As part of your organization’s legal contracting team, contract details are your domain. During the drafting process you might include every possible clause and rider to cover all the eventualities that might be encountered throughout a business relationship. These lengthy blocks of text can be critical to the success of a contract and anticipating potential risk, but they can also be difficult to wade through to locate specific terms and language. And that’s assuming you’ve found the correct version of the contract in the first place. 

Contract search and analysis, powered by AI, reduces the manual tedium—along with the enormous number of hours and expense—required to find and comb through contractual agreements to pull out relevant language on demand.

As a global driver in contracting technology, DocuSign conducted a survey of 1,300 contracting professionals around the world. The results of this survey reveal how legal teams in today’s contracting ecosystem locate agreements, identify terms, and use analysis to enhance business value. The results show: there are compelling benefits to automating contract search and leveraging AI analysis.

Read on for the insightful findings. 

1. 68 percent of contract professionals search for completed contracts at least once a week

Imagine having to do the same search tasks week after week, all year long – sound familiar? That’s the case for more than two-thirds of contract professionals. Now what if the volume of your contracts is so extensive that the search for completed contracts is a time-consuming daily task? That’s the impasse confronting 23 percent of respondents. 

Why is there so much contract searching going on? Respondents indicate they’re: 

• Looking for contracts in anticipation of an upcoming renewal (61%)
• Using completed contracts as a basis for drafting new contracts (55%)
• Identifying deviations from terms and conditions (49%)
• Reviewing contractual obligations (45%) 

Along with looking at overall contracts, respondents also note they’re looking for specific information, such as:

• Payment terms and financial obligations (56%)
• Renewal terms (55%)
• Details of service level agreements (48%)
• Legal and regulatory requirements (29%)

Being able to locate completed contracts quickly enhances business performance. It’s a simple equation: when you spend less time finding and sorting through your contracts, you free up time for fulfilling complex obligations and ensuring compliance. AI analytics and search tools offer the power to search efficiently and effectively for contracts and language within them so that your teams can devote more time to strategic pursuits that protect the company and improve the bottom line.

2. Finding specific language in a contract takes more than two hours, on average

According to our survey, the majority of contract professionals spend between one and six hours tracking obligations in a contract over the course of its lifetime. One in four spend more than a full workday in total. Surely there are more productive ways of spending that time.

Typically, retrieving contracts breaks down into two stages:

• Locating a contract (45 minutes) 
• Finding the relevant section or language (84 minutes)

In total, that’s more than two hours spent just locating contracts and language, not even analyzing or applying the information. And that’s only for a single contract—if you consider on average companies generate over 500 contracts per month, or over 6,000 per year, the time cost is tremendous.

What’s more, despite these lengthy searches, in some cases, teams can’t find the right contract. 46 percent of the organizations we surveyed are sometimes unable to locate contracts, and less than half reported feeling very confident that the document they found was the most up-to-date version.

As a result, even with all the hours spent looking for contracts and pulling out language, it’s not always clear that teams manage to identify the final—and therefore actionable—version. By offering customizable, robust search options, AI-assisted tools help legal teams avoid this trap.

3. 65 percent of teams aren’t using integrated tools to manage agreements

Our survey shows why many companies spend so much time on contract retrieval: they’re still using siloed systems which slow them down. The average team uses three or more separate tools to perform analysis, and a majority aren’t using specialized technology: 65 percent still use spreadsheets and email to manage contracts.

The result is lost time. From an efficiency and accuracy standpoint, it’s better to have everything you need to manage agreements in one place, with integrated systems so you eliminate the need to switch between platforms or cut and paste information. Much of the time spent locating contracts and searching for specific language can be reduced by managing these processes from one system.

The absence of automated search and analysis capabilities has deleterious effects on the overall contracting process. According to our survey, the majority of problems are related to the inability to efficiently analyze contracts, which can result in missed payments, missed deadlines and missed opportunities. A more efficient system, making use of integrated technology and advanced AI, helps companies prevent misses caused by disparate workflows.

