With the #acquisition of @H5technologies & addition of the leading review efficiency tech, Lighthouse will be able to address #docreview w/ a “highly differentiated offering that will dramatically reduce the need for manual review.” ow.ly/uIeb50Fsb2I #legaltech #ediscovery
doeLEGAL wins Gold Stevie Award in 2020 for Inbound Marketing Program of the Year. After demonstrating its transformation into an outwardly focused legal technology provider, most notably in their marketing efforts, doeLEGAL is recognized for their first Stevie Award with the Gold statue. Integrating information from their other business teams, they work together to ensure their messages resonate with the target audience and answer their needs. Their last 18-month campaign proved the benefits of their approach to the markets they serve by increasing overall market penetration, inbound traffic, and sales opportunities more so than any other time in their 50-year history. You can read the original PR at Newswire.com.
Postmates Delivers Intuitive, Review-Ready Slack Data Exports With the Help of Hanzo Hold
Postmates—a rapidly growing delivery service—considers Slack to be a critical business communications tool. As its importance has grown, the IT team was concerned by how long it might take to search for and export data for internal investigations and ediscovery matters.
“ Slack information governance is a big blind spot for a lot of companies. Anyone who’s looking to fill that gap and make sense of the data they’re generating within Slack with an easy-to-use product that’s backed by a responsive supporting partner couldn’t do better than Hanzo.”
Sean Joerg, Head of IT for Postmates
Read how Postmates legal, HR, and IT teams use Hanzo Hold to quickly search for, preserve, and collect Slack data in its native format with full context available.
2021 has arrived, and with it comes new innovations to your contract management software processes. Keeping this in mind, we have outlined six critical contract management tools that your organization should equip itself with to stay ahead of future-minded contract management best practices in 2021 and beyond.
#1 – Complete Contract Lifecycle Management
No organization should navigate the evolving landscape of contract management with disorganized and ununified contract lifecycle management. Your organization needs to step into 2021 with a game-changing solution that saves time, reduces costs, increases revenue, and provides a scalable, low-friction, and efficient contract administration process for oversight of the the full contract lifecycle.
Leading contract lifecycle management software solutions support your organization with a user-friendly interface for the entire contract lifecycle – including:
- an automated contract request process.
- easy contract writing that features streamlined merging of contracts with templates from your organization’s pre-approved clause library.
- a centralized process for contract negotiation, contract collaboration, contract review, and contract approval routing.
- unified contract analytics and contract data tracking.
- automated key date alerts and notifications.
- comprehensive risk management, risk mitigation, and risk analysis.
- straightforward process configuration and tracking for specific contract types for a myriad of industries.
- integrated RFx management (including RFPs).
- simple searching and reporting – which can include an ad hoc and custom report designer.
- & more.
Make Your Case for Contract Lifecycle Management
Trusted CLM software platforms support automated, intelligent contract workflow to expedite the contract lifecycle from requests to potential renewal opportunities. Save time, maintain compliance, reduce costs, and lower friction with credible contract lifecycle management software.
#2 – A Secure Contract Repository
Successful contract management in 2021 relies heavily on your organization’s ability to embrace centralized processes across the board. This is why you must leave manual methods for storing contracts – such as those involving filing cabinets for paper documentation, spreadsheets, emails, and disorganized digital storage – in the past. Those procedures make it nearly impossible for your organization to maintain version control, keep contracts secure, stay on top of key dates and milestones, or enforce contract archiving and retention rules.
Your organization can get ahead in 2021 with a secure contract repository system that helps store contracts while continuing to get the most use out of them. A web-enabled document repository allows contracts to be safely stored, and your organization’s contract management professionals can organize contracts, oversee permissions, enforce document version control, track contract status, search for existing contracts, collaborate, and much more.
Throughout the progression of the contract lifecycle, confidential information is stored and tracked within a contract management software platform. Your organization must be able to place access restrictions on PII, PCI, and other sensitive data.
For instance, your organization’s software end-users may not have any need to edit contracts other than those they’ve drafted themselves. With a permissions-based process, your organization can easily prevent instances of sensitive data being accessed by unauthorized personnel.
A secure online repository can help your organization by:
- safeguarding the organization, location, protection, sharing, and searching of contracts.
- improving accountability.
- centralizing control.
- increasing productivity.
- streamlining contract management.
Equip yourself with the centralized repository system that your organization needs to excel in 2021 with leading-edge contract management software.
