About Xakia
Meet the team: Nolan O'Connor
With a deep understanding of the pain points in-house legal teams experience, Nolan is dedicated to understanding and helping them achieve business...
Contract management is a broad church and the pain points can be plentiful. But what do teams rank as the MOST painful aspects?
When contracts sit at the center of your business dealings, how they are managed is critical to business success.
However, before you can systemize or optimize a contract management process, consider this (non-exhaustive) list of contract lifecycle management stages:
- request
- assign
- draft
- negotiate
- approve
- execute
- store
- search and retrieve
- fulfil and track
- renew
- close
Phew! Knowing which pain points to focus on can be daunting. It's unlikely you can tackle all at once, so you may need to choose 1-2 stages at a time to iterate on the process and establish quick wins.
Choosing which stage to focus on might lead to analysis paralysis... so we asked the in-house legal community what they consider to be their top 5 contract management pain points. This is what we found:
#1 Streamlining contract approval / signature
Ranking equal first, 31% of in-house legal teams surveyed reported that contract approval and signature processes are a major challenge. This is surprising, but also worrying. Lawyers did not go to law school to wrangle a contract-approval-to-signature process so this is an excellent place to start in smoothing the process and removing a major pain point.
#2 Ensuring contract obligation compliance
Tracking obligations and ensuring that both you AND your counter parties do the right thing is, well, the very reason you entered into the contract in the first place. If you cannot track obligations easily you may have a risk management, revenue leakage or cost blowout problem. This one is important!
#3 Centralizing contract storage and retrieval
How many hours do you spend looking for contracts? Who is responsible for keeping them all in one place once they have been signed? Is storage standardized in a way that you know how to find them quickly, understand your obligations in a crisis (think COVID and force majeure clauses) or look for related contracts? This one is admin of the "a stitch in time saves nine" variety.
#4 Contract templates and standardization
Are there ten people in your team and ten different versions of a 'standard' indemnity clause? Do you all use a different template document? This is the very definition of reinventing the wheel. Make sure you have a clear, central, agreed set of templates and then automate them so that your business is using the same version every. single. time.
#5 Tracking contract deadlines and renewals
This is contract lifecycle management. For in-house legal teams the renewal dates are critical for making sure that you have sufficient runway to renew, renegotiate or otherwise deal with the legal aspects of contract to ensure that they end or continue as appropriate.
WHERE SHOULD YOU START WITH YOUR CONTRACT MANAGEMENT SOLUTION?
No matter what your biggest pain point is, any improvement is a good one! Sometimes you just have to eat that elephant one bite at a time.
For more detailed insights & strategies, make sure to check out our white paper, Contract Management 101: Your Top 10 Problems Solved.
Dive in and see why contracts are your best friend when it comes to showcasing your department’s value. It’s packed with valuable tips and expert advice that can help your legal team stay ahead of the curve in contract management and beyond.
Want to know about Xakia's simple, powerful and affordable Contract Management?
We offer free Contract Management software up to five users including a central repository, lifecycle management and beautiful contract analytics. Need more users or more functionality? Read about our approval workflows, intake and contract automation here or book a time to see a demo here.
