A legal department is often perceived as a cost centre. How to reframe this perception and make ‘legal’ a profit centre? So, how to make ‘Legal’ the corporate winning team that drives revenues instead of the gatekeeper managing risks?
The answer is simple. Elevate the legal department’s level of maturity of legal service delivery (aka Legal Ops). Getting things done is usually best achieved by aligning with corporate strategy. Nowadays, one of the key strategies of any organisation is likely to become ‘AI-literate’. A legal department is well fit to address such organisational effort to leverage AI.
AI requires RevOps
The key to becoming a winning team is in revenue operations, RevOps. The driver to optimising RevOps is AI. To understand why, let’s look at the greater challenges of leveraging AI:
- Poor data management: data is collected across the organisation but invisible where data matters most.
- Poor alignment between teams (teams work in silos leading to inadequate ‘deal handover’ from sales to service delivery teams; or vice versa, information heard by customer success managers remains unnoticed by the marketing team).
- Inconsistent (lack of repeatable) compliant processes and inefficient workflows across revenue generating operations.
Leveraging the potential of AI emphasises the crucial importance of data, of effective sharing of data across an organisation and of the efficiency of the organisation as a whole. The consequences of poor data management, teams operating in silos and inconsistent processes is called revenue leakage. And minimising or preventing revenue leakage is captured by the buzzword RevOps.
Legal into RevOps
But where is ‘legal’ in this RevOps story? Well, a legal department ‘owns’ (or should be end-responsible for) one of the organisation’s core data entry points: contracts. Moreover, across the organisation (from marketing, sales, service delivery to customer success), the legal department is in the best position to streamline the underlying process of data entry: contracting.
Unfortunately, the use of first-generation technology (including basic CLM applications that do nothing more than alerting of contract renewals or identifying change of control clauses) gives organisations insufficient insight and inadequate controls. This is why CRMs are being upgraded to RevOps platforms, and why marketing, sales and customer-services teams are connected to such platform.
RevOps and CLM
But the essential data are in contracts, which is why a CLM is a key component in support of RevOps. Creating a contract is the point where data are entered into the revenue operations. The contracts (and contract-related files like SOWs) anchor a corporate’s entitlement to revenue.
To enable or boost RevOps, a mature CLM will provide:
- Centralised data.
- Smooth workflows (handover from pre-signing teams to post-signing contract managers).
- Easy data insight and one-click data reporting capabilities.
- API-integrations (incl. with RevOps and AI models, or with ERP or CRM, duh).
- Central repository for all contracts and all contract-related files (like SOWs or contract schedules).
- Easy searchability of all contracts: indexed files (full-text searchable, so automated OCR).
- …
Did you know that Weagree accelerates your contract (data) flow? …that Weagree’s CLM enables mature contract lifecycle management? …that we are keen to leverage Weagree’s AI capabilities on your contracts, and enable RevOps?
At Weagree, we are ourselves ‘deep’ into RevOps, as we are closely working together with Gartner on optimising our internal operations and making Weagree extremely scalable. All we need is a bit of extra revenues to make it happen, and also in this respect, Gartner is assisting us.
We are implementing the best RevOps platform available in the market, and are being assisted in this by the best integrators of RevOps. Needless to say that we are using AI, and integrate all with our own Weagree CLM. Our customers will reap the maximum of benefits from our learning curve!
