Descubre La Mejor Plataforma Para Seguimiento De Contratos En Servicios Legales

Contract tracking platform for Legal Services

contracts lose 8.6% of their value due to poor contract management this isn't a stat I've just made up this is from an intensive survey and report by the world Commerce and Contracting organization and they did this report I think it was back in 2014 and this figure was a little bit higher it was about 99.2% in the span of almost a decade we're still struggling with contract management and that figure I gave you of 8.6% is part of a range right from 3% typically that's the best companies in the world they're still losing 3% of the value of their contracts but there are plenty at the other end losing 20% of their contract value and of course outliers either end but I know where I want to be so in this video I'm going to take you through what is contract management what is the contract life cycle that we need to consider when we're working with our vendors and how we prevent contract value erasion through very good decent amazing contract management activities so what is contract management and I'm not going to bore you with the details of what a contract is we're just going to take the contract as a concept that is proven that is legal that is an agreement between two parties and the two parties we care about is the contract we have with one of our vendors so someone who provides us with a service some sort of goods or maybe some software and contract management is all about making sure we get whatever it is we've contracted for and it fits within something called the contract life cycle and we would typically look at this in two distinct phases so we have one phase which is the pre- signature phase this is all the activities that go into getting that contract sign and then on the other hand we have post signature contract management activities this is typically the area of neglect and this is one area where if you can get this right that value erosion that we spoke about at the start we start going down to the lower digits close to that 3% figure of contract value erosion instead of 8.6 or up to 20% so to start with we've got the request or intake stage right this is where someone in your business and this might be your procurement team might be someone out in the business they use some sort of form some sort of method to interact with you and they will tell you why they need a contract with a vendor and you will use this very important phase to Cate and collect as much information about this request as possible because a big problem a lot of organizations have is that the request and intake phase is typically left to email to slack to inperson Communications or and yeah it's just a nightmare because someone will just message you hey we need to get this contract in place and you'll be like cool I can help you with that but I need to know this and this and this and then there might be something you've forgotten and it just leads to a massive back and forth and that back and forth is ex exactly what we want to get rid of so by building hopefully into a digital system a platform such as gatekeeper a vendor contract and life cycle management platform we can collect all of that data using a dynamic form depending on the type of request the type of vendor the type of category and so on and so on we can get all of the information out of the requester so we can start processing it and start getting that contract agreed with one of our vendors so the next phase we're just going to title contract review and we kind of commented this from two angles right so we may already have a contract that is ready to go out to one of our vendors this might be a templated contract so something that we have ready to isue out for certain vendors or types of categories that we are procuring if that's the case we'll send that out to the vendor the vendor will review it they Redline it which will come to you in a moment and they'll send that back but the other side of that is that we don't have terms perhaps we're buying something like s ass software as a service and the tech vendor that we're dealing with has specific contract terms that frankly would be ridiculous for us to be drafted on their behalf they send them to us and I then review this contract and what does a typical contract review look like it's typically me reading the contract looking for areas that don't conform or comply with my organization's risk positions and may have a contractual Playbook that sets out hey we need these 10 15 points as is it might be the limits of liability the insurance amounts it might be intellectual property rights whatever it is and then I will Redline them and I'm not going to talk about red line too much but it's the art and I'm going to call it the art of going through a contract striking out what you don't like and rewriting it in a way that makes it compliant for your business and you'll have it back and forth with that and typically that's called the negotiation phase right that's that back and forth of the redline documents to start with which typically culminate in a face Toof face or a zoom a zoom meeting where we are just negotiating the contract we're trying to figure it out and know over the last few years I've done hundreds of Zoom contract negotiations they're great it works they kind of lose the edge compared to in person in person just feels a little bit like there's more on the line but it works now once you done all of this negotiating and communication with your vendor you'll get to a point where really that that's it the vendor doesn't want to do it anymore you don't want to do it anymore you've exhausted The Avenues that you're willing to tread with your vendor now we have that review and approval process as a contract management professional I might need my general counsel to sign off on the positions I got with my vendor perhaps I haven't got to a fully compliant position with our contractual Playbook or our risk standards whatever it is we're using perhaps that's the same if you're a legal counsel but in in short what I'll say is that everyone's review process looks a little bit different but there's two phases right you need someone to review your work and you need them to approve it and those approvals are essential to show to any Auditors or to comply with maybe ISO 270001 sock 2 that you are putting enough riger into your vendor review process right because this is an area that you can come really unstuck with in terms of audits if you're just blindly accepting whatever it is your vendors want you to signed in those contract so that review approval phase is vital and the best way to do this is to have all of this information documented in a digital workflow because there's just no way of doing this effectively and and efficienty I've done hundreds of these over the years by