At the end of January, Agiloft made the trip out to the most important annual event in legal technology, Legaltech 2019 in New York City. The staff who attended were there to meet the best and brightest of the legal world and chat about their biggest challenges associated with contract management. What they found was that despite Legaltech’s keynotes and panels devoted to artificial intelligence (AI), many legal teams are still using outdated, inefficient systems, including email and paper documents, to track and manage contracts.
This is in line with what we have heard from customers and from the industry at large. In fact, Gartner reports that 85% of companies still do not use an enterprise contract management system. With demands to increase productivity without increasing costs, legal teams are stuck using cobbled together systems of email, spreadsheets, and sometimes paper documents to manage critical contracts. This creates excess strain on paralegals and other legal operations because much of their time can be spent simply looking for contracts.
Start small and evolve
Sure, most legal teams would love to employ automation and AI technology in their contract management, but they do not know where to begin. Legal teams can start small with an out-of-the-box CLM system that features a dynamic repository, automated notifications, and easily configurable approval workflows. Once the team sees how much time and money is saved, it will be easy to pitch advanced CLM customizations and AI enhancements to business leaders and decision makers. This process is even easier with no-code software, which allows deep configuration without traditional coding or long implementation times. Many workflow and approval changes can be done with just a few mouse clicks.
It’s all about risk
At the end of the day, legal teams are all about reducing risk. Whether its for a small business or a global enterprise with hundreds of vendors, managing contracts, compliance, and the maze of documents required by modern business is virtually impossible without an effective CLM system. Instead of manually managing thousands of documents and tracking every small change, building compliance into an automated system helps save time and money while reducing risk of an audit or costly compliance failure. And these automated CLM systems are only getting more advanced with AI-based risk scoring, Alexa-enabled analysis, and natural language processing coming to contract management in 2019.
Whether your legal team is looking to update an old paper-based system, an outdated and siloed contract repository, or bring artificial intelligence into your contract management, Agiloft can help.
Click here to schedule a demo to see how our flexible and scalable platform can empower your legal operations.
Read more about automated contract management:
Bringing Alexa to work: voice-activated AI in the enterprise
How to avoid the five biggest pitfalls of selecting CLM software
Legal limbo: four types of contract mismanagement denial
