Common Challenges with Contract Intake and Negotiation

Legal teams across the spectrum of company sizes and stages all have similar challenges in their legal ops when it comes to redlining, reviewing, and finalizing contracts. Unfortunately, these challenges can lead to bottlenecks, errors, and misunderstandings between parties. They can also make the contract review and negotiation process take much longer than necessary.

Here are some common challenges business and legal teams often face when negotiating a contract. Do any of them sound familiar to you?

Cumbersome, manual processes

Contract review workflows often start with clunky, outdated processes that guarantee nothing will be done efficiently. Clients email their requests, which may or may not be saved correctly on the receiving end. Cycle times suffer because there’s no quick way to assess risk on a document or scan for changes between versions.

Contracts perceived as bottlenecks

Legal and business teams frequently deal with urgent contracts first to meet their deadlines and move their businesses forward. However, risks still need to be addressed in these situations, which requires a significant amount of time and attention to detail.

Getting back to the client requires copying and pasting from previous contracts and clauses, looking up company policies and drafter’s notes, tracking changes, identifying differences in new revisions, scrubbing internal comments, and more. The whole process is tedious and labor-intensive.

Unable to integrate with existing enterprise apps

Vertical apps often struggle with integrating workflows. At the same time, broader CLM systems do everything imaginable, yet nothing particularly well. Without integration, legal teams end up clicking between multiple platforms, which can cause confusion and lead to duplicate work in some cases.

The Solution: Low Code Automation

The good news is that you aren’t doomed to facing the above challenges for contract review. Low code automation turns users into developers with point-and-click features that can be customized to match a business’s unique needs perfectly.

Power Automate, DocJuris, and NetDocuments combine legal engineering with low code automation to help legal teams get through contract negotiations faster without sacrificing quality or accuracy. Here’s how.

Staging area for contract requests

Power Automate’s front door trigger allows clients to request their contracts to be reviewed with a simple form hosted on any platform compatible with Power Automate, including Microsoft Forms, Formstack, and TypeForm.

Easy document save feature

NetDocuments makes it easy to save and govern documents. A request is routed to a dedicated transaction folder, ensuring that the most up-to-date version of the document is saved at all times.

Automatic contract inspections

When the contract is delivered to DocJuris, the software automatically inspects the contract against a known playbook or rule framework. Then, DocJuris sends a first-look screening report back to the same NetDocuments transaction folder as an Excel file.

Easy redlining for negotiations

DocJuris’s powerful features empower business and legal teams to collaborate, compare, and make redlines and edits during contract negotiations. With DocJuris, every collaborator will know exactly what has been changed and who has changed it. In addition, every individual also has access to up-to-date redlines, ensuring they are always working with the most accurate version of the contract.

Simple delivery to counterparty

Once the team is aligned on contract redlines, the turn (i.e., the version that is ready to be sent out) can be marked “complete” and sent to NetDocuments as a new version inside the same folder. DocJuris conveniently returns the mark up as a PDF and the clean version as a DOCX file. (Documents can be converted to other formats based on preferences using Power Automate.)

Notification threads

Set up an optional thread through Teams, Slack, or email to allow collaborators to discuss the transaction and work through blockers with stakeholders.

What You Need to Get Started

To leverage the power of low code automation to simplify every stage of contract negotiations for legal teams and stakeholders, you will need three things:

●  DocJuris

●  NetDocuments

●  PowerAutomate

To super boost your contract negotiations, you can also get the optional features of an intake form on Power Automate (e.g., Sharepoint, Formstack, or Typeform) and a communication tool that’s on Power Automate (e.g., Teams, Slack, or email).

We’d love to hear from you and learn more about your business needs. Schedule a demo to see how DocJuris can improve contract negotiations for your firm.