Buying Contract Lifecycle Management To Mitigate Challenges

Buying contract lifecycle management software in the corporate legal department can mitigate challenges of daily contract management, workflows, contract drafting, administrative time, work efficiency, user engagement, and so much more.

The initial aspect of fending off challenges to buying contract lifecycle management software is understanding what those challenges are and how to avoid them. In this blog post, we’ll look at some of these challenges and why integrated enterprise legal management software provides a correlating solution.

Challenges Of Buying Contract Lifecycle Management Software

Challenge 1: Identifying the best contract lifecycle management software

Everyone wants the best software solution in their corporate legal department. However, sometimes disparate tech solutions may not be the best fit. If that’s the case, a purchase can be a waste of money, time and effort. Disparate software doesn’t speak with one another. This creates issues around collaboration among the legal team and operations teams.

Engage the legal and operations teams in the decision when buying contract lifecycle management software. Lawyers and contract managers touch contracts more than operations professionals. That’s why inviting them to the decision-making process helps identify the best contract lifecycle management software.

Challenge 2. Identify legal department needs with a contract solution

When was the last opportunity to explore the types and volume of contracts that flow through the legal department? What risk level do they have? What monetary value is attached, if any? Knowing the answers to these questions helps determine the scalability and robustness of a contract lifecycle management solution.

Challenge 3. Is your tech a patchwork quilt?

Technology solutions often get purchased on their own timeline. For many organizations, contract lifecycle management software is a one-off purchase decision. This creates issues with synchronization, tech-to-tech communication and collaboration, lack of integration with the enterprise legal management solution, and other inefficiencies.
Rather than making a singular purchase of a contract management solution, ensure that contract lifecycle management integrates with matter management as part of the enterprise legal management solution. This aspect, particularly, is critical to the success of the tech stack, streamlining workflow and creating advanced proficiencies in the legal department.

Challenge 4. Change is a problem with end users.

Outdated technology solutions inhibit success. While an end user, in this case, a lawyer or contract manager, of contract management software prefers an existing version to anything new, operations must communicate the benefits of contract lifecycle management software to the entire department. While it may require a strategic plan to deploy new software, the communication aspect of the deployment strategy requires additional attention, so all end users are satisfied. This attention can be engagement in the beta test, purchase decision or actual deployment. It can also be providing consistent training so everyone is comfortable.

Challenge 5. Templates and clause libraries are stuck in archaic software.

Anyone responsible for contract intake, drafting, negotiation, review, and execution understands the value of utilizing contract templates and existing clauses that repeat from contract to contract. Lawyers know that a winning contract drafted from templates and clauses that contribute to the win is a contract template to use time and time again. What happens when buying contract lifecycle management software and the template and clause library cannot communicate with a new solution?

One of the first questions a legal department director should ask of a contract lifecycle management vendor is about transferring existing templates and clauses to the new environment. Another solution is to select an enterprise legal management platform with integrated contract lifecycle management software. This provides the opportunity to access templates from deeper ecosystems. This also ensures that each tool in the platform communicates and permits collaboration with a single, unified workspace.

Challenge 6. Selecting the wrong vendor when buying contract lifecycle management software.

In 2024, the number of vendors that provide contract lifecycle management software is in the hundreds, and they exist globally. It’s easy to select the wrong vendor to provide a long-term solution for your legal department, and it isn’t easy to select the right vendor. Why is that?

Technology procurement takes time and involves various departments including IT, procurement, legal department leadership, legal department lawyers, finance, and other business stakeholders. Whether they have a partial or higher stake in the decision-making, everyone must reach consensus about needs, identify a list of potential software providers, conduct market research, and begin in-depth conversation to learn about software features and benefits.

When selecting the right vendor from which to buy contract lifecycle management software, ensure that the end solution is, or can be, integrated with the enterprise legal management platform. Consider CounselLink+, an integrated enterprise legal management and contract lifecycle management solution. Contact us to learn more.