How Can Law Firms and Legal Departments Benefit From Contract Management Software?

Contracts and legal documents take up a lot of time for law firms and legal departments – luckily, new technology like contract management software for legal departments and digital solutions make it easy for businesses to manage contacts in an effective manner.

Legal contract management software (CMS) helps organizations (and legal teams) streamline and automate the entire contract lifecycle, from creation to signing to renewal.

The legal industry is known for its extensive paperwork and meticulous attention to detail. In such an environment, the adoption of contract management software can be a game-changer. Contract management software, with its suite of advanced features, can help law firms and legal departments streamline their processes, reduce errors, and improve efficiency. For example, features like automated workflows can assist in reducing the time spent on routine tasks such as contract creation and approval. Additionally, these systems can provide reminders for important deadlines, ensuring that no critical dates or obligations are missed.

Moreover, contract management software can also provide strategic advantages. With the ability to store all contracts in a centralized, searchable database, these tools facilitate better organization and access to crucial information. This can be particularly useful for large law firms and corporate legal departments handling hundreds or even thousands of contracts. Furthermore, the ability to track performance metrics and use data analytics can offer invaluable insights for decision-making. With these insights, law firms and legal departments can better understand their contracts’ lifecycle, identify trends, anticipate potential issues, and devise strategies for improvement. This can ultimately lead to better client service, risk management, and overall business performance.

Why is legal contract management software (CMS) important?

Contract management software for legal departments is a great asset to helps with the daily operations of any legal team; using this tool, teams are able to significantly reduce the amount of time and manual labor that has been traditionally required in order to manage our increasingly complex legal contracts.

In the modern age, technology has allowed businesses many shortcuts to help daily operations go as smoothly as possible. Unfortunately, many businesses continue to use the same contract lifecycle process that businesses’ used a century ago – this is a problem, as legal contract management software is affordable and widely available (no matter how big or small a business is!)

Contracts are legally binding – this means that they are inherently (1) important, and (2) a high priority. 

That said, the more time spent on managing legal contracts is time lost. Contracts do not directly contribute to the growth of a business, they are merely a byproduct of doing business in the first place.

So, the less time spent on contract management, the better.

As it pertains to legal teams, there are serious repercussions of not staying compliant to legal documents – this is simply the responsibility of legal departments and law firms everywhere, and one that has consequences if not maintained.

For these reasons, law firm & legal department contract management software is basically essential. 

Also, these software solutions must be reliable and secure… otherwise, there are risks to the lifeblood of the organization that you serve. The job of legal departments is to ensure full legality and avoid fees or ‘hazards of the law’ – so, not only must contract management software be used, but it also must be a system that is of excellent quality.

Benefits of contract management software for legal departments

There are many benefits of legal team & law firm contract management software offers.

Some of these benefits include:

Enhanced visibility

Paper legal contracts are naturally difficult to manage, and one reason is because of the way in which manual contracts are stored.

Using legal department contract management software, legal teams have complete visibility over their database of contracts and where each contract is at in terms of its lifecycle.

Effective contract management solution for legal departments allows businesses’ the ability to get a ‘birds-eye’ view of their contracts in order to allow for better management.

Using the software, all contracts are stored in a central database that can be accessed by team members with the right permissions from their own personal computer.

Fast approval

Getting a contract approved is easier than ever thanks to legal contract management software.

The entire contract process is automated when contract management software is used – and this includes approvals.

When contracts are made and finished, they are automatically sent to the various department heads or team members that must approve a contract so that it can be completed.

All team members are able to see what obligations are required of them and what they need to do so that the contract can be signed and finished.

Contract compliance

With a legal contract management system, legal documents are unable to be edited in a way that makes them legally ‘invalid’.

Legal department contract management software automatically ensures all contracts are valid and that they establish the exact legal boundaries that the contract is intended to establish.

Automated alerts

Using legal CMS, all relevant parties involved in a specific contract are alerted whenever a task is required of them.

Not only that but when a contract is nearing its expiry date a notification is sent out so that the contract can be dealt with and renewed.

Simplified management

Overall, the most difficult job of legal departments when it comes to legal contracts is simply managing the 1000’s of contracts that businesses deal with on a day to day basis.

Using legal CMS, the contract lifecycle is simplified and the ability to oversee all contracts within an organization is made easy as well.

Digital solutions allow businesses to more effectively manage various aspects of daily business operations, and when it comes to legal teams one way to cut down on time spent dealing with contracts is to implement legal contract management solutions.

Considering how complex legal contracts are today and the sheer amount of them that businesses have to deal with on a day to day basis, legal contract management tools is no longer a luxury – it is now essential.