• Drafting a proposed contract
• Editing a contract (also called redlining)
• Finalizing a contract

• Signature
• Counter-signature

• Storing an executed agreement
• Extracting data from a contract to parse out obligations, opportunities, and risks
• Pushing extracted contract data into another system

While many legal teams will require similar solutions, the best CLM for your organization will be identified as the result of planning. The key is to know your legal processes from front to back, and the best way to do this is to write down a list of every stop your contract makes from conception to execution.

Once you’ve visualized the process, you can identify where improvements can be made. Where are your pain points? Which steps in your pipeline are dragging on longer than they should be? How often do errors occur? These questions will bring the problem into focus and help you identify the solution.

Now that you have your contract processes mapped out, you can begin to prioritize specific solutions. No legal practice is perfect, and your team will probably have more than a couple of pain points that stand to benefit from a CLM solution. Instead of trying to fix everything all at once, focus on one or two areas that need the most attention. By identifying these one or two problem areas, you can approach contract lifecycle management vendors with a specific outcome and have an easier time deciding who can help.

When you’re finally prepared to approach CLM vendors and explore different solutions, it’s critical to ask the right questions. For example, how long will it take to integrate the platform, and what sort of training will your team need in order to navigate the interface? How secure is the network? How will data be hosted, shared, and accessed throughout your organization and between trusted partners? What renovations is the platform currently going through, and what changes should you expect to its functionality down the line?

More than anything, you want to understand the vendor’s services as clearly as possible, how it can be applied specifically to your processes, and what kind of support you can expect should any problems arise.