Crossing Legal’s Digital Divide with Contract Data
By Tim Donaghy
Chief Technology Officer | Contract Logix
Excerpt from CCBJ – Crossing Legal’s Digital Divide with Contract Data Article:
CCBJ: Tim, can you tell me a little about Contract Logix and what you do?
Tim Donaghy: Yes, absolutely. Contract Logix is a leading provider of contract management software. We were founded in 2006 and our goal since the beginning has been to help our customers uncover and mitigate hidden risk in their contracts. We work very closely with corporate legal and legal operations teams across several different industries, especially highly regulated ones, like healthcare, energy, and pharmaceutical. They use our platform to simplify, automate, and digitize the way they manage all phases of the buy-side and sell-side contracting process. This includes everything from a contract request, the creation, negotiation, and electronic signature of an agreement, as well as the ongoing post-award management including things like obligation tracking, amendments, you name it. We are a full contract lifecycle management solution, and we pride ourselves on being a very data-driven, customer-centric, and security-first company.
You talked about helping organizations uncover hidden risk in their contracts. Can you elaborate on how you are helping legal teams do that?
Uncovering contractual risk is part of our DNA at Contract Logix and there are many ways our software helps make that possible. Our belief is that risk is inherent in every legal agreement and to effectively manage risk, you must identify and assess it before you can mitigate it. We also believe that data is key to effective risk management. Unfortunately, many organizations don’t have the ability to leverage their contract data because it’s stuck in shared drives, spreadsheets, and other obsolete or document-centric contract management tools. That’s where we can help. You need a data-driven approach to contract management and we’ve built our platform from the ground up to be data-centric.
Our software gives our customers the ability to harness the wealth of data in their contracts like names, dates, terms, values, even legal language. Our platform then takes that data and transforms it into actionable business insights using capabilities like real-time reports, dashboards, automated alerts, and more that can be used to uncover and minimize legal, financial and security risks like missed obligations, unfavorable terms, slow approvals that might cause a deal to be lost, or unauthorized access to sensitive information. We provide a modern, accurate, and automated way to identify, assess, and mitigate contract risk.
Are there any other examples of how technology like yours can help Legal and Legal Ops do their jobs better when it comes compliance, speed, strategy, or other areas of their business?
That’s a great question. Research and our own experience have shown that many corporate legal departments and contracting teams spend way too much of their time on routine, manual, and mundane contract management tasks because they aren’t using the right digital CLM tools. Those activities take them away from spending time on more strategic initiatives that can really help the business such as ensuring compliance with internal policies and external regulations, implementing better risk management processes and checkpoints, and even facilitating more effective collaboration and negotiation to finalize business faster. With our software, they can simplify and automate their entire contract lifecycle management process. This frees up an enormous amount of time so they can focus on the highest value and highest impact things for the business.
For example, many organizations request contracts via email. That’s an inefficient and often inaccurate model that usually results in unnecessary back and forth communications before a request is even approved and the contract is created. Using contract management software like Contract Logix’s, they can centralize their contract request process using standardized web forms where all required information is captured up front. Then, they can automatically route those requests to the appropriate approver and the contract can be automatically generated using clause and template libraries and merge fields with the required information.
Another common, yet powerful, example involves the use of automated workflows. Many legal teams get unfairly blamed for being bottlenecks in the sales or purchasing process. Automating the flow of a contract throughout the creation, review, approval, and negotiation phases using workflows has a lot of benefits. It reduces a great deal of friction at each stage, ensures the organization’s business rules are followed which plays an important role in compliance, and eliminates the need for human intervention and manual errors from occurring. And those are just two examples of how this technology can help legal and contracting teams be more agile. We’ve had some customers tell us they were able to reduce the amount of time it takes to execute a contract by 90%! Imagine what you could do with all those extra days and hours.
Read the full Crossing Legal’s Digital Divide Article at: ccbjournal.com or learn more about Contract Logix
About Tim Donaghy
Tim has been with Contract Logix since 2006 and was on the founding team during the initial product concept phase. As the CTO, Tim leads all Product and Technology direction for the company. He has crafted the vision for what has become an industry leading SaaS platform.
Tim is a well-known industry expert, speaker, and author in the field of contract lifecycle management. Prior to Contract Logix, Tim held senior marketing, product management, sales, and technology leadership roles at Intellisoft Group and Contour Design; and in the U.S Navy where he served on nuclear submarines.
