How "Integrated" Playbooks Speed Up Contract Negotiations and Training by 6X

Sudden company growth, promotions that leave gaps to be filled, and departing employees can all leave companies in the lurch. To add further complications, a rise in remote work has created a dispersed workforce, which means more training is taking place offsite by individuals instead of in a group setting.

While training new team members is nothing new in the legal profession, most teams can agree that their methods are outdated. It’s time for a new tool to speed up contract negotiation training while improving accuracy and efficiency.

Contract Playbook Challenges

Traditional contract playbooks are great—in theory. However, they’re difficult to put together and even more challenging to read and operationalize when the final deliverable is sent as an Excel or Word file.

Because meaning can be lost or confused in these formats, playbooks are ultimately tricky to implement. Training can take an unnecessarily long time as the trainee attempts to sort through the playbook to get up to speed. Even worse, errors can occur if the playbooks have not been updated with the most recent version.

Finally, gathering reliable data on what comprises your company's contract playbook is the greatest challenge. How often is the playbook updated? Is there a release process? How is new guidance from outside counsel incorporated?

What are Integrated Playbooks?

Integrated playbooks are an alternative to traditional playbooks for teams that need a quick and effective way to train new hires, procurement professionals, and sales teams. They're also a method of gathering data, updating playbooks in real-time, and making sure your playbook is working for you — not the other way around. Integrated playbooks also take the great idea of traditional playbooks and transform them into an actionable training tool.

Here are some of the reasons legal and business teams rely on them for training.

Bespoke contract editing

It all starts with using a non-generic word processor to edit and redline contracts, where playbooks can be integrated in the same user interface. Using a bespoke editor that is specifically designed for contract review leapfrogs traditional methods of marking up deals.

Automatic inspections

Unlike traditional playbooks that require manual changes, integrated playbooks automatically inspect documents as they are loaded into a workflow. Users can immediately see what needs to be updated, what information is missing, and which sections need to be clarified.

Easy-to-use interface

The intuitive interface of an integrated playbook is checklist and collaboration-driven, making it ideal for team environments. By including the checklist directly inside the contract review, the mental gymnastics of multiple windows and copy/pasting goes away.

Formatting alignment

Speaking of copy and paste, using traditional playbooks can break formatting on copy/paste. An integrated playbook inside a specialized contract editor can completely eliminate the risks of formatting and outline styles getting out of control.

Defined terms harmonization

When dealing with third party paper, swapping defined terms in your playbook can be a big challenge, especially when the third party is using alternative terms.

Exhibit incorporation

Ever need to drop in an exhibit pursuant to your playbook mid-flight in a contract negotiation? In a traditional setting, you would have to hunt for the exhibit, copy, paste, and pray that the document doesn't fall apart.

With integrated playbooks: exhibits can be dropped in with one click

Automated amendments and exception tables

By controlling the editing experience and making it data enabled, your contract markups can be dynamically exported and translated into other formats, including automated amendments templates and exception tables. This greatly reduces the need to manually draft documents that derive from a markup.

Streamlined knowledge

Integrated playbooks streamline the process of providing information and applying that knowledge to new contracts as they come in.

How DocJuris Implements Integrated Playbooks

Here’s an example of how an integrated playbook can help your team.

DocJuris’ contract negotiation workspace accelerates the development of playbooks, captures negotiation data, and drives consistent results. Our product also increases contract efficiency by 2x with automated amendments and fallback management.

1. Let’s say Jon is taking parental leave. A temp attorney is coming in to take over his contract review work. Typically, it would take a new attorney three months to get fully trained. Jon will be back by then!
2. However, if the temp attorney is given an integrated playbook, they can simply upload a contract and be immediately guided through markups and negotiations with data at their fingertips.
3. Without needing to go through all of Jon’s files, the temp attorney can see past precedent and redlines Jon has prepared plus get checklist guidance, one-click edits and highlights that identify errors, one-click exhibit insertion, one-click missing provision insertion, and automatic deletion of clauses that shouldn’t be there.
4. Integrated playbooks can speed up the training process with up-to-the-minute markups that help trainees understand the nuances of your contract negotiation methods.

Interested in learning more? Check out this product tour here.