Reducing risk, increasing efficiency:  The power of contract templates in legal teams 

Risk – we all try to avoid it, in both our personal and professional lives. And when you’re in-house legal counsel, whether your organization is big or small, your professional life is centered around avoiding and mitigating risk.  

There are many ways to go about this: 

• Keeping the company up to date on laws and regulations relevant to its industry 

• Identifying potential legal risks in business operations and creating strategies to mitigate them 

• Ensuring the company follows ethical business practices and governance structures 

• Securing patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets 

• Conducting due diligence to uncover legal risks before mergers and acquisitions. 

• Drafting employment contracts, non-compete agreements, and the like 

While all of these risk avoidance procedures are intrinsic to the legal profession, how much can be simplified through technology? One could argue all of them, but today we’re focusing on one: drafting contracts, agreements, and any other legal documents that can be templatized for easy use throughout an organization.  

Templates. They’re wonderful things that give you more than just a blank page as a starting point and guide you through what could be a difficult task. Templates are used in many ways in manufacturing, in software engineering, in Marketing, and yes, in Legal. Some of the more standard agreements such as NDAs, SOWs, or MSAs can be more efficiently executed as templates. People throughout the organization can fill in the template with unique information such as amounts, dates, names, and the standardized language accepted by the organization. While risk is the primary concern for many legal teams, contract templates provide other game-changing differences for organizations: 

• Faster contract creation: Create new contracts quickly with only essential details needed 

• Better compliance: Standardized contract templates help ensure adherence to legal and regulatory requirements 

• Reduced risk: Populate your clause library and link variables across different tables with ease 

• Decreased administrative burden: Process agreements more efficiently with less contract drafting 

• AI readiness: Standardized contract language is the first step towards utilizing AI 

So how should lawyers go about introducing contract templates into their organizations?  

First you need technology, and second, you need change management.  

A Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) systemprovides an easy way to templatize contracts and put them through a workflow that ensures transparency of the contract’s progress and integrates e-signature capabilities for ease.  

The truly state-of-the-art CLMs provide the ability to work inside known applications like Microsoft Word, an application used by more than over one billion people worldwide. By empowering people to stay in their comfort zone working inside of Word, user adoption becomes that much easier. Also, having a quick, standard SOW or NDA created without having to rely on Legal to generate a “quick” contract frees up valuable legal resource time. 

To introduce change to any organization, you need a change management plan. There are 5 general steps to introducing change management to any organization: 

1. Every team impacted with a new technology should be involved in the evaluation and implementation of that technology. This way, you create champions within those teams, ensuring function realignment and convincing skeptics of the value at hand.  
2. Overcommunication is key to successfully implement changes, such as contract templates. It’s important that no one is surprised at the expectations established with a new process. 
3. If everyone jumping on board at the same time isn’t realistic, it’s okay to change tactics and do things one step at a time. Depending on the organization, you may be driven to adopt new ways, such as templating contracts, in one fell swoop. Others may implement one template at a time for one particular group and grow from there. Either way is acceptable – just like a flexible system, you need a flexible change management approach. 
4. Learning comes in many different ways. Some learn better by reading, others by watching videos, and some by demonstration. That’s why it’s important to have each different vehicle for learning available to everyone who needs to know how to implement and utilize new processes like contract workflow and templates. Ongoing communication and management of the new processes are critical for success. Utilizing things like office hours, tip sheets, and continued training enables veteran and new users as well.  
5. Last, but not least, there is executive buy-in. If it comes down to it, you will have the buy-in from the top to enforce new processes. When the teams see leadership actively engaged and utilizing templates, others will follow suit.  

In summary

Now you know about how to introduce new CLM technology to an organization and =how to use templates to reduce risk at your organization through change management. This is a quick and high-level overview, but make sure that you partner with a company that goes into detail about each of these elements and has the capabilities that you need for a flexible contract workflow and templatized contracts – now, and in the future.  

Interested in learning more? Check out our live demonstrations