Signs You Might Have a Contract Management Challenge

We are delighted to be kicking off a new 6-part webinar series called “Pulling Back the Curtain: Things You Ought to Know When Choosing a CLM Partner and a Solution”. The goal of this series is to help you through the complex journey of addressing the contract challenges you may be facing today in your organization. By bringing together contract experts with operational, legal processes, and technological backgrounds, we will be covering the most important contract management areas in a way that simplifies the issues and makes sense for what you need.

In our first webinar, we cover the top 6 contract challenges that may indicate you need a better way to handle your contracts. If you have ever thought one of the following, then this webinar is for you:

• My organization is growing and so too is our contract complexity and volume, but staffing resources are staying the same.
• I keep getting complaints about delays and bottlenecks in contract creation and the review and approval process.
• It seems like the entire company is dissatisfied with how tedious and difficult the contract process is.
• It’s so hard to find anything because contract documents are stored all over the place and there is no visibility.
• Our current technology is so slow and outdated.
• We have no way to keep track of contracts and their obligations post signature.

Our panel of experts breaks down some of the misconceptions about contract management, like “Legal is a black hole where contracts go to die”, and provides some perceptive advice about where to jump-start process efficiencies and increase contract visibility even in a system that may feel completely broken.

Our webinar panel includes three seasoned contract management professionals: Stephanie Corey, Co-Founder and General Partner at UpLevel Ops; Matt Patel, COO and Co-Founder of Malbek; and Teju Deshpande, CEO of Oya Solutions, who combined share decades of experience solving contract management problems for professionals just like you. Take a listen, even if it’s while you are reading the latest news or window shopping through Amazon products over your lunch break. We are sure you will glean some valuable nuggets of wisdom.

This clip from the webinar addresses common contract management challenges, including things like: "My contracts always get stuck in legal!" If you'd like to watch the full webinar, you can get it here.

"It’s not even just the legal department. And so what will happen, at least with the legal departments I’ve worked in and the departments we work with, is it will start with a business alignment survey or some kind of survey that’s done within the company where they’re looking at legal services and how they’re being delivered. And, of course, rarely do you ever hear: “Oh, legal is a joy to do business with!” And oftentimes what happens is what bubbles up in these surveys is: “Legal’s a black hole. We send them stuff and we don’t hear back.” And then the businesses may complain that they’re not getting the fast service that they’re expecting. And so what we’ve found that I think is so interesting, both when I was in-house and now on the consulting side, is once you do actually start down this path where you’re really looking at how things are done within the department from a contracting perspective and once you can actually put systems in place where you can get metrics. I know Teju and I have worked together enough where I know I’m stealing the language right out of her mouth when I say you’ve got to do this upfront work first where you really focus in on cleaning up your processes and process mapping and doing all of that, and I’m sure she’s going to touch on this down the road in the webinar here. But once you’ve done that and once you’ve automated that piece of it, which is the beginning part, the pre-execution piece so to speak, you can start pulling all kinds of metrics out. And what we’ve found is oftentimes it’s really not legal that’s the bottleneck. It’s that what will happen is the business will send legal a seventy-page contract and say “Review this. I need it back in two days.” And then the legal department has to go there’s so much back and forth that has to happen. Well, what part of this do you want me to review? These are business decisions, not legal decisions. What are the legal aspects of this that you really need me to focus in on? And so by automating the systems you can actually focus the requests coming in so that right from intake you’re actually honing in what parts of the review process that legal really needs to focus in on versus just having things thrown over the fence at legal, which does create delays long-term because then all of a sudden it’s creates all of this back and forth. And then other times what you find once you automate and can actually see where things are in this lifecycle, in this contracting lifecycle, what you find is the delays, they haven’t really been sitting in legal’s inbox for that long. We’ve bounced this back to you, business partner. It was on your desk for three weeks. You finally reviewed it and sent it back to us and are now complaining that we need another week to review it. And so actually one of the benefits of automating this process is you can literally see where the bottlenecks are and then that will help you figure out where the problems are and how to resolve them. Everything is anecdotal until you’ve got data in place," Stephanie Corey, UpLevel Ops.