Legal contracts are growing more sophisticated every day, and your contract management processes need to evolve to keep up. Fortunately, modern contract lifecycle management (CLM) software offers the features and functionality you need to stay on top of your agreements and improve the efficiency of your legal team.
In this guide, we’ll share seven deadly sins of contract management and how to avoid them by optimizing your contact management workflow. By avoiding these seven common mistakes in contract management, you’ll ensure your legal team is operating at peak efficiency.
Deadly Sin #1: Not Utilizing a Centralized Software Solution
Nothing simplifies and accelerates your contract drafting and management process like having a unified workflow – managed through a centralized software solution – to oversee creating, editing, reviewing, executing, storing, and monitoring your contracts. Rather than spread out your contract drafting, due diligence, redlines, and execution across a host of tools (none of which speak to each other), adopting an end-to-end Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) tool will keep your legal team and your contracts in sync and on track.
Manage Contracts with a Single Workflow in LinkSquares
LinkSquares is an end-to-end contract lifecycle management platform powered by AI. Draft your contracts, send them out for signature, and manage your contracts in an AI-powered repository – all in one platform. LinkSquares also integrates seamlessly with popular tools like Salesforce and Microsoft Word to keep your teams working from within the tools they know and love. When you’re done negotiating and signing, LinkSquares AI will extract your key dates and terms (we call them Smart Values) and intelligently build dashboards and reports for a holistic view of your contract’s lifecycle. All things contracts in one tool for one single workflow. Magic!
Deadly Sin #2: Not Unifying Contract Templates in One Repository
Contract templates are a great way to standardize your legal language, maintain consistent obligations across agreements, and avoid "reinventing the wheel" every time you need to draft a new contract. But templates aren't useful if, for example, the sales contract template is on "Steve's laptop" and is designed to work with Microsoft Word, but the employee non-disclosure agreement template is on "Jane's iPad" and is made for Apple Pages. A single template repository in a unified format is essential to a streamlined contracting drafting process. Your contract workflow solution should offer one.
Unify Contract Templates in LinkSquares
Templates give your teams the ability to self-serve and build agreements in just minutes,
Build Our Paper, Third Party Paper, Sign Only, Request templates, and access the Clause Library to pull in standard preferred language where needed. With all templates stored in one place, your team has everything they need at their fingertips.
Deadly Sin #3: Not Integrating Key Software Tools
There's no sense in (inadequately) duplicating all the word processing of Microsoft Word just so you can do all your work in a single software program. There’s also no sense in making your sales team leave Salesforce to see the status of a contract.
A good contact management solution integrates seamlessly with best-of-breed tools so you can manage all your contracts in one place without having to manually export or upload the contract work you've done in other, more specialized software. This simplifies workflow and avoids the human error that crops up when files are transferred or managed "by hand."
Streamline your Workflow in LinkSquares
LinkSquares integrates with popular tools like Microsoft Word and Dropbox, so you can work faster while staying within the tools you prefer. With seamless integrations with cross-functional tools like Salesforce, Coupa, Netsuite, and more you can track and manage agreement requests, effortlessly share status updates or agreement versions, and keep deals moving. Stakeholders across the business can work wherever they are, drafting, requesting, and tracking agreements without leaving their favorite tools.
Deadly Sin #4: Not Tracking Contract Status
Is your big sales contract still being drafted, or is it under review by the legal team? Has your new partnership agreement been redlined, or are we still waiting for feedback from the other parties? Has your new employee signed their offer letter yet, or is it still out for signature?
Answering these questions shouldn't take multiple conversations with different employees across multiple departments. To keep contract management running smoothly, you need a "traffic manager's view" of your contract pipeline available on demand. This should be displayed on a contact status dashboard within your CLM solution.
Track Contract Status in LinkSquares
LinkSquares Agreement Statuses help you efficiently track your contracts and understand where they are in the review process at all times using clear, descriptive names that represent the contract lifecycle. Legal teams can start their contract processes where they want, advance the statuses as needed, and roll back to a previous status. Stakeholders across the business, such as sales, can also keep track of statuses in Hubspot or Coupa using turnkey integrations or the API, so they are in lockstep with legal.
