In business, there’s complexity, then there’s biotech-company-level complexity.

From pharma to food-tech, these companies generate massive contract volume while improving health and human conditions.

Given the essential role contracts play in product development, commercialization, and M&A, adopting a contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution is essential. But biotech companies often wait too long – limping along with chaotic contracting until a legal hire joins.

As CTAs, CDAs, provider agreements, and pricing schedules pile up, contracting improvement can’t wait. Fortunately, you don’t need a JD (or to be an IT wizard) to transform your contracting experience.

In this eBook, we discuss what CLM software is and why biotech companies need it. We also feature popular use cases so operations teams can unleash contracting excellence.

What is contract lifecycle management software?

One leader recently told us that her pre-clinical phase biopharma company generated over 150 contracts per quarter.

From manufacturing to toxicology and consulting agreements, the small operations team was overwhelmed trying to ingest, manage, turnaround, and report on contracts.

Fortunately, they discovered a CLM solution.

Exploring CLM

CLM software connects every contract phase–from initiation and execution to renewal.

To understand it further, Gartner dives deeper:

“CLM spans all processes associated with the life cycle of each agreement – from initial request through discovery, authoring, redlining and negotiation, valuation, approval, execution, order tracking/matching, compliance/obligation management, amendments, dispute management, auditing, reporting, and finetuning to eventual archiving."

Here’s how we break it down at LinkSquares. CLM solutions manage the contract lifecycle, which means they help with the steps in the contracting process, including:

Creating a contract:

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

Executing a contract:

• Signature
• Counter-signature

Managing a contract:

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

While simplifying workflows is a key function, biotech companies also rely on CLM platforms to add visibility into ongoing spend, surface contract insights and risks, and reduce administrative work.

For many, CLM replaces legacy processes whereby employees manually create contracts and use static storage (like, gasp, email!) to share and collaborate.

CLM makes modernization happen

CLM solutions eliminate one-off contract generation, support smart templating, move static files into the cloud, and apply Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities to understand and query contract language.

Consider the importance of modern tools in the dynamic sectors biotech companies operate in.

For instance, imagine the ability to quickly pivot operations as regulatory guidance shifts. With modern contracting, biotech companies can immediately access relevant contract terms or phrases and update standard clauses – without any legal expertise.

As CLM adoption grows, leaders reduce time-consuming admin work, minimize file and versioning chaos, and accelerate commercial agreement turnaround.

Discovering CLM benefits for biotech companies

Whether coordinating with outside counsel, coordinating supply chain agreements, or tuning operations to support future growth, business leaders can harness CLM for rapid ROI.

Here are a few of our favorite benefits:

Contract organization

With CLM, biotech companies can categorize and classify signed contracts to improve speed-to-market, compliance, and new product collaboration. Teams rely on the software to speed up tracking for budgets, consumption, and milestone payouts. Cloud-based contract management also supports searchable, reportable, and permissioned repositories.

With contracts organized, operations and legal leaders easily run due diligence and track the volume and nature of documents like confidential disclosure agreements (CDAs).

Commitment insights

CLM helps biotech companies extract key information from every contract – and turn static dates and commitment data into actionable insights.

For example, using Smart Values, LinkSquares, automatically extracts over 115+ key pieces of contract data.

Users can create or share dashboards that detail:

• Contract dates and terms
• Important development or regulatory milestones
• Royalty payout timing
• Upcoming renewals
• Termination stipulations
• Pricing and payment obligations
• IP rights
• Specialized clauses

Pairing Smart Values with custom reporting and search means users find the answers they need in seconds.

Whether you’re chasing royalty payments for clinical trials or monitoring NDA and CDA renewal dates, find what’s due (and when) at a glance. No more combing through hundreds or thousands of contracts.

Repurpose contract language for easy drafting

Efficient biotech companies reuse expertly drafted contract clause language. With a modern CLM, the preferred language is available to insert directly into new contracts and existing templates.

Internal business or legal leaders can easily find specific language within an existing contract, highlight, and add from the Clause Library, or create a new entry for the Clause Library and include the language there.

No more bogging down a CEO, clinical executive, researcher, or expensive outside counsel to craft and update NDAs or MSAs.

Accelerate deal making, fundraising, and M&A

To capitalize on liquidity or M&A opportunities, biotech companies need easy access to deal disclosures and due diligence data.

Using AI-powered insights, CLM platforms help teams review key clauses and terms, view assignment and change-of-control clauses, evaluate litigation or patent claims, and capture payment or distribution liabilities.

100+ Smart Values broken out into the following categories:

1. General Information

2. Key Contract Dates & Terms

3. Contract Renewal

4. Contract Termination

5. Confidentiality

6. Customer Data

7. Data Security & Data Privacy

8. Liability

9. Pricing and Payment

10. Intellectual Property Rights

11. Specialized Clauses

12. Restrictions

13. Change of Control

Biotech companies also rely on CLM to manage portfolios of inventor assignments and patent applications. Easy licensing agreement search and review are critical for intellectual property management, especially during due diligence.

Teams can easily populate data rooms – then draft and collaborate on event documents (including tender offers and term sheets) without messy redline tracking and version monitoring in different systems.

Click here to learn how ProPharma’s five-person legal team supports pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device businesses around the globe with LinkSquares.

De-risk third-party agreements

Estimates suggest that up to 75% of biotech contracts exist on third-party paper. Control loss like this can multiply manual work and value leakage.

In busy periods, risk exposure also spikes given constant third-party agreement inflows. The right CLM solution centralizes third-party contract management, automates review processes, and helps leaders expose non-standard clauses and other liabilities lurking in their contracts.

Simple to use – and deploy

Few things demoralize eager biotech leaders more than the thought of asking over-taxed IT teams for software implementation help. And in dynamic markets, idling at the bottom of a multi-year project roadmap won’t do.

Fortunately, the right CLM solution will be easy to deploy and have a quick time-to-value.

Companies like LinkSquares offer platform solutions without a long, complicated implementation period. Comprehensive implementation and training plans also align with overarching business goals.

As Founder Shield shares, while trailblazing is revolutionary, it’s also challenging to comply with constantly changing models, regulations, and payment and trial activities.

Contracting excellence helps you keep up.

LinkSquares can help

LinkSquares is the company behind the AI-powered contract management platform of choice for legal teams aiming to move their business forward faster. With LinkSquares Finalize you can develop standardized legal agreements with maximum speed and minimal staff oversight. With LinkSquares Analyze, you can parse and extract key data from every legal agreement in your portfolio, then use that data to drive tasks in your other critical applications. Together, they form the best end-to-end contract lifecycle management suite money can buy.

If you’re ready to write better contracts, close deals faster, and understand every aspect of every contract, contact LinkSquares today.