Save Time and Effort with Contractual Agreement Templates
By Karen Howe
The average individual or small business person who Googles contractual agreement templates will find hundreds of examples of “free” legal forms that can be downloaded, but as a contract professional, you know that those generic, cookie-cutter contract templates aren’t sufficient to ensure compliance and mitigate risk to your organization. Chances are you’ve built up a library of legally approved and carefully crafted contract templates that you expect everyone to use, but how you manage and make these templates accessible is critical. If done right, it can save your organization much time and effort. If done poorly, it can expose your business to unnecessary risk and noncompliance.
Contract Management Software from Contract Logix provides centralized storage of contract templates. For users, it’s quick and easy to generate a contract with a single click and there’s no need to hunt down the right version or temptation to re-use an older contractual agreement template that you might have laying around, which minimizes the danger of having a contract that contains out-of-date language.
For the Legal or Contracting staff, creating and maintaining the templates library is similarly straightforward. If you have a copy of your contractual agreement templates in Word format, you can upload it directly into Contract Logix, while maintaining all the formatting of the original. You can save even more time and effort down the road by inserting merge fields that will auto-populate with key data points when the document is generated, such as the contracting party name and address, term dates, and so forth.
Templates are also essential to the type of self-service, automated contract request process that can save your legal staff valuable time and was featured in last week’s blog, Get Contracts Processed in a Jiffy Using a Self-Service Contract Request Process.
As your organization’s contract management process matures, you may choose to expand your usage of Contract Logix’s clause library feature. Clauses, complete with merge fields, are added to the library then assembled into templates. Updating the language in a clause automatically updates the template, so you’re assured that the most up-to-date and legally-compliant language is being used. Further, language can be automatically included or excluded from the generated document based on conditional business rules. This flexibility around the usage of standard vs. non-standard or alternative language translates to needing fewer contract templates to manage, thus saving you time.
Takeaway for Managing Contractual Agreement Templates
Contract creation and authoring tools are key components of a modern contract lifecycle management software solution. With a contract management system from Contract Logix, centralized storage of contractual templates makes them easy to access and simple for users to generate properly formatted contracts, which in turn removes a significant burden from overworked legal staff. More importantly, it ensures that everyone is using the most up-to-date and legally-compliant language, and that can save you much more than your time. It can save your business!
If you’d like to learn more about contract templates, please schedule a call with one of our specialists today.