Contract Review, Approval, and Signature Platform

Written By Todd Libet

Problem

When I first started reviewing legal contracts that came through, I noticed how manual the process was. A client would send over document in different formats, through different mediums (email, Slack, DocuSign, RightSignature, etc), and the sales team was consistently asking when they should expect signature. In order to do more discovery, I started interviewing all of the users that were involved in this system. Here are the issues I uncovered:

  • Lack of

    • Visibility where the contract was in the lifecycle

    • Standardization of approvals

    • Process

    • Accepted standard legal terms

    • Tracking system

    • Communication (internally and externally)

    • SLAs

Research

Now that I had the issues to solve for, I had to start documenting the correct way to perform a proper contract review process. There were some areas where I wasn’t going to re-invent the wheel and others where I had to figure out what the current secret sauce was that needed to be baked in. Here is how I structured it:

Software

  • Should we look at implementing a custom CLM platform?

  • Should we look at utilizing a tool that we already had?

  • Are there dependancies that need to be considered for integrations or working with our clients/vendors?

  • How much money can we spend?

Process

  • What were the different stages/workflows in reviewing a contract now?

  • Should the current stages/workflows be changed or made more efficient?

  • Who was involved in each step?

Implementation/Solution

After research and discovery, came the most fun part… deploying.

The research revealed that we probably were not ready for a full CLM, nor did we have the budget for it. There was also merit to the idea that contracts are very closely linked to the client/vendor and keeping those records together may provide insights to reporting, analytics, and ease of access. So we decided to build the process into Salesforce.

I didn’t know much about the features and configuration of Salesforce so I started taking some lessons on LinkedIn Learning, watching YouTube videos, and using the Trailhead learning platform. What I learned is that there is actually already a Contracts object in Salesforce and we could use that as a starting point to implement the solution.

Here is what we implemented:

  • Modified Contracts object to have the data points to support the requirements that came up in research (contract execution date, contract type, etc)

  • Updated the Status field to act as the workflow manager

  • Created Page Layout screens to integrate the Contract object into different pages

    • Opportunity

    • Contract

    • Account

  • Used Process Builder to automate the communications/notifications for parties

    • Email Alerts were used to set party information for each step

    • Email Templates were used to set the template for each email going out

  • Documented the new process in Confluence

  • Lots of testing and iterations

Results

I’m not going to lie, it took awhile (maybe 2 months) for the users to start getting the hang of the system. In the beginning, it was very difficult to convince users to start putting contracts into this new system, rather than sending them over in email and falling back in their old ways. It wouldn’t have been possible without leaderships support. After about a month, we communicated that we would no longer be taking contracts via any other method than the new system (and had an email template to send out with the new instructions in case someone attempted).

After everyone figured out how to use the system, supporting meetings were sent out, and change management ran its course — the contracts process changed for the better.

We now had one meeting per week (just a scrum) to talk about the status of each contract in the system, blockers, or anything weird that came up that we needed to address. Contracts were going out the door faster than ever (about 50% faster). This not only made the sales team happier, it increased our internal legal staffs efficiency and removed the need to utilize the outside counsel we had been using for the previous 3 years (for overflow contracts).

Here is a list of improvements:

  • Full transparency of contract statuses and comments

  • Approval process was automated, standardized, and documented

  • Acceptable legal terms were documented along with words we wanted to avoid (and terms we were willing to flex on)

  • Communication between clients, vendors, and the internal teams increased as they could now simply comment on contracts and have real-time feedback

  • SLAs were cut in half

  • Saved $200k+ on outside legal counsel

  • People were happier (how do you measure happiness)

Overall, this was one of the most successful projects I have been a part of. It really felt good to take something from discovery through interviews/research, into implementation, and out the door into people’s hands.

Todd Libet