 20,000-40,000 active contracts. Imagine having to manage this contract volume throughout their lifecycle without any technology! In most cases, the responsibility of drafting, authoring, reviewing and managing a huge portfolio of high-value contracts falls on the legal or contract management function where execution is largely the responsibility of the legal operations team. And unfortunately for many operations teams, automation in contract management is still not a common practice. Companies continue to rely on manual processes for contract management – making this cumbersome, time-consuming and often routine effort for the legal team – that often exposes the company to risk and omissions.
An advanced contract management solution means streamlined processes, automated workflows, predictive analytics, standardized language, pre-configured alerts and triggers, and a centralized, integrated repository with easy access across devices. These are just some of the functionalities of an advanced CLM that can enhance the working of legal departments, improve productivity, decrease turn around time, help in strategic decision making and reduce costs and manual errors.
With so many benefits, adopting a CLM technology has become a goal for many legal departments. A proper plan in place with metrics to track each step of the journey can make the adoption easy and avoid hiccups on the way. We have identified four such steps in the CLM journey to ensure high adoption:
Ways to Designing CLM for high adoption
1. Know your point of origin
While adopting CLM, knowing where you are in the CLM maturity model can make all the difference. Understand where you had been in the past and how you have reached the present state. Study the challenges faced and draw insights from your experiences. This stage is the starting point of the CLM adoption and having a thorough understanding of the current scenario from the technology and business standpoint can go a long way.
2. Collaborate with key stakeholders
It is best to involve all the stakeholders in your decision making to ensure you get the right contract management solution for your organization. Contracting, legal, procurement, and any other divisions who would be using the solution could have important suggestions and insights that might help in a more ideal solution, save costs and ensure higher CLM adoption. However, do so at the risk of feature and scope creep – so keep your friends close and…well you know the rest.
3. Capture use-case intricacies
As you are capturing the as-is state, be sure to understand and reach out to the stakeholders, process owners, reference data managers, clause curators, past, present and future librarians, and don’t forget the heritage legal file administrators as well as future stewards. Now is the time to understand the intricacies and complexities – or at the least document them and have owners identified.
4. Simplify processes and integration
The goal of implementing a Contract Lifecycle Management solution is to simplify the process. With a simplified, more straight forward process, which leverages technology to facilitate decision paths and embodies new technologies like AI and Machine Based learning to provide assistive guidance, user adoption increases through incremental and consistent gains in performance and process efficiencies.
For a more in-depth understanding of each of the steps in the Journey of CLM adoption, along with real-world examples and insights from established market leaders from Zycus, Intel and Transdev, attend Zycus’s breakout session on ‘The Journey of CLM Adoption in Legal Operations’ on Tuesday, May 14th. The speakers will discuss their journey of CLM adoption, the challenges they faced and the learnings from the same. They will share their experiences in leveraging CLOC competencies that include defining target metrics through Data Analytics, rallying support through Cross-Functional Alignment, and leveraging agile program management disciplines in their journey of Technology & Process Support for Contract Lifecycle Management.
