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It's funny how some of the most important aspects to running a business can also be the things that tend to drag businesses down. Contracts are an excellent case in point. While contracts are essential, managing them can be a labor-intensive efficiency killer. Corporate legal departments tasked with watching their organizations' bottom lines need a better way of managing the process.

Legal professionals have relied on everything from email to spreadsheets to (gasp) paper to track, share, and analyze the status of contractual agreements. There's little to no visibility into contract terms and conditions, and limited ways to determine if partners are abiding by their contractual obligations. Worse, manual, non-standardized methods can greatly increase the risks of errors.

Building an efficient and high-performing legal operations team requires improving how you manage the lifecycle of your contracts. The process must become standardized, streamlined, automated, and measurable.

A CLM Growth Spurt

These needs help explain the rising popularity and evolution of contract lifecycle management (CLM) software. CLM software has been around for at least a decade, but demand has increased. CLM tools made their initial impact with procurement teams to track and manage "buy side" contracts but have evolved to also focus on the sell side as legal operations teams' oversight over contracts has increased. That's probably why Forrester estimates that the market is experiencing 18% annual growth.