#3 – Contract Intelligence: Risk Mitigation & Clause Recognition
Intelligent contract clause identification and extraction can promote continued machine learning – which allows your organization to enter 2021 with a process that continuously improves. AI-powered contract intelligence allows your users to locate standard clauses within a document when it is added to contract management software. Clause text found can be added to your organization’s training data for continuous machine learning – endlessly enhancing future clause recognition!
Your organization can leverage contract management AI to pinpoint potential risk. Leading contract intelligence can analyze text from a newly introduced document and identify “good or bad” contract language – according to a pre-configured, rules-based sentiment. An integrated artificial intelligence engine for contracts can also detect sensitive data, run statistical data analysis, and give helpful risk mitigation recommendations based on real-time data.
#4 – Contract Intelligence: Data Identification & Data Extraction
With the help of AI-powered contract management software, your organization’s contract processes are automated and streamlined. Your organization can put its trust in a proven system for analyzing contracts and transforming static, stagnant documents into dynamic, success-driving building blocks for enhanced contract oversight, proactive opportunity identification, and risk mitigation. Built-in contract AI powered by machine learning can help your organization to get the most out of its contracts. Watch the video below to learn more.
Your organization can take advantage of automated data entry capabilities that save time and resources when new contracts are added to the system. Your organization can identify critical data such as key dates and milestones, clauses, counterparty information, locations, emails, phone numbers, financial information, and more – thus eliminating the need for monotonous, time wasting, and error-prone manual data field entry.
#5 – Robust Compliance Management
Your organization can utilize advanced compliance auditing and reporting to gain better visibility into relationships between contracts across business entities. Legal, regulatory, and other compliance standards and important obligations can be adhered to with user-friendly and robust reporting tools, key dates, contract analytics, renewals, and alerts. As such, collaboration for expedited compliance and renewals is made easy and fast.
Seamless OFAC search – integrated with the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control – further improves compliance management, giving your organization the best tools for managing vendor, company, and employee compliance. After entity data is run through an initial check against the data within OFAC’s database, subsequent checks can be configured to run on a recurring, scheduled basis to ensure that OFAC data compliance is upheld. Furthermore, visually engaging risk analysis snapshots about vendors, employees, and companies can be provided to your users – enhancing data analytics.
Utilize winning compliance tools for better compliance reporting, contract analytics, and stakeholder relationships.
#6 – Rapid, Integrated Electronic Signatures
Electronic signatures integrated with contract management software can assist your organization in transitioning from negotiations to signatures quickly – as you navigate the demands of the evolving landscape of 2021 and beyond.
A rapid signing process for fully electronic signatures and electronic approval collaboration can reduce send-to-sign time by up to twenty percent. Your organization can send documents out for signing immediately after contract negotiations are completed. Reliable contract management software platforms provide a unified online repository within a centralized online portal for the comprehensive management of partially or fully executed electronic signatures.
Manual methods for new agreements, bulk HR documents, amendments, addendums, policy updates, and more can be left in the past – thanks to leading functionality that lets you send virtually unlimited documents out for bulk signatures. Sending documents is easy, and stakeholders have the ability to sign from virtually anywhere at anytime. Signatories can be provided with emails that bring them to relevant signing portals without the need for downloading a software system. View the video below to discover CobbleStone Software’s electronic signature software – IntelliSign®.
When cutting-edge contract management software solutions are integrated with robust eSignatures, signing collaboration and approvals are rapid, efficient, and cohesive.
Leap Into 2021 with Contract Insight®
The six tools that we have mentioned above can positively revolutionize how your organization manages contracts. With full contract lifecycle management, a secure contract repository, industry-defining contract intelligence, ironclad compliance management, and quick and easy electronic signatures, CobbleStone’s acclaimed contract management software suite has everything you need to jump into 2021 with confidence. Watch the video below to discover better contract management with CobbleStone!
Learn how to become the future-minded contract management all star of tomorrow – today! Book a free demo now.
Enterprises who’ve adopted Slack know the content adds up quickly across channels, direct messages, and group communications. Information governance is critical for mitigating risk. However, making informed decisions about preservation and scoping discovery is also essential for controlling downstream costs while meeting your duty to preserve.
In this session, Brad Harris, Hanzo’s VP of Product, will share insights about how to effectively manage the sheer volume of Slack data for discovery. Additionally, attendees can see a high-level demo of how Hanzo Hold can help streamline Slack data discovery.
