The evolving role of Legal leaders
From solo general counsels to heads of large legal teams, the role of “Legal” is changing. The value Legal brings to an organization isn’t simply in its ability to negotiate contracts – although that’s still extremely important – but true legal “leaders” bring so much more to the table.
At a time when businesses are looking for greater cost-savings, greater efficiency, and a bigger ROI on every product, service and employee, it’s more important than ever for the legal team to earn its reputation as valuable business partners.
The challenge is, for most legal teams (regardless of their size), there’s simply too much work to do on a daily basis to leave time for higher-level strategic initiatives! As the company grows, contracts grow exponentially. More customers mean more contracts. More vendors mean more contracts. More contracts mean more negotiations, more amendments and overall more chaos, as new amendments and versions pile up.
For business-savvy legal leaders who want to show their impact across the larger business, using modern technology and Contract AI can be a game changer. Read on to learn 3 ways you and your legal team can earn recognition as valuable business partners who help save money, increase revenue, reduce risks and more, across the entire business.
1. Empower Sales to close more deals, faster
In today’s competitive market, sales velocity is everything. When legal teams are stuck in manual contract review processes and endless email threads, they become the unintentional roadblock to revenue. But what if your legal team could actually help accelerate the sales cycle?
By leveraging Contract AI and intelligent contract management, legal teams can transform from deal bottlenecks to deal accelerators. Imagine giving your sales team self-service access to pre-approved contract templates right in their CRM, automated approval workflows for standard terms and instant visibility into every customer’s contract history. Not only does this speed up deal closure, but it also ensures compliance without sacrificing speed.
The result? Sales teams close deals faster, customers get what they need sooner, and legal maintains control while focusing on higher-value strategic work. That’s the kind of impact that gets noticed across the business.
With modern, intelligent and high-tech contract management, specifically a platform that leverages Contract AI, sales teams can:
- Close deals faster
- Get ahead of vital renewal conversations
- Self-serve their contract needs, taking Legal out of the loop for pre-approved templates
- And do it all without leaving CRM
2. Enable Procurement to minimize vendor spend and increase purchasing power
Procurement teams often struggle with expensive auto-renewals, missed termination windows and difficulty enforcing vendor obligations. This is where a tech-enabled legal team can become procurement’s secret weapon.
With Contract AI doing the heavy lifting, legal can give procurement teams a way to spot overlapping vendors, identify opportunities for consolidation and ensure vendor compliance with contractual obligations. Better yet, by automating contract reviews and approvals, legal empowers procurement to negotiate more effectively while maintaining compliance with company standards.
When legal helps procurement avoid unnecessary auto-renewals, enforce penalty clauses and consolidate vendor relationships, the impact goes straight to the bottom line. That’s the kind of value that gets executive attention.
With modern, intelligent and high-tech contract management, specifically a platform that leverages Contract AI procurement teams can:
- Identify unwanted auto-renewals before they happen, with plenty of time to renegotiate or terminate vendor contracts.
- Enforce vendor obligations and take action when vendors fail to meet contractual standards.
- Increase negotiating and purchasing power by comparing terms of every contract across all vendors and identifying and consolidating duplicate products and services.
3. Give Finance the power to stop revenue leakage and find untapped revenue opportunities
Giving Finance an easy way to discover hidden or untapped revenue opportunities while plugging revenue leaks will make Legal look like superstars in their eyes.
It isn’t magic though: It’s the power of a platform with highly accurate Contract AI that gives Finance cleansed contract files, organized contract families and extracted contract terms. From there, Finance can easily search, report on and analyze every contract to identify opportunities for contractual price increases, spot revenue leakage and even compare invoices to contracts to spot areas of uncaptured (but contractually allowed) revenue.
With modern, intelligent and high-tech contract management, specifically a platform that leverages Contract AI finance teams can:
- Centralize contract visibility to eliminate time-consuming searches for key terms.
- Get answers to finance-related contract questions in seconds.
- Stop revenue leakage by spotting duplicate vendors, overpayments, or penalties you shouldn’t be paying – and much more.
- Capture every bit of revenue you’re entitled to.
It’s time to be seen as a Legal leader with business impact
The days of legal teams being seen as pure cost centers are over. By leveraging modern technology and Contract AI, Legal leaders can transform their teams into strategic enablers that drive value across the entire organization. Whether it’s accelerating sales cycles, reducing procurement costs, or unlocking hidden revenue for the finance team, tech-enabled legal teams can deliver measurable impact that gets noticed at every level of the business.
Ready to position your legal team as a strategic driver of business value? Learn how Pramata’s enterprise grade Contract AI that actually works can help you get there.