4. Around half of respondents expect AI to reduce human error and minimize risk in contract management.

Many companies and their legal teams are beginning to heed the call of new contract technology. They’re becoming aware of what AI-assisted tools can do to help their contract management lifecycle: 54 percent of survey respondents say they’ve heard of smart contracts, 37 percent of intelligent search and 35 percent of language flagging during negotiation. And around a third of respondents recognize the power of AI-powered process shortcuts like:

• Automatic data extraction 
• Clause-level text recommendations
• Predictive post-execution analytics

By harnessing the power of technology, legal teams can be part of their companies’ efforts to drive efficiency. The rewards for automation are substantial. 53 percent of respondents expect AI to support human decision making and reduce error in the contract management process and 48 percent expect AI to minimize risk.

The financial benefits of a digitized contract process

According to a Forrester study, a composite company saw a 356 percent return on investment in contract lifecycle management technology over the course of three years. The study found that, generally, a robust contract analysis process can reduce the costs associated with hiring outside counsel to analyze documents, as well as errors in agreements and the risk of exposure.

DocuSign helps your legal teams search smarter and analyze better

DocuSign is an innovator in AI-powered contract technology. DocuSign CLM leverages AI to uncover insights from existing contracts and the negotiation process. Beyond intelligent contract analysis, we’re continually developing new AI tools to help your team through every step of managing an agreement. 

As we continue to innovate, our priority is always ensuring that our customers have the tools they need to get work done as efficiently and smartly as possible.

To learn more about current trends in contract analytics, check out our ebook on smarter search.

If your company has spent years trying to streamline your contracting process, it’s easy to get excited hearing about the ease of implementation or the ability to achieve ROI quickly via a contract lifecycle management (CLM) tool. But once your organization has selected a CLM tool, you might be thinking: how do we get started? How do we turn these promises into reality during implementation? 

It’s 100% possible for your organization to implement a CLM efficiently, effectively and with demonstrable go-live success. Here are the top 10 tips for an agile implementation of contract lifecycle management from DocuSign and Spaulding Ridge, a DocuSign platinum partner: 

Tips to follow before you kick off a CLM project: 

1. Document your existing process. Whether it’s on the back of a napkin or a color coded swimlane diagram, starting with a visualization of your existing contract process helps your team understand the starting point for developing a process within CLM. Even if this entire process ends up getting scrapped, starting from the same point helps your team get on the same page. 

2. Know your stakeholders. If your process is the “what”, your participants in the contract process are the all-important “who” (legal, for instance). If you hope to design a better process within your CLM system, you’ll need not only their input, but their buy-in.  

3. Designate an executive single point of contact (SPOC) for build decisions. What happens when there’s a disagreement on a path forward between your legal and sales teams? To streamline the process, you’ll need someone to break ties and stalemates to avoid delays. Delegate an involved leader to be the final vote should these situations come up.  

Tips to follow before you begin the CLM build: 

4. Focus on the big steps before diving into details. If your team has been working through a manual process for years (or decades), seeing the advanced capabilities of CLM solutions can be eye opening. But a good process is more important than any bell or whistle a system offers. Define your MVP and make sure you align on the larger process steps before diving into nuanced functionalities.  

5. Get your subject matter experts (SMEs) engaged. During design workshops, it’s extremely important for the core project team to stay involved. The core team should prioritize engaging cross-functional SMEs internally to ensure that the process design is not only streamlined, but all-inclusive of necessary participants. A bonus of this engagement–these SMEs will be more equipped to become future power users and evangelists of the system within their unique department or function. 

6. Formalize your sign-off process. Once you’ve completed your design, put a bow on it via a formalized sign-off. This act may seem symbolic, but it’s a way to ensure your team is fully engaged and bought in. A clearly defined scope of work that is agreed upon across your team, the vendor and the implementation partner is critical to avoid an untimely “re-designs” in the middle of the build, or worse, after the build has been fully completed.  

Tips to follow during CLM implementation: 

7. Get trained: Classroom Style. If your CLM solution has formalized training offerings, the best time to take these courses is during the build. That way, as your team completes the technical components of the build, you’ll have your training at the top of your mind and be well prepared for the subsequent testing and go-live.  

8. Get trained: Hands-On Learning. Whether your team is utilizing a solution implementation consultant or not, hands-on learning during the build is a great call. Ask to take some time during the technical portion of the build to facilitate knowledge transfer. That way, you’ll be able to pair your knowledge of the concepts of the system with the real-world example that your organization will be using for years to come. 

