Get more out of your lawyers
Involving lawyers or in-house counsels to review contracts has been the one way to get legal advice on an incoming contract. And why wouldn’t it be? The International Association for Contract and Commercial Management show that companies lose 9% bottom line due to value leakage caused by poor contract review. It is therefore clear that a proper contract review is essential for any business.
However, involving lawyers comes with a cost in both time and money:
Obviously, we need to pay them, and their expertise does not come cheap.
It takes time to get the lawyers’ feedback. This causes delays in the sales process, often for weeks (I’ve even heard about months). During this time any customer lead could turn cold or find an alternative supplier.
In a perfect world you only pay your lawyers for the time during which they provide you with expert advice, not for the hours spent reading standard texts and redlining obvious deal-breakers. You do not need to be a lawyer to sift through a contract and highlight an unacceptable governing law, for example. That’s not hard, just time-consuming.
Releasing your lawyers from that burden and instead letting them fully focus on where they can give you the most value for your money would also allow them to provide you feedback far faster than before. This would result in fewer delays, less money wasted and, as a bonus, leave your lawyers with more inspiring and motivating tasks!
This is all well and good, but you do not want to end up with the pile of contracts and the highlighter in your hand either. So, if neither you nor your lawyers should be scanning contracts for those mundane deal-breakers then who should? This is where AI robots trained to review contracts enter the scene and becomes your second pair of eyes.
Tools like Legly highlight important clauses, warn when something is missing and flag deal-breakers. All in less than a minute. As a result, you can forward this feedback to your customer the very same day. No more gridlock. You also get rid of obvious deal-breakers before you start wasting money and time waiting for your lawyers, and they in turn get a cleaned-up contract that allows them to focus on providing you with cost-efficient and value-adding expert advice.
The future of legal is here. So, involve your lawyers or in-house counsel in the discussion on how to make the sales and contract management process faster, more efficient and more profitable.