Softonic, a leading software discovery platform based in Barcelona, has consistently prioritized innovation and efficiency since their founding in 1997. Recently, Softonic has been undergoing a large, company-wide digital transformation. The program, Above and Beyond, is centered around their core values of thinking big, stepping up, working smart, and acting as one team.  

Farouk Merzougui, Softonic’s CFO, leads a lean team of eight covering finance, legal, and compliance, and knew right away that implementing a CLM would be critical to legal’s own digital transformation.

Building a scalable process

Due to several factors - the sheer volume of agreements, operating globally, and experiencing unprecedented growth, Farouk knew there was a process bottleneck when it came to legal. The contracting process was managed via email and collaboration tools like Slack, making it very manual and people dependent. 

When evaluating CLMs, Softonic was looking for a collaborative, all-in-one tool to centralize work with an easy user experience the entire team could use. And they found all of that, and more, in LinkSquares.

Transforming contract creation with Finalize 

The team now manages their entire contract process - from creation to signature - with LinkSquares. There is not a single contract at Softonic that is executed without Finalize. And the results speak for themselves. “Prior to implementing LinkSquares, NDAs could take anywhere from 3-4 full business days. It was very manual and time-consuming, requiring a lot of back and forth between legal and sales to collect all the necessary information,” says Farouk. “Now, with pre-built templates in Finalize, sales reps can execute NDAs themselves, spending on average 5 times less executing agreements.” 

While Farouk manages a team of eight, only two members are working in legal and compliance, pairing with external counsel for some additional support. Luckily, their outside counsel firm also works within Finalize, and the additional automation and collaboration has significantly cut costs. 

Centralizing all contracts within Analyze 

Once contracts are finalized, they now live neatly in LinkSquares Analyze, greatly reducing the headaches of having contracts across Google Drives, emails, and other various locations. As Softonic operates across 17 countries, centralizing contracts in one place is critical for team efficiency. 

Farouk particularly enjoys the power of the AI features and their ability to pull out all the critical information while simultaneously renaming and organizing agreements. As Softonic operates in a highly regulated space, it can be very time-consuming reviewing and finding what they need. But LinkSquares has sped that up - “Things go way faster now. Just for example, by using the AI Smart Values and Tags, instead of reading a 15 or 20 page contract, you can go right to the clauses that really matter. So it makes the process faster, and at the end, we save time and money," explains Farouk. 

Anyone can do it

But perhaps the best result of all, even on top of the time and cost savings, has been the improvement in collaboration. Previously, people could be reluctant to go legal - they knew the workload and how overwhelmed the team was and feared it would slow down their deal time. With LinkSquares, the team has greatly reduced the backlog and bottlenecks, completely transforming the relationship with the business. “Legal is more integrated into the company and is seen as a strategic business partner vs. ‘the guy that says no’.”

And he feels strongly that other teams can see similar results. “Softonic is a mid-sized company - many people of the same size feel ‘We don’t have the money,’ but in reality, the only way to scale and grow the legal team is to invest in a solution like this as they continue to grow. A CLM tool can solve a lot vs. doing the manual work with a larger team.” 

In fact, many, Farouk and the Softonic team included, feel the lawyers that will thrive in the future are those that really understand how to leverage CLM and legal technology. Embracing such solutions is not just a nice to have, but the key to unlocking new ways in-house teams can strategically partner with the business and drive sustainable success.