Сontract management isn’t the sole responsibility of the legal team. Yet, lawyers still get overloaded with standardized contracts generated in all kinds of departments across the company. If that’s your case, an effective contract lifecycle management system is the answer. Yes, we’re talking about CLM software.
Routine contracts require little effort and little to no qualification. So maybe instead of drowning your legal department in mundane tasks, you could go for AXDRAFT’s CLM system instead?
Sure, all contracts require legal oversight. But that doesn’t mean your in-house lawyers should be drafting contracts or reviewing simple documents. Let them focus on providing secure and up-to-date templates while the AXDRAFT CLM (contract lifecycle management) platform ensures the documents created from these templates are spotless.
Here’s how AXDRAFT’s CLM system works and what benefits it offers.
Access control with AXDRAFT’s CLM system
AXDRAFT supports access control, which means your in-house lawyers stay in the center of contract excellence while limiting their involvement in routine work. The CLM’s granular access control provides access to files and management processes based on employee roles in your organization.
Here’s what you can do with it:
- Set and adjust roles and permissions for individual users and groups
- Share and restrict access to specific templates and projects
- Establish access rules for new documents (to automatically share certain contract types with specific departments)
- Introduce granular contract modification rights during the redlining process (in which users or groups can leave comments, approve changes, or edit certain documents)
- Create contract lifecycle management workflows to automate contract reviews (automatically assign documents to specific users and groups under certain conditions)
Reducing the strain on your legal team while keeping it in control helps you maintain the high quality of documents and eliminate many security risks.
Overall, the AXDRAFT CLM platform improves contract management processes across your organization. And we’ve got some real-life examples to prove it.
Sales
The majority of deals are sealed with contracts, and quite often, legal review becomes a bottleneck in the process of business growth. On top of that, sales departments need an effective way to execute service agreements, supply deals, and other processes. Luckily, AXDRAFT’s contract lifecycle management software offers advanced features to make these processes frictionless.
So, what does our CLM solution have in store for sales teams?
- Ability to build clause libraries that allow your teams to find documents for different scenarios
- Integration with CRM platforms (including Pipedrive) that pulls up templates from your libraries
- Dynamic templates with auto-filled forms to help your employees draw up documents faster
- Integration with e-signature software to increase contract velocity
- Customizable workflows to automatically send documents to relevant stakeholders for review (you can specify stakeholders based on condition-based rules)
AXDRAFT also offers contract lifecycle management solutions for collaboration with other companies. For example, our QuickDocs allow your counterparties to create and sign contracts based on your compliant legal templates on their own without getting your lawyers involved.
So, how does this benefit your company? Your sales department will close more deals instead of handling tasks they’re not qualified for. On top of that, your lawyers won’t have to curate every agreement — instead, they can review only selected drafts.
Case study
AXDRAFT helped OLX Group, an online marketplace that operates in 45 countries and employs over 4,000 people. Our team created templates using the customer’s supply and sales contracts. Next, we integrated our CLM platform with the local database and set the templates to automatically fill with up-to-date data.
OLX Group reduced the time spent drafting legal documents from 35 minutes to 2.5 minutes. This helped the company save 550 hours of legal work and gain over $49,500 of revenue annually.
AXDRAFT CLM proved to be overall beneficial for sales. As a legal counsel who worked with us points out:
“We rolled out with AXDRAFT to delegate the drafting of standard supply and sales contracts from the legal department to our sales team. The team analyzed our agreement templates and set up a fully automated drafting process in just four days! Now, our SDRs draft contracts in several minutes—there’s no need to do any additional draft review.”
Human resources
HR departments need to run a lot of contracts through the legal department. As they mainly deal with onboarding, employee agreements, invoices, claims, and non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), this is quite the number of documents to be reviewed by a lawyer. But the thing is, most of these documents are typical and don’t require legal approval—if you have a CLM solution at hand, that is.
