Contract automation: 9 best practice rules of successful implementation
Failing to innovate contracting successfully?
Do you have team members who resist change? Are you short of time to innovate effectively? Don’t know where or how to begin? Does contract automation feel like a mountain – without a starting point, like an endless project? Do the grapes hang too high for some of your team?
Meeting these challenges is easier than you think. In our ten years of implementing contract automation, Weagree has gained a lot of experience in successful change management. Reason to develop an easy-to-apply framework, with tips, do’s and don’ts how to optimise your contracting processes swiftly – and become a champion.
Our best practices are divided into three parts: influencing the emotional elements of change (the elephant in your head), optimising the rational aspects (the elephant’s rider), and making the path, and your challenge, easier.
It sounds absurd – being incapable to innovate – but many lawyers experience it as their reality. Team members who are:
- still creating contracts based on ‘latest-deal example’, spending time on repairing cross-references and inconsistent definitions, removing redundancies at risk of making errors.
- not creating contracts in an automated fashion, up to 120 times faster, because “there are too many Q&A questions”. (Did you realise that every Q&A question is relevant and to be answered in old-school contracting as well?)
- allowing a response time by Legal of more than three days, where contract automation reduces it to a few hours (or zero).
- not structurally allocating time to improving contract know-how, but perpetuating in short-term client-first service. Accordingly, little ‘pearls’ of transaction-tailored contracts never end up as a model contract, or even the excellent contract clauses in a proper clause library.
- ignoring the importance of model contracts for the so-called ‘urgent’ questions from business managers knocking at your door.
The precondition to your success with innovative technology is its user-friendliness. We have made it our compass. But to change people’s behaviour, you need to steer your elephant.