Speaker
Brad Harris, VP of Product, Hanzo
Brad Harris is the VP of Product at Hanzo, a pioneer in the contextual capture, and preservation of dynamic web and collaboration content for corporate legal and compliance departments. He leads product vision and innovation for the company. Brad has more than 30 years of experience in the high technology and enterprise software sectors, including assisting Fortune 1000 companies to enhance their e-discovery preparedness through technology and process improvement. Brad is a frequent author and speaker on data preservation and e-discovery issues and is a member of The Sedona Conference WG1 and WG6.
For many small- and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), hiring a full-time head of marketing or Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is unappealing and simply out of reach.
Many SMBs experiment with hiring a junior level marketing staffer, only to be disappointed by their limited expertise, industry contacts, and pool of resources. These staffers rarely have the experience or vision to provide strategy and results.
Enter the fractional CMO.
As 2021 draws ever nearer, the truth remains that general counsel and paralegals continue to encounter growing contract complexity and volume. An ineffectual legal contract management process makes obstacles for legal departments tough to overcome. Here’s how to leverage seven legal contract management software tools for a streamlined legal contract lifecycle, reduced risk, and minimal contract lifecycle bottlenecks and delays.
#1 – Easy Contract Requests & Approvals Interface
Leading legal contract management software enables users to enter legal requests and submit them for request approval easily. Data entry for request records is significantly simplified. Communication bottlenecks are reduced with easy-to-use request intake forms that allow users to collect, store, review, and approve automated requests.
Additionally, teams can remain in sync with approval routing to legal workflows for the main areas of the software. Users can attach virtually unlimited files, and convert contract requests to contract records without data loss or the need for data re-entry. Legal teams are held accountable with integrated document tracking, task assignments, and nearly unlimited notifications.
Optimize contract requests with a unified, standardized process that equips vendors, customers, suppliers, providers, and employees with the ability to request new contracts easily.
#2 – Automated Document Assembly
Trusted legal document assembly solutions can help organizations to author timely, compliant, and accurate contracts. Using automation to dynamically merge data fields with clauses from a pre-approved clause library, legal teams can manage multiple templates and document versions for rapid contract authoring and exportation into standard file formats. Document templates can be repeatedly used and easily updated.
Please read our blog on contract writing to garner a fuller understanding of legal contract authoring with automation.
Make Your Case for Contract Lifecycle Management
#3 – Contract Negotiation Automation
General Counsel, paralegals, and other legal contract stakeholders no longer need to rely upon a contract negotiations process that depends on redlining and back-and-forth communication.
With contract negotiation automation proffered by robust legal contract management software solutions, document collaboration and document version control are simplified with numbered version tracking and a detailed log of document iterations. Collaborative parties can maintain version control with the capability to upload and download up-to-date document versions with ease.
Clause ownership functionality makes it so that organizations can assign clause owners. If a party attempts to edit a clause, advanced contract management software can add that clause’s owner to the approval process. Consequently, only necessary parties are added to the negotiation process, as per rules-based clause ownership.
Contract negotiations between internal negotiating parties, external parties, and employee non-users of software are more efficient when organizations are equipped to configure a rules-based process. A pre-configured workflow permits contract stakeholders to receive a notification that takes them to a contract collaboration portal. There, relevant documents can be accessed for review. A benefit of this process is that external parties and employees without contract management software access can view and edit contracts that are assigned to them but cannot access core system features and contracts that are not pertinent to them. Documents that are needed are isolated so that stakeholders can view or make changes right from the portal. Furthermore, contract parties can engage in approval collaboration in a centralized location and receive alerts about the approval process – in the interest of reducing delays.
With an advantageous contract negotiation portal, legal contract collaboration is efficient and straightforward.
#4 – Obligations Workflow
Diligent observance of contract obligation fulfillment is critical for healthy contract lifecycles. Contract workflow automation that leverages automated alerts, notifications, task escalation, and approval routing helps organizations to meet their contractual needs and focus their attention on more strategic aspects of contract management – such as opportunity realization and data analytics.
Obligations workflow can be configured within legal contract management software to trigger when specific criteria are met, before contract execution, after contract execution, or both. Flexible obligations management promotes a culture where the proper alerts, notifications, and approvals are set in place for contracts at the right time.
#5 – Compliance & Auditing Tools
Advanced compliance reporting and auditing tools give legal teams visibility into contractual relationships across entities and businesses. Legal compliance standards can be easily maintained with robust and user-friendly reporting metrics, key dates, and renewals.