email and I've done hundreds and hundreds of these in gatekeeper and I can tell you which one I prefer it's definitely gatekeeper and then we come to the easy part which is the digital signature phase once everything's been reviewed and approved you put it into your digital platform you get it signed by the right people and typically you only have a list of approved signatories for your business built into your system so once that contract's been signed we're pretty much at the end of that pre- signature phase right all that needs to happen now is that contract needs to be stored if you're working in a manual method you probably been emailed your digital signature if you're digitally signing them now you have to store them in Google Drive SharePoint wherever it is that you store contracts but in a vendor and contract life cycle management platform like gatekeeper as soon as that contract is signed moves to the next phase and it's automatically sent over to your contract repository that's linked to your vendor record right so everything is where you need it it's all signed you've got that signed version there and all of that metadata that you've collected along the way all of that really rich information one of those reviews and approvals is all stored and available to be used at any moment but then we also have Performance Management obligation management and there's a number of ways you can do this typically you would just have those key obligations documented and tracked with events with reminders set up around them to make sure that you ever missed them and then on the Performance Management you can do some scoring scorecards are a great way of doing this and then for renewals renewals are a nightmare right so many companies get stung by renewals typically missing Auto renewed contracts a lot of SAS contracts have an auto renewal Clause that will kick in sort of 90 days before the contract is due to expire before the end date and it means that you're locked in for the same term typically but you've signed in the first place one way to avoid this is to have an automated contract renewal process that starts even without you being involved it doesn't need a person to push a request out to someone in the business to say hey do we still need this software does it for you that's what we do in gatekeeper It's amazing And this renewal process will happen for absolutely every single contract so that you can also deal with your terminations here so contracts that are naturally looking to expire you can deal with that here and then even look to offboard the vendor if they have no more cont contracts in place with you so I've noted throughout this video that the way to do this is not to use dispar systems we really want to use a single place to manage our vendors and their contracts and a platform like gatekeeper vendor and contract life cycle management platform it's the perfect place to do this because of the three pillars that we utilize and I'm going to run you through these now so to start with we have the restore visibility pillar so restoring visibility is all about centralizing and all of that vendor and contract data meaning that people outside of procurement outside of legal can get involved in the day-to-day management of contracts in one place and they can be empowered utilizing the software and having everything to hand in a really easy to use system it's just phenomenal right because typically the number one issue with a lot of people across the businesses they don't know where contracts are they don't know how to read them they don't how to deal with them and they don't need to worry about this because all of the information that you need that you care about is already extracted it's already in the system it's already in your contract record now we have the take control element so vclm actually standardizes the way in which your organization works with vendors so we ran through that entire contract life cycle every single phase of the process now if you've got multiple different teams across different entities different geography each one could be doing these things slightly different and when you have those slight differences you'll actually tread in the compliance typ R right like if anyone misses something because they're not following the designated Contracting policy or whatever it's just not good it's not a good look for your business and there could be like severe consequences value erosion coming back to that theme at the top of this video could be one of them so with digital processes you can have everyone follow the same process even if they don't understand what the process is cuz they don't need a human to move them along the process what will happen is once one phase is complete the software gatekeeper would take you through to the next applicable phase it's amazing right that's all I'm going to say on that one so you've now got all of your data in one place that everyone can use you now have all of your processes that anyone can use even if they don't understand like the the policies the reasons why they'll be guided on their contract and buying Journey which is incredible and then we move to the last pillar safeguarding compliance for any of you that are dealing with gdpr ESG you fully well know that this area is the area of nightmares you get one Clause slightly off if you get dates wrong if you get processes subprocesses incorrectly documented that you could attract some unwanted attention not to mention you actually just want the contract performed you want those obligations met you want the perform perance to be as high as possible all of this kind of factors in to that third party risk management element and with a platform like gatekeeper you can do all of this in one place so coming back to that theme of everything in one place everything accessible by anyone in the business it really empowers people to start working with their vendors and their contracts without fear of them doing something wrong if you've made it this far man I I really appreciate you this is a huge topic it's a topic that I don't think gets enough attention and I also see and talk to hundreds of people every year maybe thousands it's a lot of people I talk to that still doing all of this in spreadsheets in email in slack in person and I'm telling you now they have a horror time I've been there I've run teams I've run contracts and Commercial teams that do all of this manually I've built a lot of templates a lot of Excel spreadsheets in my time and I tell you when you move up to a vclm platform everything is way better so if you're interested to see what gatekeeper can do for you there's a link in the description and before you go check out this video here super useful it's all about what is vendor on boarding it kind of accompanies this video really nicely so check it out and I'll see you real soon