Tip for user acceptance testing: 

9. Try to break everything. If you’ve followed the tips up until now, you’ll have a good understanding of your process, your people, the CLM tool and your specific CLM configuration. This is where it all comes together: bring a cross-functional team together to test all of the functionality of your configured system. If your team wants to do UAT right, don’t just test the standard path – test the nuances, exceptions, and one-offs. The best CLM systems have been fortified by a robust UAT with engaged participants. 

Tip for CLM go-live: 

10. Advocates = Adoption. Congrats – your team has made it to go-live in record time! Now how do you get your team to start using the system right away? If you’ve engaged your cross-functional teams throughout the process, utilize them as departmental trainers and system advocates. Change management is crucial to an efficient start on CLM. The more your team spreads the word and stays involved, the more likely your organization is to adopt usage of your new CLM tool.  

The more you invest upfront in these best practices ahead of time and throughout your CLM implementation, the more long-term success you’ll have. The most successful CLM implementations include an experienced system integrator partner and a dedicated vendor account team including customer success managers who’ve helped hundreds of customers navigate these projects successfully. 

While these 10 tips can be utilized for any contract management solution, selecting the correct tool increases the likelihood that you’ll have an efficient and effective start with contract lifecycle management. Learn more about how DocuSign CLM helps automate manual contract tasks, streamline workflows, and reduce errors and risk in your contract process. 

This blog was contributed by DocuSign and Spaulding Ridge, a DocuSign platinum partner.  

Questions on how the DocuSign CLM function can make your business more efficient and streamline your agreements process? Contact jennifer.schwartz@docusign.com or ahelin@spauldingridge.com. Or visit our sites at https://www.docusign.com/products/clm/toolkit or https://www.spauldingridge.com/docusign 

2,500. That was roughly the number of people who attended the 2022 Global Conference in May.  That’s a lot of people to be in a space at one time.  It might also be the first time many people were at a public gathering this large since COVID began in 2020.  All of that to say, there was probably a lot of different emotions running through attendees. For me, it was excitement.

Here I was, a law student at a global conference, in one of the newest and most innovative spaces surrounded by thousands of professionals immersed in legal operations and legal technology.  I entered day one of the conference hardly knowing what legal operations was, how it actually operates in different size companies, and what the day-to-day looks like of a professional in this field.  All I knew was that I was interested in the industry, felt that I had the skills and experience to join these professionals after graduation, and knew that I needed key takeaways to bring to my summer internship program in legal operations to share with the team.

Fast forward several days and I learned that these professionals are not alone in what they do.  From managing a team of one, to five, to fifty, these professionals were able to connect with others and understand that they were also encountering the same challenges.  What seemed to be the best part, though, was that they heard from professionals who scaled and grew an entire department.  They heard what worked, what didn’t work, and what they’re doing now to drive change and improve their companies.

I left the conference inspired and in awe.  The legal operations professionals I met are carving a path.  They’re carving a path for themselves and their company in an industry that is moving full-speed ahead.  This year’s conference was motivating, encouraging, and informational.  As a law student, I left with an action plan of skills I can work on developing while I’m still in school, a vast network of leaders making change, and insight into how different sized legal operations departments operate.

Author: Theresa DiCenzo, Campbell Law School and 2022 CLOC Scholarship Recipient

Visual Contract & Document Redesign Project

TIM worked with Villa-Visual Law Studio to redesign legal communications through process simplification by restructuring contracts and documents so they would be more easily understood by users. The primary outcome achieved was visual and digital transformation of legal documents resulting in reduction of lawsuits.

Designing a Meaningful Data-Driven Equity, Inclusion & Diversity (EID) Program

Kaiser partnered with Digitory Legal to undertake a two-phase project including designing of workflows to ensure diversity data is consistently tagged within the company’s billing system. This initiative also required detailed staffing and budget plans be provided to promote “mindful” work allocation and equitable distribution of career advancing roles to diverse attorneys.

Experiential Student/Client Business Challenge

LiteLab created a program to educate future lawyers on how to address the challenge of “doing more with less” by working directly with inhouse teams to solve a discrete business challenge by learning and applying legal design thinking, business model canvas, agile methodology and computational thinking, using low/no code platforms to build PoC solutions that can be easily maintained.

We, the legal operators, love working with you, GCs, and we are impressed every day by how quickly you get to the heart of complicated problems that are presented to you from across the company regularly and frequently. We admire you for mastering the art of building up your arguments to present compelling cases. And we experience you to be modest, humble, and humorous. 

Thank you for offering us a seat at the legal leadership table and for thoughtfully, intelligently, and supportively sponsoring our initiatives to reimagine the delivery of legal services. We have done well together and came far. Amongst other things, we figured out outside counsel collaboration, eDiscovery, contract automation, and litigation management. We have also made considerable progress in enticing our colleagues – the legal function – to move from consultation to collaboration, which has led to more tangible results and given greater purpose to our lawyers. 

As we have increased the functional maturity of legal teams, we are now ready to address the fact that not every piece of legal work requires tailored attention and a perfect solution. In fact, half of the work that we do should be looked at from a perspective of operational excellence to help our business partners obtain faster, more consistent, and simpler legal solutions. We are convinced that this is a logical next step, and in pockets, for example in contracting, we are well on the way to doing this already – it is about harmonizing, simplifying, and automating these services. The questions that we need to address are: 

“How do we lead a legal function that will cover workstyles that range from providing a commodity service to the extraordinarily complex and bespoke nature of developing a litigation or acquisition strategy?” 

“How do we do justice to our people that want and need to be developed on these extreme ends of the spectrum?” 

 As always we come prepared with three archetypical options: 

• Focus on core legal activities and delegate everything else to business partners 
• Split the legal function and have an independent legal solutions team manage the day-to-day operational activities 
• Broaden the legal leadership approach to accommodate both groups, those that work to support the day-to-day business and those that take care of the extraordinary matters that companies face a couple of times a year. 

 All options will lead to spectacular outcomes, happy business partners, and satisfied and engaged legal professionals on both ends of the complexity spectrum. 

Author: Maurus Schreyvogel, Chief Legal Innovation Officer at Novartis International AG.

A couple of weeks ago, I met with twelve outstanding #LegalOperationsProfessionals as part of the #CLOC Mentorship Monday program. Thank you Betsi Roach, Janice Carroll, and Nicole Zafian for considering me and for the perfect orchestration of that day. 
 
The day went by very quickly and was an incredibly enriching experience! I was impressed by how well the participants were prepared for the sessions and surprised to conclude that all twelve discussions were quintessentially around the same three questions: 
 
(1)   How can I become an effective #ChangeAgent 
(2) How much risk shall I take driving driving #change? 
(3)   Why is the person who hired me [GC / CLO] not supporting me more? 
 
For those who are returning from #CGI2022 Las Vegas these questions likely sound familiar. Especially to those who were strong enough, and there were many, to attend the excellent closing session moderated by Jason Barnwell and with the fabulous Aine Lyons, Laura Richardson, and Wendy Rubas. 
 
So here my learning from the mentorship sessions: When I became the operations person for #Novartis, I was so happy that I finally got the position that I always wanted, that stopped taking any risks. I was afraid that I could lose the position that I fought for so hard. Needless to say, that this did not work out well. Ideas, processes, and systems that I implemented were broadly ignored by the legal professionals that I tried to serve. An effective change agent needs to be bold, needs to inspire, needs to feel comfortable being wrong. And all that takes courage and at times it is risky. But hey, what is the worst that can happen? As long as you’ve prepared diligently, and gave it your best, I suggest not that much. That at least is my conclusion after being a #LegalOperator for over fifteen years. And yes, I started taking risks eventually and the reward has been spectacular. A big shout out to Shannon Thyme Klinger who taught me so much about leading change and who always encouraged me to be curious and bold, and who motivated me to be the best version of myself every day. 
 
And what do we do with our GCs and CLOs that are not always supporting us? Remember, they hired us to improve and reimagine how legal services are provided, likely because they acknowledge that this is out of their comfort zone. So, it is on us to inspire them, educate them, and help them to be the convincing sponsor that we need on our side to be an effective change agent. 
 
Thank you, dear mentees from the bottom of my heart for helping me to see clearer on the highly relevant topics that you raised during our sessions! Continue to be curious and bold…, and be kind. Then always remember, we are bringing new ideas and change to one of the oldest profession in the world, and there has been very little change for the last 2000 years about how we work. Change can be hard for those who are asked to adjust the way they work. 

Author: Maurus Schreyvogel, Chief Legal Innovation Officer at Novartis International AG.