Leading-edge legal contract management software also offers integration with OFAC search data. This helpful compliance tool checks vendor, company, and employee data and compares it to data within OFAC’s (The Office of Foreign Assets Control) sanctions lists – providing crucial risk analysis snapshots.
#6 – Legal Contract Management Reports
Ad-hoc reports equip organizations with reports on upcoming tasks, user-defined status reports, reports on financial commitments, and more. Reports can be emailed on a scheduled basis or swiftly exported to spreadsheets to save locally and distribute.
With an online report designer, general counsel and paralegals can use contract management software to establish easily configured and flexible report layouts to display critical contract information. These report designers include many file exportation options, such as PDF, MS Word, spreadsheets, various image formats, rich text, CSV, and more!
Executive graphical dashboards deliver a comprehensive overview of key dates, activities, and contract performance.
With the help of advanced financials tracking, improved searching, and reporting tools, legal teams can track payments, spending, and contract data changes.
#7 – AI-Powered Risk Management
Fastidious risk management is paramount for successful legal contract management. AI-based contract management software makes risk assessment, analysis, and mitigation more manageable and efficient.
A risk score can keep your legal contract management team accountable by equipping them with an outline of how well (or how poorly) they are leveraging their risk tools. From there, they can act accordingly to establish the best possible risk management process.
Watch the VISDOM® AI video.
Advanced legal contract management software also provides risk rating and risk mapping features. Risk profile ratings can help legal teams to visualize risk. Based on tracked risk, users are provided with a risk assessment matrix. They can view risk probability patterns for events that may occur within contracts, as well as risk exposure that results from those events.
Awareness of potentially detrimental risk events can help general counsel and paralegals to decide how to move forward with a contract. Risk visualization can help teams make risk management decisions more efficiently and more effectually.
Experience Next-Level Legal Contract Management!
Now you know the cutting-edge legal contract management software tools that can help general counsel and paralegals to implement a workflow process that mitigates risk, reduces bottlenecks, and helps organizations to manage a growing number of increasingly complex contracts for enhanced legal operations. Therefore, it is time to select the legal contract management software solution that best fits your organization’s needs. That solution is CobbleStone Software’s Contract Insight®.
Contract Insight has the tools to help your organization manage the entire legal contract lifecycle. For over 25 years, CobbleStone Software’s legal contract management suite has been lauded and trusted by General Counsel and legal departments. With the help of end-to-end document assembly, legal workflow management, fast implementation, and an easy-to-adopt user interface, CobbleStone Software is the go-to solution for the effective management of contracts and committals.
Stop wasting time and money on disorganized legal contract lifecycle management. Start centralizing documents, streamlining compliance and approvals, increasing your ROI, and more with Contract Insight.
Enjoy a free demo of CobbleStone’s acclaimed contract management software platform today!
This article was previously published on CobbleStone Software’s blog.
CobbleStone Software, a proven leader in contract management software, is pleased to announce additional enhancements to its proprietary PC Helper App for MS Outlook.
The application integrates seamlessly with CobbleStone’s award-winning contract management software suite – Contract Insight®. CobbleStone users can maximize the tool for smarter, faster, and easier contract lifecycle management. The app provides users with an easy-to-use CobbleStone control panel within their MS Outlook application. With it, Contract Insight users can initiate new contract requests and upload files from their emails directly into Contract Insight – simplifying and centralizing the management of contracts, requests, vendor records, employee records, eSourcing records, and purchase orders.
To learn more about CobbleStone’s MS Outlook Plugin with visual details, read this blog.
“We are excited to continue innovating Contract Insight with industry-leading integrations such as our proprietary MS Outlook Plugin,” says Bradford Jones, Director of Sales & Marketing at CobbleStone Software.
“CobbleStone’s PC Helper App for MS Outlook helps our users to further streamline their contract lifecycle management processes by bridging the gap between email and file management – providing a seamless and secure integration for optimized contract administration.”
To see CobbleStone’s PC Helper App for MS Outlook in action, book a free demo with a Contract Insight expert today. For further information on Contract Insight features, industry news, and best practices, read CobbleStone’s Contract Insights blog and subscribe to their YouTube channel.
About CobbleStone Software:
CobbleStone Software has been a leader in providing enterprise contract management, vendor management, and eSourcing software solutions for over 20 years and is trusted by thousands of users. CobbleStone’s Contract Insight contract management suite provides contract and vendor tracking, configurable email alerts, calendar notifications, contract workflow management, robust security options, authoring of contract templates with dynamic clauses, revenue/cost management, full-text indexing and searching, vendor/client ratings, document version control, custom reports, electronic signatures, smarter contracts with artificial intelligence and machine learning, and more.
