Have You Reviewed and Approved a Contract Lately?

This week we are continuing our contract management "how to" series. This blog series examine the important steps needed to achieve ideal contract management. Even if right now you are overwhelmed and starting from zero, there is hope. Let us guide you through the process.

If you receive contract documents via email and have to email your feedback or approval — even maybe stamping an approval within the document itself — you are not alone. Many people we talk to are still handling the review and approval process in a very manual way. On top of that, there is a huge amount of effort involved for the contract or legal ops admin to make sure all the right people have gotten the contract via email to approve. And if that contract admin is away from his or her office for a few hours or even days, the process halts and causes delays in the overall contract lifecycle.

We all use mobile devices to buy products and approve purchases online.  So why are we still reviewing and approving contracts in an email and on desktops or laptop devices?  Since mobile devices empower us to be productive in any place, it's time you start to review and approve contracts via your mobile device.  Imagine if you could:

1. Receive an email with key terms of the contract summarized in the email itself without having to read through a long document attached to the email.
2. Get a contract approval request based on exceptions or terms in the contract outside your preferred terms only when you are required to review it . Otherwise you would not to bothered if the language is standard or has pre-approved alternates.
3. Route the contract automatically through a series of required approvals in sequence, or parallel, thereby significantly expediting the review cycle time.
4. Provide your approval (or rejection) with a simple click, or press of a button, on your mobile device.
5. Have AI-based guidance on risky terms as you provide your approval.
6. Manage all this without any manual intervention from legal ops or contract admins and let the system automatically route based on predefined rules.
7. Do all this while providing real-time visibility into where the contract is in the approval cycle with a full audit history of the approvals completed thus far.

If your review and approval process is more manual and you're interested in moving to a more automated state, check out Malbek and ask us how we can make your approval tasks just a tad bit easier.