AXDRAFT’s platform helps HR teams deal with contracts more efficiently, keep track of them, and make sure the data is not scattered—all without involving the legal department. For example, the CLM system can help you:
- Create high-quality documents using updated and compliant dynamic templates for different scenarios
- Request documents from the CRM and pull CRM data into the documents
- Use pre-approved templates on QuickDocs to share and collects NDAs from contractors and potential hires
- Edit, approve, and sign contracts with third parties and employees inside the platform
- Ensure performance, control costs, and mitigate risks by keeping track of contract obligations
- Store all contracts in one place, easily locate the necessary document, and access the data anytime
CLM software makes onboarding and invoice processing hassle-free, as demonstrated by our collaboration with Creative Mobile.
Case study
Creative Mobile, an independent game developer and publisher, had issues drafting and storing documents for its contractors. But integrating our CLM platform allowed the company to streamline invoice management and automate routine processes.
The result? The company processes invoice documents 92% faster (from 30 minutes to 2.5 minutes per document). This helped the company’s legal department save 687 hours and led to $61,875 in annual revenue gains.
Marketing
Even marketing strategies bear the burden of contract management. They have to create service and advertising agreements, approve publicity clauses with vendors, collect NDAs, and manage invoices. The marketing department also has to keep track of due dates and post-execution deliverables. Honestly, this isn’t the best use of time for your marketing or legal professionals.
So, how can you improve your marketing efforts with the AXDRAFT CLM platform?
- Ensure fast contracting and launching of new marketing campaigns with compliant and up-to-date templates
- Keep track of deadlines using the platform and never miss obligations or prolong a contract by accident
- Send out automatic notifications that remind stakeholders to terminate expiring contracts and ensure you don’t accidentally renew unwanted obligations
- Enjoy full automation and self-service with QuickDocs: create NDAs, service agreements, and GDPR documents according to approved templates without involving lawyers
CLM basically shortens the time required to arrange and sign agreements for your marketers. Besides, your lawyers will only have to authorize selected types of contracts instead of curating every single one.
Finance
The financial department has to approve terms in loan documents, track cash flows, furnish invoices, and allocate budgets throughout the organization. The AXDRAFT CLM can simplify and improve these processes. Here’s how:
- Highlighted metadata about your signed contracts stored in the platform shows contract value, payment methods, fees, due dates, compliance deadlines, and pull this data into your reports
- The possibility to assign metadata to external uploaded documents allows you to include new information in the reports and see the broader financial picture
- Search and filtering functions help you find information faster
- Employees from different departments can collaborate in the platform and monitor contract changes
- Integrations with ERP (enterprise resource planning) software and analytic tools allow you to measure contract value and plan budgets more accurately
- Automatic notifications help you comply with deadlines and avoid revenue leaks
A single repository and the reporting feature help analyze a company’s financial performance. Moreover, the CLM platform can help you establish a cross-departmental approval flow. That’s what we did for our partners.
Case study
DNA Payments Group, an omnichannel payment provider, had a complicated agreement approval process. AXDRAFT’s contract lifecycle management software made the drafting and processing 90% faster (from 30 minutes to just 3.15 minutes) and helped improve its financial analytics. Automated processes mean the company doesn’t have to double-check most documents, which is a huge time-saver in the financial industry.
Other companies share the sentiment. As head of a legal department noted:
“Getting through my tasks has become easier and quicker now that our team uses AXDRAFT. You no longer have to be afraid of missing out on something or consult a bunch of documents to finish your own documents. It’s all right there in the system, and you just have to click and select the info you need.”
Procurement
AXDRAFT CLM helps procurement teams with freight claims, supply contracts, and service agreements. Some of the ways you can use this platform to refine contract management include using:
- Customizable workflows that help manage and approve documents across the company
- Notifications that allow you to keep track of milestones and deadlines, revisit terms and conditions, as well as terminate or renegotiate contracts before they expire or roll over
- AI-powered tools that can digitize your legacy contracts and transform them into workable documents
- Dynamic templates with autofill that help your teams draft and approve contracts much faster
This functionality can shorten your procurement cycles, improve the contract turnaround, and reduce legal risks. Let’s see how that helped other companies.
Case study
BNP PARIBAS is a commercial bank with over 10,000 employees across 65 countries. However, even such large enterprises can struggle with contract management.
