While it is estimated that around 70% of businesses were already undergoing some form of digital transformation pre-COVID, it hasn’t been enough to sustain the effects of the pandemic. Companies are now being forced to rapidly employ digitalization to stay in business as millions of workers and consumers are expected to maintain social distancing or isolate themselves. The legal management industry is no exception.
How COVID is driving Digital Transformation
Digital transformation was a buzzword prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and companies were taking their time in fully adopting technology without any sense of urgency. When the Coronavirus reared its head and countries went into lockdown, businesses were scurrying to find strategies to manage their workforce while still trying to service their customers. Here is details for chicago divorce lawyer .
Every organization has to rethink the approach to a sustainable business model that can survive unforeseen events. Companies that previously prohibited work-from-home policies, now have to embrace telecommuting. This involves virtual events, online user access to company documents and programs, as well as continued team collaboration.
Serving customers has also seen a dramatic shift in business thinking where they’ve had to change how products and services are supplied. The legal management domain has no immunity as they grapple with the knock-on effect with contract risks while the world tries to adjust to the new “normal”.
COVID-19 has highlighted how businesses have to assess legal obligations and reduce risk exposure. Strategically aligning with technology, and integrated systems and processes expedites time-consuming tasks and promotes online collaboration. Therefore, implementing digitization like investing in a contract management solution will increase the likelihood of future success.
Legal Contract Management Solutions
When manually managing a company’s legal contracts, there’s increased exposure to all kinds of risks especially with multinationals and companies with two or more physical locations, and to sustain company growth. It would be near impossible to handle the ebb and flow of short and long-term contracts with a manual process.
A legal contract management solution offers multi-faceted benefits. Firstly, having a centralized contracts repository is critical to standardizing contract templates, maintaining audit trails, managing changes, and providing transparency to stakeholders.
It can ensure updated clauses are universally applied (where allowed) to anticipate labor and supply chain disruptions because of unpredictable causes, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. But for future contract changes, it can also manage template updates to deal with world events.
Benefits for Technology Investment
Investing in technology tools like automated software solutions for the contract management can deliver impactful value. It drives efficiency and productivity through digitally enhanced processes. This can enable the legal function to be proactive in managing contracts while providing insight and advice to the business in a timely and reliable manner even with abrupt changes occurring across industries.
As the saying goes, ‘the only constant thing in life, is change’ and embracing digital transformation in legal contract management will prepare any business for significant changes that occur through a crisis such as COVID-19. While some of us may think we may be entering a new era of post-pandemic, specialists have warned that another wave of infections could still occur.
This will have a continued impact on businesses to perform accordingly under their contracts. Whatever happens in the future, every organization has to be prepared. A global pandemic is unforeseeable so contract managers must determine what contractual obligations can be met and what clauses to invoke.
How CLM Solves Problems
If we think of manually managing aspects of contract management such as finding contracts affected by clauses and terms, making mass amendments, getting approvals, renewals, and more, it can be a frustrating exercise fraught with irregularities.
Contract management is becoming more complex as we deal with greater uncertainties. Universal contracts are not always the answers as customers demand personalized terms and clauses. Having a reliable process to onboard new contracts, get them approved, store them centrally, and monitor them during their lifecycle are key issues in a contract management process.
Contract management does not have to be complex
Automated solutions facilitate collaboration between teams. Emails can be sent to the right people instantly to get input and approval while also automatically creating notifications for events like new contract requests, updates or comments.
Central storage repository
A decentralized method for filing contracts creates chaos and confusion. A centralized contract repository gives transparency to specified personnel to manage the contract’s lifecycle information that includes key participants, milestones and critical dates, negotiations, and real-time status reports.
Automatic compliance
Having a central repository keeps track of every contract’s version control with visibility on every change made. It enforces compliance by tracking access and edits for full audit trail reporting.
Design flexible workflows
The best contract management solution will give you full configuration to design the most efficient workflow to eliminate bottlenecks for every contract type related to your business.
Graphical dashboards
Dashboards that can be customized provide stakeholders with the ability to quickly display and interpret contract progress and identify risks before they turn into business-critical problems.
Takeaway
There are many advantages to having an automated contract management solution. It is becoming a necessity to stay ahead by creating, managing, and monitoring future-proof contracts. This is where technology mitigates the stumbling blocks associated with this process.
Adjusting to contract changes by swiftly reacting is especially vital during and after the pandemic. What lies ahead is still unknown but through careful planning and investing in technology, the impact on processes and workflows can be diminished.