If you’re a lean but mighty legal team of one (or two, or three) or if you’re a CFO managing expensive outside counsel – you know all-too-well the heavy weight, and potentially cost, of contract management.
Whether your contracts are all over the place or in some sort of basic repository, you may struggle to give the business the type of answers they need from information hidden deep in your contract terms. And have little ability to quickly and accurately report on terms or renewals across your contracts.
Gaining control over contract renewals, price uplifts, financial obligations and vendor spend, either as a solo-General Counsel, or a GC with less than a handful of supporting staff, can be overwhelming and comes with its own unique challenges including:
- Competing priorities: Between helping sales find statuses of their contracts, helping finance cut legal costs and helping executives answer contract related questions its hard to get any meaningful work done.
- Costly bottlenecks: Does it take days for you to answer C-Level contract questions? Does your sales team miss out on deals because customers won’t wait around during the contracting process? These common obstacles cost your company money and cost you and your legal team reputation points.
- Diminishing resources: As a solo GC, you might have to manage outsourced law firms, but they’re getting more expensive to work with every day. And if you already lead a small legal team of one or two people, you’re getting asked to do more with less, as economic uncertainty puts plans for new resourcing on hold.
What is contract chaos costing you?
Companies often view legal as a high cost center and actively search for ways to reduce legal spend. This could be by reducing headcount or cutting down on support from outside law firms.
Instead of saving money, these types of cuts leave many lean legal teams manually conducting their contract management responsibilities, which is actually more expensive in the long run.
Manual contract management means highly skilled legal leaders spend valuable time on administrative tasks, like searching for the most recent version of a contract or compiling data from multiple contracts, instead of focusing their efforts on more strategic and impactful work.
Some of the most concrete down sides of managing contracts manually include:
- Missed revenue opportunities as customers move on to a competitor who can get them up and running faster
- Missing opportunities to negotiate with vendors or get out of contracts before auto-renewals happen
- Missing opportunities for price lifts and important pre-renewal conversations
Contract management systems and lean legal teams
To ease the burden of manual contract management, you may be thinking about (or already started) investing in a contract management system, or CLM.
A CLM should make your job easier by organizing your contracts, making them searchable and offering helpful reporting capabilities. Unfortunately, many CLMs don’t work well for leaner legal teams and end up costing companies more than they’re worth.
Many CLMs are to heavy of a lift for lean legal teams
The main drawback of a traditional CLM for small legal teams is the cost, time and resources these systems require before they actually start delivering value.
While this might not be as big of an issue for larger teams, smaller legal departments will feel overwhelmed trying to get every contract into the new system, set up searchable terms and organize contracts into specific folder structures on a short timeline.
And if your organization is cost-sensitive, you can forget about hiring any out-of-budget third-party consultants for help!
Let Pramata do the heavy lifting instead
If your current contract management process (either manual or an existing CLM) has you or your staff at your breaking point, look for a solution designed with lean legal teams in mind.
This means you need a platform that fits in your budget (less than the cost of an FTE!) and most importantly, is delivering valuable results to the business in as little as a month, without manual effort from the legal department.
Pramata is a radically simple solution with all the features and functionality you need to simplify contract management and empower your business – and nothing you don’t. You won’t have to pay for the expensive bells and whistles your small legal department will never use.
You can read more about the challenges small legal teams face and how Pramata solves them in a radically simple way in our article Contract Management for Lean Legal Teams.
Ready to take the cost and frustration out of contract management?
