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“Legal transformation requires an appropriate amount of vision, planning, budget and patience for success.”

Contract lifecycle management (CLM) is back in the spotlight, post-pandemic. A Forbes article notes that CLM is enjoying its heyday once again thanks in part to the “eye-opening amount of money to be made in the market” with CLM. On the money side, CLM offers legal departments major cost-savings and great value on investment, if CLM is implemented correctly. 
Although companies may have integrated CLM as part of their legal departments’ processes, they will need to upgrade when they run into the 5 signs we share in this article. Every good thing gets better when it’s updated and upgraded, and the same goes for CLM. According to JD Supra, “manual contract management can cause roadblocks and revenue leakage”. It’s only with the latest CLM tools that legal departments can accelerate their contract processing speeds, fine-tune their budget, and stay efficient.

General counsels looking to implement CLM as part of their legal transformation need to research appropriate providers. Prior planning and research is crucial in determining the success of the CLM implementation strategy. GCs hold a position of influence and can positively direct their organization’s CLM selection process. With business goals in mind, GCs and their companies can utilize CLM technology for success. 

Adapting to a braver new post-pandemic world includes in-house counsel adopting new trends in technology and business practices to keep moving forward. A Gallup article predicts that 37% of office desks will continue to stay empty in 2022 – including those of in-house counsel. If this educated guess comes true, what are handy legal tech and business practices that in-house counsel can integrate?

Finding the silver lining in upcoming regulations

Financial organizations have become quite tired of the unceasing flurry of regulatory activity in their industry. But what many of them don’t realize is that when regulatory mandates are seen as an opportunity rather than a burden, the long-term benefits surpass the short-term discomfort. Colin Reid, CTO at Vox Financial Partners[1], points out how European banks took advantage of the new legislative framework, Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II), to standardize trade records across the EU by upgrading trade data warehouses to centralized data repositories. Now, they are well-equipped to respond to future regulatory changes and trade reporting requirements. Reid proposes three ways to use upcoming regulatory changes to upgrade one’s contract management approach[1]:

“Doing more with less” is the new legal mantra, particularly in litigation services. This mantra can be trickiest to implement in eDiscovery. Document reviews can end up becoming lengthy, expensive, and convoluted if you are not well-prepared. Special Counsel recently came up with ten steps for achieving a workflow that will prepare you for your next eDiscovery project[1].

Legal technology is constantly being fine-tuned and enhanced. This requires companies to stay abreast of the changes, before they fall into legal hot water. Regulatory technology (RegTech) is designed to replace manually created legal language with AI and coding. This facilitates legal departments and corporate counsel in staying compliant and in line with regulatory & compliance measures.

Legal professionals have embraced legal technology to supplement, and often take over, daily processes. There are a dizzying number of legal tech apps and softwares for every need. From legal spend management to legal research tools, there’s a solution for every legal department’s problem.

Since 2019, the world has seen disruption after disruption, and legal is no stranger to them. To make matters worse, a recession is on the horizon, forcing legal to plan ahead to weather the storm. Resources including contract lifecycle management (CLM) technology may be able to help legal tide through an economic downturn. Find out more in this article.