AXDRAFT standardized all of the customer’s procurement-related contracts and helped build an easily updatable library. The bank’s employees can now draft documents for all kinds of scenarios using updated templates. In numbers, the CLM saved its client 10,250 lawyer’s hours and offered a $922,500 gain in annual value.
We’re excited to hear that procurement specialists find our contract lifecycle management software straightforward. Iryna Petrenko, head of the procurement department, said:
“I really like the interface of AXDRAFT and learned how to use it in almost no time… I can work on a document on any gadget in any location, which is very convenient. AXDRAFT team also helps with automation, basically creating an effective solution kit. And if I have any issues or questions, I know that their support team will guide me through.”
Business development
Business development encompasses a broad scope of activities across departments. And CLM software that integrates with CRMs, ERPs, and e-signature software can speed up these activities.
The most valuable features of the AXDRAFT CLM platform for your business development teams include:
- Ability to create tender documents, lease and sublease agreements, property transfer acts, and NDAs from a variety of customizable templates
- Custom approval workflow to simplify collaboration between teams
- Public-facing templates that help your clients and partners draft correct contracts
- Multilingual support to help you extend business activities across the board
- In-depth reporting and analytics tools to track performance per contracts
- Integration with public registers to find information about specific companies, regulatory actions, and environmental protection measures
A combination of built-in tools and integrations standardizes your documents, allowing your teams to handle most of the work without involving the legal department.
Case study
Dragon Capital, a large property management company, spent too much time tossing documents between lawyers and managers. So, AXDRAFT organized the entire contact management lifecycle and developed a set of templates based on the client’s preferences.
Our efforts helped the company reduce document processing time from an hour to about 6 minutes—that’s ten times faster! This led to $572,970 annual revenue gains and saved nearly 6,400 hours for the legal team.
Even complex documents, like leases, are made simple with AXDRAFT’s CLM platform. As Yaroslav T., real estate commercial director, says:
“AXDRAFT allows me to prepare a document very quickly even if I don’t know some complicated legal issues. I just answer a couple of simple questions and get the document ready.”
IT department
IT departments have quite a few processes tied with the legal department. CLM platforms make life easier for the IT teams when dealing with data processing addendums (DPAs), master service agreements (MSAs), IP documents, and assessments. Plus, the AXDRAFT CLM system ensures bank-level security mechanisms and complies with privacy regulations to protect your corporate data.
Let’s highlight some of the features that can improve contract management in your IT department:
- QuickDocs helps you receive ready and signed documents in a matter of minutes: your clients just answer the questions, and you get perfectly structured and legally approved contracts
- Tracking features ensure you don’t miss contract obligations or other essential dates
- Critical information and documents are accessible remotely from any device (and we really mean any device—even from an airport terminal)
- Secure contract repository, granular access controls, verification technologies reduce internal and external threats
The CLM basically takes the hassle of contract management off your IT team. And if you need any more convincing, you should hear about our next customer.
Case study
AXDRAFT helped Slack, a business communication platform that needs no introduction. During the onboarding stage, all new corporate users need to sign a DPA. At their request, we built a self-service page where customers can draft ready-to-sign DPAs without interacting with the legal department.
Now, Slack’s lawyers don’t participate in the engagement process. This saves over 1,600 lawyer hours and generates over $191,000 per year.
Another customer states that the AXDRAFT CLM system simplified most of its administrative processes:
“The level of service AXDRAFT provides is second to none. The ease of use for our customers is huge for us, but the easing of administrative burden on my team has been the biggest win. We’re no longer monitoring an inbox and updating spreadsheets. Rather, we’re capturing all necessary data at the point of submission.”
Wrapping up
Contract lifecycle management software is geared toward lawyers but can be invaluable for sales, HR, marketing, finance, procurement, business development, and IT departments.
As we’ve shown, AXDRAFT’s CLM system ensures that your teams execute deals faster, use error-free templates, and, in many cases, automate drafting and approval. On top of that, the platform makes contract management more secure with bank-grade tools and granular access control.
Your work may be challenging, but your contracts don’t have to be. If you’re eager to try AXDRAFT CLM software, don’t hesitate to book the demo!