Streamlining the contract creation and management process: A guide for Heads of Legal

As a Head of Legal, you shoulder the immense responsibility of overseeing the legal integrity of your organization’s operations. This includes ensuring that contracts—whether they are NDAs, MSAs, employment agreements, or licensing agreements—are not only compliant with the latest regulations but also reflect your organization’s current standards.

Managing these tasks efficiently, while also leading an in-house legal team, can be challenging. You are not only responsible for maximising value, you are to do so whilst completely eliminating risk. Balancing these principles effectively and efficiently proves near impossible, even for high-performance teams. But, should compliance always come at the cost of speed?

Here’s how you can structure your workflow to address some of the common pain points you may face.

1. Implement a centralized digital contract lifecycle management system

Templates are hard to police, leading to the potential use of outdated or non-compliant terms in contracts. Whereas the finance function has designated controllers, and developers full-time QA testers, how do we maintain order and oversight in legal teams?

The first step toward solving this problem is implementing a centralized contract lifecycle management system (CLM), that can house all approved contract templates, organized by type and regularly updated.

By centralizing templates, you can:

• Ensure consistency across all contracts by providing a single source of truth.
• Automatically lock certain sections of contracts (like standard terms and conditions) to prevent unauthorized edits.
• Incorporate a version control system, so your team is always using the latest, compliant templates.

By implementing a contract lifecycle management (CLM) tool like Docfield, that centralises the creation and management of your key contracts, you can ensure a complete view on all agreements your enterprise is binding itself to. Allowing your team to easily store, access, and update contract templates, ensures that your everyone in your company always operates with the most current and compliant versions of each document.

Optimised for scale, you can ensure not only the most technical and complex deals are covered, but also those pesky, repetitive agreements where no one sees the underlying risks. By updating a template centrally, and feeding these changes to all sub-agreements, you can ensure that your corporation is not binding itself to anything that outdated or hasn't yet been approved.

Actionable steps

• Research and implement a digital contract management tool like Docfield that integrates well with tools like Microsoft Word.
• Appoint a member of your legal team to oversee the regular updating and auditing of templates within the system.
• Train your legal team and other stakeholders on the use of the CLM to ensure smooth adoption.

2. Automate regulatory updates and compliance checks

Keeping up with regulatory changes and ensuring all documents are compliant requires manual review.

Given the rapidly changing regulatory environment, manual reviews of each contract are not sustainable. Instead, use a contract management solution that includes automated compliance checks. These tools can flag clauses that might be outdated or non-compliant based on the latest regulatory updates.

In addition, you can leverage AI-driven tools that can compare existing contracts with current regulations and suggest necessary amendments. And set up alerts within your CLM for any regulatory changes that affect your contract terms, ensuring you are always up-to-date.

Docfield offers features that simplify this process by allowing for automated compliance checks. With these capabilities, your team can quickly identify and rectify any discrepancies in your contracts, ensuring they meet current legal standards.

Actionable steps

• Integrate a compliance tool that can automatically update you on regulatory changes.
• Schedule regular reviews to ensure that all your templates and contracts are updated as per the latest regulations.
• Consider developing a playbook that outlines how to handle regulatory changes, including timelines and responsibilities.

3. Enhance real-time collaboration

Real-time collaboration between legal and other departments is hard, especially when speed is important.

Collaboration is key to ensuring that contracts meet the needs of all stakeholders while remaining legally sound. To improve real-time collaboration, consider the following strategies:

• Use cloud-based document editing tools that allow multiple users to work on a document simultaneously.
• Implement integrated communication tools to facilitate quick discussions and approvals within your legal team and with other departments.
• Set clear guidelines on the approval process, including the sequence of reviews, who needs to be involved, and the timeline for each stage of the contract creation process.

Docfield’s collaboration features enable your team to work together in real-time, regardless of their location. This ensures that legal and other departments can seamlessly collaborate on contracts, reducing delays and improving efficiency.

Actionable steps

• Establish a standardized process for contract creation and approval that includes input from all necessary departments.
• Ensure that your team and other departments are trained on collaborative tools and understand the workflow for contract reviews.
• Regularly review and refine the collaboration process to identify any bottlenecks or areas for improvement.

4. Delegate and streamline workflows

Overseeing every detail while managing a small team can be overwhelming.

By outsourcing low-value, high-importance routine tasks and streamlining contract workflows, your team can focus on higher value activities. Some examples:

• Assigning junior members of the team to handle the initial review of contracts using the CLM and compliance tools, leaving more complex issues for senior legal counsels.
• Automating repetitive tasks, such as sending contracts for e-signatures or generating reports on contract statuses.
• Setting up a regular cadence of meetings to review complex issues and ensure that everyone is aligned on priorities.

Docfield can help by providing workflow automation features that take care of routine tasks, allowing your team to focus on strategic legal matters. From automating the contract review process to managing e-signatures, Docfield makes it easier to delegate effectively and maintain oversight.

Actionable steps

• Clearly define the roles and responsibilities of each team member to optimize efficiency.
• Utilize project management tools to track the progress of contract reviews and ensure deadlines are met.
• Regularly reassess and adjust workflows to improve productivity and address any new challenges.

Conclusion

As a Head of Legal, optimizing your workflow is crucial to managing the growing demands of your role. By centralizing contract management, automating compliance checks, enhancing collaboration, and streamlining workflows, you can ensure that your in-house legal team operates more efficiently and effectively.

This not only reduces the risk of errors and non-compliance (with Docfield, it’s impossible to create outdated documents) but also frees up your team to focus on strategic legal matters that drive your business forward.