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 don’t have to.
Virtually all CLMs boast that they “do the heavy lifting.” 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 “heavy lifting” and what it should mean versus what it usually does. If you’re used to a CLM that simply can’t 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 “heavy lifting” you should expect, and be getting, from your CLM – and how Pramata rises to the challenge where others don’t.
Why getting a CLM is such hard work
Your business runs on contracts.
Think about it: You’ve got contracts with every customer, every vendor and likely with some (or all) employees and independent contractors. So, unless you’ve had superhuman organizational powers since your company’s inception, chances are there’s at least a bit of mess surrounding your contracts, where they live and how they’re organized.
And, let’s be honest. For most organizations, it’s more than just “a little bit” of mess.
Depending on your company’s 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, someone’s personal DocuSign account, in paper folders, on someone’s desktop or a combination of these locations and others. If that’s the way your company’s been doing it for years (not to mention if there’ve 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 you’re 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 isn’t 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 “do the heavy lifting” 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 “magic AI button”
I bet you can guess by now that there’s no such thing as a “magic AI button.” But how many times has a vendor told you it’s as simple as that? What customers find in reality is that when the promise is “AI will do all the work” the truth turns out to be that they’re presented with a finished product that’s highly inaccurate and disorganized, which they’re now responsible for quality controlling. The task of correcting and updating the AI’s mistakes can actually be more time consuming than if you’d 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 you’ll 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 you’ve sold the company on your CLM of choice at a certain price point but find you’re left with something that’s basically useless unless you spend even more money to resource its implementation.
The deceptive demo
It’s common for a CLM to offer a proof of concept, but that usually means they’ll take a small number of documents to show you what their system can do. In these cases, because they’re trying to sell to you, you’re 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 they’re spending combing through every document you’ve 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 it’s a whole different story when you begin to put all of your historic contracts into the system and realize you don’t 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
You’re probably wondering how Pramata’s 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 aren’t just more empty promises?
AI with a experts in the loop
I’ll be the first to say that artificial intelligence is an amazing tool for contract management and many other things in life. But, we know it’s not perfect and shouldn’t just be left to its own devices. This is why Pramata’s 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 that’s 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 contract’s relationship to others.
Because this team is made up of lawyers and contract specialists, you also don’t have to worry about someone “training” the AI models without the correct understanding of legal and commercial terminology. We’ve 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 – 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, Pramata’s 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 aren’t required to maintain your Pramata instance, Pramata offers complete visibility into your contracts’ status at all times. Whether it’s 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 doesn’t 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 I’ve seen of the CLM market outside of Pramata, you won’t see value in a tool unless you and your team personally review each document as it’s ingested, every key term that’s 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 don’t have to just take my word for it that Pramata performs where others fall short. You can read detailed accounts from customers who’ve seen the difference Pramata makes compared to other CLMs they’ve used, or compared to having no CLM at all.
“A lot of companies claim to be Software-as-a-Service. Pramata is one of the few I’ve ever seen that lives up to that claim. I’ve done around 40 implementations in my career and this is the first one that I didn’t have to touch”
Kath de Lange, Vice President GTM Operations at MetricStream
“When we upload a new agreement, we no longer have to spend time manually entering data. We just click a button and it’s done. It’s that simple.”
Stacy Passino, Contracts Administrator at Catholic Health System
“The difference between Pramata and other contract management solutions is we don’t 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.”
Andrea O’Rourke, General Counsel at ICE Data
“Pramata is the difference between having a room full of books vs. having a library. With a library, it’s still full of books, but now you know exactly where to look and exactly what you have.”
See what “heavy lifting” really looks like for yourself
If you’re tired of all the talk and ready for some action, I’d 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.
