How to Survive Contract Management in a Do More with Less Environment

At some point in your career, odds are good that you’ve been faced with the impossible imperative “do more with less”. In fact, contract management and corporate legal operations teams are increasingly battling this conundrum. They face growing contract volume but have no additional resources to relieve the burden. And, of course, performance is not allowed to slip.

For some, a contract management solution means using a homegrown or outdated system that’s just not cutting it anymore. Others may have no systematic way of managing contracts at all and everything is done manually. For everyone else, even those with a contract management solution that works for them, there are still real contracting hurdles to overcome.

All is not hopeless, however. Recently Malbek joined Above the Law, a website that takes a behind-the-scenes look at the world of law, for an expert discussion addressing these very real contracting issues and some of the ways to alleviate them.

In this clip from the webinar we discuss how to handle the challenge of increasing contract volume but with no additional resources. You can listen to the full webinar here.

"Of all these great contract documents, whether they’re in Microsoft Word or pdfs or scanned copies that are not indexed, well, if you OCR them, that’s great! Now you have a searchable pdf, but that’s still not quite as easy as Googling it, right? So the combination of indexed content or OCR documents with search capabilities in a CLM system allows you to search by phrase or keyword and not only give you a list of contracts that have that phrase, but gives you context around the language in that contract. So if you’re looking for a specific governing law jurisdiction or indemnity or a specific liability clause, just searching across your C drive, for example, will give you lots of files that have that kind of wording in it, but in a CLM application, it’s a little bit more than that. It gives you context around the types of contract that have that keyword. You can start to narrow down your filters and find exactly what you’re looking for just like you find product online in Google," Matt Patel, Malbek.