To learn more about Contract Insight, contact the CobbleStone team at sales@cobblestonesoftware.com or call 866-330-0056.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – February 3, 2021 – Consilio, a global leader in eDiscovery, document review, risk management, and legal consulting services, today announced the launch of a number of key enhancements and innovations to its platform, Consilio Complete, to coincide with Legalweek(year) 2021. The enhancements, Complete Transfer and Contract Analytics, aim to strengthen the client experience, transferring large volumes of matters and efficiently addressing contracts with machine learning and artificial intelligence.
About Complete Transfer
Complete Transfer offers clients a custom-designed and proven solution to seamlessly migrate matters, regardless of stage or complexity, to Consilio’s global, enterprise-grade data processing, hosting, and production infrastructure. Over 300+ terabytes of active client matters have been migrated to Consilio using Complete Transfer in the last 12 months. For more information on Complete Transfer, please visit: consilio.com/transfer.
“Our proven process incorporates a consultative approach to understand our clients’ specific requirements,” said Meredith Kildow, Chief Revenue Officer at Consilio. “Our experts, experienced with complex Complete Transfer migrations, then define, propose, and execute a Complete Transfer that minimizes process and technical risks during a structured transition.”
About Contract Analytics
Contract Analytics, powered by Complete Intelligence, allows clients to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to efficiently identify and act on clauses and data within large volumes of contracts – reducing risk and cost. Contract Analytics use cases include M&A due diligence, identification of risk and obligations during corporate transactions/change in control activities, improving regulator inquiry response such as antitrust, re-papering efforts (i.e., transitioning from LIBOR, incorporating data privacy, process changes due to Brexit or aligning with lease accounting standards). For more information on Contract Analytics, please visit: consilio.com/contract-analytics.
“Corporate and law firm clients are managing larger volumes of contracts with increasing complexity in terms and clauses,” said Kildow. “Contract Analytics utilizes advanced technology, process and our proprietary methodology to reduce risk and cost of these complex transactions.”
Deployed across more than 70 locations in 11 countries, Consilio Complete is trusted by clients in a wide range of industries, averaging over 70+ terabytes of data processed per month, 3,000+ legal review professionals on Secure Virtual Review infrastructure, and significant client- and matter-level growth in Sightline, Consilio’s private-cloud eDiscovery platform.
In addition to the product enhancements, the Complete suite offers eight additional solutions including: Complete Investigations, Complete Data, Complete Review, Complete Intelligence, Complete Consulting, Complete Flex, Complete Audio, and Complete Chat.
Mark your calendars for February 4, 2021, at 1:15 pm EST for this CLE eligible session, It’s A Brave New World—Map Your Course For Managing Discovery With Collaboration Data. We’ve assembled an outstanding panel of experts who will join us to share their insights regarding ediscovery and information governance with data from modern collaboration applications.
SPEAKERS
- Andrew Amoranto, Senior Paralegal Manager, Litigation, Twitter
- Stacey Blaustein, Counsel, IBM
- Graham Rollins, Sr. Manager, Sr. Counsel, Capital One
- Brad Harris, VP of Product, Hanzo
CLE SESSION DESCRIPTION
Whether we’re ready or not, collaboration platforms and channel-based messaging have arrived in force and are here to stay. As a result, we’re changing how we communicate in ways that are more dynamic, interactive, and friendlier than ever. Collaboration platforms are reducing corporate reliance on email while empowering collaboration, remote work, and innovation—enhancing an organization’s agility during challenging times.
For corporate legal teams, these changes are requiring a whole new way of thinking when it comes to governance, preservation and discovery response. Playbooks designed for a world of static documents and email no longer suffice in the face of multi-channel, multi-modal communications. In other words, it’s a brave new world.
In this CLE session, panelists will explore the challenges posed by collaboration applications, and how corporate legal professionals are developing and implementing forward-thinking strategies to navigate those complexities. Panelists will discuss:
- What is the new communication paradigm and how does it differ from traditional forms of communication?
- Why do traditional approaches to both governance and ediscovery need to evolve?
- Why access to the data is so important and how it can inform your plan for addressing preservation, collection, and discovery for complex and voluminous collaboration data.
- Strategies for data governance, security, privacy, and retention.
VISIT HANZO
Be sure to visit Hanzo during Legalweek. We’re planning some valuable how-to sessions and technology presentations. If you’d like to schedule a personalized demo, contact us today.