Contract Management in the New Era – Challenges and Opportunities

World Commerce and Contracting has estimated that 60-80 % of business operations are governed by contracts and agreements. Astute and meticulous management of contracts is, therefore, imperative. They are the core of a business. It ensures good business health and provides the scope for increased profitability and growth.

Organizations should ensure their team is able to manage, create, execute, and analyze contracts. This will help to derive maximum operational and financial benefits, reducing exposure and risks.

Efficient management of contracts – why it should not be ignored

Contracts are integral to the smooth functioning of business operations. Many businesses are often caught in inefficient management of legal contracts, resulting in monetary loss. Industry experts believe that the cost incurred by poor contract management is 9.2% of a company’s annual income. That is a huge chunk and has a significant bearing on an organization’s bottom line.

The reasons are many and include:

• Inadequate analysis of results vis-à-vis agreements
• Failure in performance evaluation
• Incompetence in identifying the scope for amendments
• Lapses in contract renewals leading to missed opportunities

Strategies to overcome poor management of contracts

1. Implement a centralized contract repository: 

A central repository of an organization’s contracts integrates from all available sources into a database. It becomes easily accessible, organized, analyzed, and secured, leading to better business decisions.

2. Standardize contract templates and processes: 

This is the next step in ensuring efficient legal contract life cycle management. The standardization of contract templates and processes saves time and ensures uniformity, increasing efficiency and client-vendor confidence.

3. Automate contract creation and management: 

Considering the tech strides of the modern era, it makes great business sense to automate contract creation and management. Choose from a plethora of tools and platforms available in the market that offer automation. Automated contract management workflows bring the benefits of fast and accurate drafting, review, negotiation, approval, and execution of contracts.

4. Establish strong monitoring: 

In order to maintain contract compliance at all times, it is important to establish a strong monitoring process that will ensure contract drafting, reviews, and approvals are as per the organization’s policies.

5. Maintain strong relationships with customers and vendors: 

This requirement might seem unnecessary at the surface level, but good customer and vendor relationships go a long way in making contracts simple and easy to execute. Bad relationships are reflected in complicated contracts that are often time-consuming to manage and difficult to revise.

6. Adopt contract analytics: 

In the modern era, analytics has come to play a crucial role in efficient contract lifecycle management. They offer business ease and speed by providing accurate risk analysis, tracking renewal periods and requirements, evaluating contract performance, and identifying opportunities to reduce costs and increase revenues.

7. Emphasis on collaboration and communication in contract management: 

Clear communication and a sincere collaboration approach always ensure sound contract lifecycle management. They facilitate accurate, timely, and exhaustive reviews, streamline monitoring, improve the confidence levels of the parties involved, and reduce cost and time leakages.

2024 trends for effective legal contract management

Emerging technologies are showing businesses and organizations never-seen-before possibilities. Artificial Intelligence (AI), analytics, and machine learning are bringing changes that will reshape every business sphere, including legal contract management. In addition, the convergence of data has the potential to bring about a deluge of insights that can facilitate business outcomes to a new level.

Find Out How We Can Help Your Business.

Here is a list of emerging trends that will re-define legal contract management in a big way in the days to come:

• Increased adoption of AI
• Greater emphasis on contract analytics
• Focus on data analytics and contract intelligence
• Stronger call for contract collaboration and visibility
• Integration with other business processes
• Increased use of blockchain for management of contracts
• Total emphasis on contract lifecycle management
• Critical focus on contract risk management
• Greater adoption of cloud-based management of contracts

Harness the power of good contract management services with Cogneesol

Cogneesol has been providing end-to-end contract lifecycle management services to clients for the last fifteen years. Our in-house team of 30 legal experts and paralegals offer contract lifecycle management services that include contract drafting, reviewing, renewal management, additions/deletions to scope across contracts related to property, corporate and securities, trusts and estates, employment, and families.

Our technical and data analyst teams also offer automation and analytics support for the management of legal contracts, helping clients onboard the latest technologies and platforms suitable for their line and volume of work. Through our contract lifecycle management services, we not only ensure compliance with the entire contract but also offer risk analysis, speed of decision-making, and increased profitability. In addition, our domain knowledge and broad exposure have helped to maximize business value for our clients through the years.

Get in touch with us at [email protected]  or call +1 833 313 3143 to see how we have delivered value to our many clients and how you can leverage our solutions to drive your business outcomes.