Like much of the rest of the world, I have been Wordling. Every. Day. Today, they said I was Splendid! Beyond the quick endorphin shot that gave me, I’ve been spending more time lately thinking about the magic formula behind this simple word game. What is it that makes it so engaging, and how can we make the technology we use every day in our professional lives this easy and fun?  

Here are my top takeaways on what makes Wordle such a delightful product experience and what inspiration the LegalTech community can take from those insights. First, the three things that really make Wordle connect with users:   
 

1. Wordle aces Time to Value – it gives users value back within seconds (in this case, value being fun). It doesn’t require a huge learning curve, implementation time or onboarding time. The onboarding instruction guide is 85 words long and took me 40 seconds to read. 

2. Wordle avoids the Build Trap – it only has a few capabilities, and it makes those features work really well. Plus, it only lets you play once a day – meaning you can’t binge it and then get bored. It makes you want to come back again and again. It just works by doing a few things really well.  

3. Wordle is Agile –  Wordle was recently acquired by The New York Times, and some small hiccups ensued. We learned we weren’t all solving the same puzzle with our friends and families and speculation started growing that the acquisition would ruin the thing we all loved.  The brand needed an intentional, well thought-through approach to making the integration successful, protecting the essence of all that is good about Wordle. But the team recovered quickly! Our lesson is to listen, iterate and make improvements fast! 

So how can we take the essence of what Wordle does so well and apply it to the much more complex LegalTech space? We can start by bringing some joy into the equation. 

We all know the last two years have not been kind to corporate legal departments. A perfect storm of record M&A volume, a slew of new regulatory and compliance challenges – including a rapidly growing list of environmental, social, and governance (ESG)-related issues – and a pandemic that disrupted traditional workflows and created widespread staffing shortages, has left many corporate legal departments feeling exhausted. 

I’ve seen the phenomenon first-hand. As chief product officer for LegalTech at Thomson Reuters, I help create technology to help legal teams confront their challenges. As those challenges have grown considerably over the past few years, I’ve felt a very real urgency to address the existential question: Can technology really help improve the experience of our people? 

As I’ve continued to talk with clients – one of whom started a call by apologizing for looking disheveled because he hadn’t slept in 48 hours – We’ve landed on three key criteria to inform LegalTech product development experience from the customer’s perspective.   

1. LegalTech needs to be Smart – The LegalTech industry needs to ensure we are truly saving people time, not asking them to spend more time monitoring and second-guessing the technology. That’s a really big deal when it comes to leveraging AI for things like automated contract review and spend management analytics. It means the technology must understand the language and nuance of each industry to inform the next best actions – and explain those recommendations by showing the logic. It means we need to be able to trust that the AI is fair, representative, and accurate. We need a human-centered approach to AI that instills trust and confidence.  

2. Proprietary platforms need to be Open – The way we work and collaborate has changed in the last few years, with cats and alien eyes joining us on virtual meetings. We must bring technology to where people are already working. For decades, tech companies have built software on their own proprietary platforms hoping to win clients over to their product universe. In fact, it is a far more effective strategy to build an open platform that can work seamlessly through existing platforms, which legal departments are already using to collaborate, both with their in-house colleagues as well as outside counsel.  
    

3. Technology is all about staying Connected – Over 50% of large legal departments use more than nine legal technologies, often disconnected from each other. This leads to a fragmented and inconsistent experience, and the effect is the opposite of what  we all want – needing technology to just work, seamlessly. Law departments have a role to play – asking for industry standards like LEDES and SALI, asking for open APIs, asking for ownership of their data. Raise the issue with software providers, asking for your suite of solutions to cooperate with and complement one another. And tech companies need to listen, learn and innovate. 

Tying this all together, tech providers need to think like partners. For some product development that means rolling, iterative software development schedules make incremental refinements and improvements every day or every week, allowing end-users to learn and absorb new product enhancements gradually as part of their workflow. 

The world has changed. The way people work has changed. In LegalTech, this means we need to be smarter, with human-centered AI capabilities, open, with the ability to meet people where they work, and connected, intersecting the choice of technology with the integration of technology.   

LegalTech can not only be better, but it can also be – dare I say – Splendid! 

Author: Kriti Sharma is Chief Product Officer, LegalTech at Thomson Reuters.