I found myself drawn to Pramata because of its rare capability as a platform to truly live up to its commitment, which is to make contract management radically simple and to actually do the heavy lifting for customers so you donโt have to.
Virtually all CLMs boast that they โdo the heavy lifting.โ Yet after experiencing nearly every CLM on the market today, and hearing countless stories from my colleagues as well as experiencing many CLM pains of my own, I know that this phrase has become all but meaningless to those evaluating contract management systems. Thus, I wanted to take the time to talk about the concept of โheavy liftingโ and what it should mean versus what it usually does. If youโre used to a CLM that simply canโt do the hard work for you, it can be hard to believe one exists that can actually live up to your expectations.
Read on to learn the level of โheavy liftingโ you should expect, and be getting, from your CLM โ and how Pramata rises to the challenge where others donโt.
Why getting a CLM is such hard work
Your business runs on contracts.
Think about it: Youโve got contracts with every customer, every vendor and likely with some (or all) employees and independent contractors. So, unless youโve had superhuman organizational powers since your companyโs inception, chances are thereโs at least a bit of mess surrounding your contracts, where they live and how theyโre organized.
And, letโs be honest. For most organizations, itโs more than just โa little bitโ of mess.
Depending on your companyโs size, age and structure, you may have tried organizing contracts by hand on something like a cloud drive (Google or Sharepoint), a local network drive, someoneโs personal DocuSign account, in paper folders, on someoneโs desktop or a combination of these locations and others. If thatโs the way your companyโs been doing it for years (not to mention if thereโve been any mergers or acquisitions), the idea of trying to get every contract into one centralized location can be daunting.
Hence, when you start looking at getting a CLM, or moving from one system to another, the task of cleaning up your contracts to get them into a usable form can seem impossible. It might be enough of a challenge that you never even start the project, or end up abandoning your CLM mission midway through.
When CLMs promise to do the heavy lifting
If youโre in the position described above, you might feel immense relief to hear a CLM software vendor claim that your job will be easy because they do all the work for you. They might say their AI-based solution will do everything on its own or tell you that their software just magically takes your entire history of contracts and gets them neatly into one place, but chances are good that what they claim isnโt actually what you get.
Many of our customers at Pramata come to us after one or more failed CLM implementations. In nearly every case, their previous vendor(s) also promised to โdo the heavy liftingโ but what they actually experienced was quite different. Here are a few of the most common commitments we see broken on a regular basis.
The โmagic AI buttonโ
I bet you can guess by now that thereโs no such thing as a โmagic AI button.โ But how many times has a vendor told you itโs as simple as that? What customers find in reality is that when the promise is โAI will do all the workโ the truth turns out to be that theyโre presented with a finished product thatโs highly inaccurate and disorganized, which theyโre now responsible for quality controlling. The task of correcting and updating the AIโs mistakes can actually be more time consuming than if youโd just done it by hand to begin with!
The enticement of lower cost
Some CLM vendors brag about the value of their system but fail to mention that youโll need to supply several full-time employees or hire temps or contractors to get the system implemented correctly (not to mention keeping everything running smoothly for years to come). This makes for an uncomfortable conversation with your finance team and others after youโve sold the company on your CLM of choice at a certain price point but find youโre left with something thatโs basically useless unless you spend even more money to resource its implementation.
The deceptive demo
Itโs common for a CLM to offer a proof of concept, but that usually means theyโll take a small number of documents to show you what their system can do. In these cases, because theyโre trying to sell to you, youโre likely to get a whole team of people at the vendor working to make your proof of concept as perfect as possible. You probably have no idea how much time theyโre spending combing through every document youโve provided, double-checking the quality of the optical character recognition (OCR) and making sure key terms that were supposed to be extracted from the contracts actually are. At the end of the day, your proof of concept might look great but itโs a whole different story when you begin to put all of your historic contracts into the system and realize you donโt have the same level of support from the vendor for tens of thousands of contracts as you did for the first 100.
How Pramata delivers where others fail
Youโre probably wondering how Pramataโs different. After all, we do in fact promise to do the heavy lifting for you. We also do it with nearly 100 percent accuracy, a lower total cost of ownership and VIP-level support for every single customer. How do you know these arenโt just more empty promises?
AI with a experts in the loop
Iโll be the first to say that artificial intelligence is an amazing tool for contract management and many other things in life. But, we know itโs not perfect and shouldnโt just be left to its own devices. This is why Pramataโs AI assist team is made up of highly trained lawyers and contract specialists who have the legal expertise to QA our amazing Contract AI as it works to Cleanse and Organize every contract you give it.
This means our team, not you, ensures accuracy in every key term thatโs extracted from every contract.
It means our team, not you, ensures renewal dates are calculated accurately from each document and for each new term.
It means our team, not you, verifies document families and hierarchies accurately reflect every contractโs relationship to others.
Because this team is made up of lawyers and contract specialists, you also donโt have to worry about someone โtrainingโ the AI models without the correct understanding of legal and commercial terminology. Weโve been doing this for over 17 years, which makes our AI uniquely capable of understanding and applying legal-specific meanings that other software may miss โ or misunderstand.
The same high standards for intake and ongoing maintenance
At Pramata, the same work we put into the initial repository setup continues throughout your entire relationship. Unlike other CLMs that charge extra for ongoing maintenance, Pramataโs experts-in-the-loop AI keeps everything clean and organized every time you add a new contract to your repository. This ensures the cleanliness and organization of your repository not just on Day One, but for as long as you use Pramata.
Be as hands-on or off as you want
Though you arenโt required to maintain your Pramata instance, Pramata offers complete visibility into your contractsโ status at all times. Whether itโs during your initial migration or when newly signed contracts are added into the system, Pramata Cleanse automatically flags duplicates, unsigned, locked and other out-of-scope documents and doesnโt include them in your repository unless you specifically override the exception. With in-scope agreements, you are not required to manually intervene in the system to make sure related contracts are linked together in document families.
With what Iโve seen of the CLM market outside of Pramata, you wonโt see value in a tool unless you and your team personally review each document as itโs ingested, every key term thatโs extracted, and manually create contract hierarchies. We like to say that other systems hand you a set of tools and pat on the back to continue managing your contracts yourself. Unlike these CLMs, Pramata actually does the heavy lifting that others promise, while allowing you a transparent view into everything happening behind the scenes.
Pramata gets rave reviews
You donโt have to just take my word for it that Pramata performs where others fall short. You can read detailed accounts from customers whoโve seen the difference Pramata makes compared to other CLMs theyโve used, or compared to having no CLM at all.
โA lot of companies claim to be Software-as-a-Service. Pramata is one of the few Iโve ever seen that lives up to that claim. Iโve done around 40 implementations in my career and this is the first one that I didnโt have to touchโ
Kath de Lange, Vice President GTM Operations at MetricStream
โWhen we upload a new agreement, we no longer have to spend time manually entering data. We just click a button and itโs done. Itโs that simple.โ
Stacy Passino, Contracts Administrator at Catholic Health System
โThe difference between Pramata and other contract management solutions is we donโt have to clean up or organize any documents. They do all the heavy lifting. The result is a game changer not only for the legal team, but for teams across the business.โ
Andrea OโRourke, General Counsel at ICE Data
โPramata is the difference between having a room full of books vs. having a library. With a library, itโs still full of books, but now you know exactly where to look and exactly what you have.โ
See what โheavy liftingโ really looks like for yourself
If youโre tired of all the talk and ready for some action, Iโd be happy to show you exactly how Pramata takes the effort out of contract management once and for all. You can contact me for a custom demo.
