Fundamentals of Digital Contracting
If you're involved in contract management or legal work, you know how time-consuming it can be to create, handle, and negotiate contracts. Contract managers often must start from scratch for each new agreement, without using templates or automation. This becomes draining when dealing with multiple active contracts, which is common in medium to large companies.
Digital contracting offers a solution to these challenges. By optimizing the contract management lifecycle (CLM), digital contracting provides quick access to data, processes, and stakeholders involved in contracts, enabling faster agreement execution. It facilitates collaboration with different business departments, automates workflows, offers various signing methods, and centralizes all contract-related activities. This way, you can easily track who is doing what and stay updated on your ongoing contracts.
Furthermore, digital contracting provides valuable insights into contract performance, empowering data-driven decision-making for your business. No longer will you need to spend countless hours creating, editing, and negotiating low-value agreements from scratch. Instead, digital contracting allows you to focus your time and energy on tasks that require innovation and strategic planning.
What is Digital Contracting?
Digital contracting is a cloud-based system that simplifies the creation and management of contracts. It handles every aspect of the contract lifecycle, including preparation, drafting, editing, negotiation, signing, implementation, and management. It seamlessly integrates with other tools in your workflows.
What are the fundamentals of digital contracting?
Digital contracting utilizes digital tools and a centralized cloud to store and manage contracts. Here are the core benefits of the ConvergePoint digital contracting:
- Quickly find information about your intellectual property contracts, such as upcoming deadlines and agreed-upon terms, with a few keystrokes. Accessing contract details becomes a matter of seconds.
- Previously, contracts were often difficult to access as they were stored in various physical and digital locations. With this searchable digital hub, authorized team members can easily and securely access contracts whenever needed.
- Stay ahead of deadlines, respond promptly, and speed up the process. Creating agendas and drafts becomes significantly faster as well.
Digital contracting provides various signing methods
“The signing solutions make it easier for people to sign anywhere and anytime, which is the type of frictionless experience that vendors, employees, customers, and partners expect.”
Integrating a software with an electronic signature provider, simplifies the contract process for legal departments with complete audit trails, version history, and metadata for contracts and signer actions. This eliminates the need for slow paper-based exchanges and reduces the reliance on printing and scanning in hybrid systems. Companies like DocuSign, Adobe EchoSign, RightSignature, and CoSign offer digital signatures, which uniquely identify the document and signer. This ensures that the signer matches the signature and prevents unauthorized edits, forgery, and tampering, safeguarding signer authenticity and data integrity.
More automated and streamlined contract processes
Contract processes are renowned for consuming valuable time and energy due to their complexity, extensive communication among different parties, and the need for extensive negotiation. Fortunately, digital contracting offers a solution by simplifying the contract management process. With software like ConvergePoint, digital contracting platforms enable quick construction and implementation of contract approval and generation processes.
The software provides a centralized location for all requests, allowing you to view all processes briefly. Additionally, they offer robust workflows that simplify contract creation. You can also select template, customize clauses, identify fields for completion, and add signers and approvers. Furthermore, the Software ensures compliance with legal and organizational requirements without the need for manual review. Digital contracting tools provide up-to-date approval routing templates and guardrails to guarantee automatic contract compliance.
Better team collaboration
"Finally, digital contracting tools offer a collaborative team experience."
Digital contracting platforms aim to eliminate communication barriers and enable collaboration between departments. By providing a centralized contract storage hub, these platforms facilitate information sharing among different departments. Legal teams can collaborate with other departments by granting them permission to access and contribute to contract drafting, management, and execution. This multi-departmental collaboration allows for the creation of higher-value and more tightly constructed contracts.
Additionally, digital contracting solutions offer benefits such as gaining insight on contract prioritization and considering relevant contract histories. They also provide the ability to update departments on the status of ongoing contracts and deals. Some platforms, such as the ConvergePoint software, further enhance collaboration through real-time editing, negotiation, and commenting features, ensuring everyone involved can effectively work together.
Conclusion
As technology continues to evolve, we can expect digital contracting to become even more sophisticated, with the emergence of new tools and technologies that will transform the way we manage contracts. The fundamentals of digital contracting with ConvergePoint Contract Management Software are essential for modern businesses looking to optimize their contract management processes. Request for demo and rejig the way you handle contracts digitally!