This weekend, I read an article on the desirability of using standardised contracts. Standardised contracts would make managing a contracts portfolio easier. While it sounds attractive, as lawyers, we all know that this is a utopia.
Unfortunately, one cannot anticipate everything, and often, what a business portfolio is worth, may depend on factors that have never been foreseen or tracked in CLM. You want to be able now to search in the future according to your then-needs, whatever those may be.
Standardisation fails to recognise important functions of a contract:
- Achieve operational fit, cultural fit, commercial fit.
- Communication: the contract as a medium to achieving mutual understanding, aligning expectations and exploring potential win-wins.
- Establish transaction-specific rights and obligations.
- Enable the customer’s stewardship: CSR, ESG and required levels of compliance with laws and regulations.
Every context has its particularities and every company their own risk-appetite. There will always be first movers – well-ahead of any standardisation. There will always be a creative in-house counsel who pencil in their personal thoughts (or who fail to write perfect English) – even if on each side the in-house counsel is an AI.
The ideal contracts world is an effective CLM that supports full-text search of all contracts, blazing fast. Especially your searches for contract parameters that had not been identified in the past. Of course, this is what Weagree CLM does. Watch yourself how easy and powerful Weagree’s full-text search is:
“Blazing fast” requires that all contracts be indexed (and therefore converted into full text files) and that the index is well-searchable. It’s a technical thing (and for decades, there are various open source tools for it – we did not reinvent the wheel).
Of course, you want the convenience – with only the blink of an eye – to check the resulting contract language you searched on. Not to open the full-text file but instead to simply look up that snippet of contract text for what you searched the CLM for. And then to export the search results as a report.
And to use it, you do not want to conduct a major implementation project (OCR-converting contract files into searchable files). That is why Weagree automatically converts all your contracts into searchable and indexable text files, and keep it up-to-date.
Contact us now to hear more about this powerful CLM feature:
