A show of hands indicated that a majority of audience in attendance at the “Leveraging Contract Data for Data Driven Decision-Making” panel would have been reluctant to board a plane without any instruments in the cockpit — even if that plane was headed to Las Vegas for this year's Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) 2019 institute, where the panel took place on day one.

In this case, airplane instruments were a handy metaphor for contract data and all of the various ways a corporation and it's legal department need to be thinking about how they can leverage that intelligence to keep their bird in the air.

Panelist Chris Young, general counsel at Ironclad Inc., pointed out that these days, contracts touch every department within an organization, from finance to marketing to HR. But it's the staff in the legal department that may benefit the most from the metadata contained from the agreements.

“Legal ops has an unprecedented opportunity to contribute to the business,” said Young. Legal departments typically don't represent an area of revenue for an organization, but creatively utilized contract data can potentially add to the bottom line of a company.

Young argued that automatic renewals buried with a contract, for example, could potentially cost a company tens of thousands of dollars a year. Being aware of when those renewals might kick in and terminating them as necessary could represent a big save on spend.

Speaking of saving big on spend, insights into contracting processes and workflows can also help legal departments boost efficiency and recognize potential gaps in their process.

For instance, a legal department could look at the total contracts completed during a given period, the average number of days it took to complete those contracts or even the average number of days devoted to each step in the process. Unfortunately, collecting process data is not always easy.

“Every contract likely touches multiple stakeholders and that can cause a lot of conflict and inefficiencies,” said Efren Bonner, a legal engineer at Ironclad.

Inefficiently stored contracts could be lost to a co-workers inbox or piled under a stack of documents somewhere. Attempts to track the multitude of contracts in an organization can also be cumbersome. Bonner used Google as an example. At one point the company attempted to use an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of its contracts. By the end of the year, that document took 20 minutes just to load.

To help add some structure to the process, Bonner said that people need to think about the data that will truly matter to their company or the reports that they will need to fill out six months from now. Data collection should also be implemented throughout the contract process rather than treated like a book report that is hastily assembled the night before it's due.

Angela Mendenhall, senior corporate paralegal at Impossible Foods Inc., suggested speaking with the heads of each department to get a sense of what contract information they need to prioritize in order to function. Once established, a plan should also be able to constantly evolve.

“You might get to a year from now and realize that [the plan] didn't work for you,” said Mendenhall.