Deadly Sin #5: Failing To Collaborate On Redlines
Most contracts are compromises, with multiple parties and stakeholders arriving at a consensus agreement by trading redlines back and forth. Nothing makes this process more cumbersome, confusing, or error-prone than trying to track down the version of a contract that is up-to-date.
A good contract management solution should maintain a single version of a contract that legal teams can mark up independently and collaborate on virtually. Every markup should have a name attached, so you can negotiate any changes with the appropriate party and lock in the contract once everyone has signed off on a final version.
Collaborate on Redlines in LinkSquares
With LinkSquares, collaboration across teams to get agreements to the finish line is seamless. Instead of hopping around in another chat application, shared doc, or email, you can streamline all your communications. Lean into the activity pane to see all the parties involved, manage tasks and approvals, and use in-app chat and email, all from one place. With the Microsoft Word integration, you can continue collaborating with your team without leaving your drafting tool of choice. Not only can you draft, review, and approve agreements housed in LinkSquares, but you can also check in with your team using the in-app chat — all without leaving Word.
Deadly Sin #6: Not Storing Contracts In One Cloud-Based Repository
Just as redlines need a single source file to work from, every aspect of your contract management workflow benefits from having a "single source of truth" for all contract storage and workflow. If all your contracts are stored in a single cloud-based repository, no lost laptop, hacked smartphone, or crashed server can cost you a document. And if that’s not tempting enough, no extraneous versions of a contract can hang around on one party's hard drive to cause confusion later.
A good contract management solution starts as a contract storage solution. Any contract management solution you select should solve the problem of where to store your legal agreements.
Store Contracts in a Single Place with LinkSquares
LinkSquares offers a central location to house your contracts – but it doesn’t stop there. When drafting and executing contracts with LinkSquares Finalize and LinkSquares Sign, these agreements will be automatically centralized in LinkSquares Analyze.
If they originated from another source, LinkSquares has several avenues for automatic ingestion. Once agreements have been centralized in LinkSquares, we apply our AI to automatically extract key contract data and automatically tag and structure agreements with our suite of Smart Admin features. These allow you to automatically tag, type classify, and apply a smart naming convention across all of your agreements, making your repository effortlessly organized and easily searchable.
Deadly Sin #7: Not Automating Due Diligence
With the help of modern artificial intelligence, software can now read, parse, analyze, and categorize your contracts faster and more consistently than any (or even several) of your legal staff.
A full-featured contract management solution should harness this technology to help you identify, for example, which of your contracts fall into what state of governing law, which is subject to your "old" service level agreement, and how many have force majeure clauses that can be invoked during a global pandemic or supply chain crisis.
With these features in place, you can automate large portions of your due diligence analysis of new agreements and effective management of every existing contract in your portfolio. No contract management solution is complete without these features.
Automate Due Diligence in LinkSquares
With over 115 Smart Values, LinkSquares makes it easy to extract contract data so you can assess your contractual obligations. Values such as Governing Law, Automatic Renewal, and Data Breach Clause are just a few that make due diligence auditing a bit easier. From there, the dashboards and reports in LinkSquares Analyze make it easy to automate the analysis of where these terms appear and how often.
Conclusion: End-to-End CLM is the Answer
The best contract management solution is end-to-end contract lifecycle management (CLM). From the moment you draft a contract until it expires (and beyond), your contract management solution should oversee every detail.
Even if you don't create every contract that you sign (and almost no one does), an end-to-end CLM solution can reflect when you received, redlined, finalized, and executed a contract – and help you stay on top of the contractual obligations and opportunities to which you agreed. When selecting software, don't settle for anything less than an end-to-end solution.
LinkSquares CLM provides an end-to-end solution.
With LinkSquares, you can manage and track your agreements in a single platform — from drafting to signature and beyond — while automatically centralizing your contracts in one repository.
LinkSquares is the AI-powered contract management platform of choice for legal teams aiming to move their business forward faster. Customers have everything they need to write better contracts, get contracts executed quickly, analyze what's in existing contracts, and collaborate better with their team at every step of the way.
LinkSquares differs from other tools on the market with its powerful AI insights, speed to tangible results through flexible automation, and ability to centralize everything for better visibility and collaboration.
LinkSquares saves companies hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars by eliminating manual contract processes and reducing the need for outside counsel. If you're ready to take your contract management to the next level, schedule a demo today.