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A clause library aggregates pre-approved contract clauses, streamlining routine changes and minimising legal team involvement. This saves valuable time and expedites agreement processes.
A robust clause strategy facilitates swift agreements and mitigates risks in critical areas like payments and contract termination. Unfortunately, legal text fragments are often scattered across platforms and spreadsheets, leading to disorganisation, outdated content, and accessibility challenges. This increases the risk of delays, errors, and non-compliance.
In our commitment to innovation and enhancing user experiences, we conducted research with enterprise firms on their clause management practices—from drafting to storage. Discover the significant hurdles and how a unified, automated clause library can offer solutions.
In the realm of agreement management, even a single clause update can entail numerous steps and extensive approvals. Manual and time-consuming revision and storage procedures can swiftly deplete valuable time and resources. Research conducted by DocuSign sheds light on three primary challenges consistently faced by larger customers in managing agreement language.
For large organisations managing vast contract portfolios, decentralised clause storage poses significant challenges, particularly in locating and reviewing specific legal text sections. With clauses dispersed across systems and documents, legal teams expend considerable effort searching for relevant clauses.
When the need arises to modify or remove a clause within widespread agreement templates, navigating scattered documents becomes laborious. While manageable with a handful of contracts, this process becomes highly inefficient and error-prone as contract volumes escalate into the thousands. Decentralisation also complicates tracking clause modifications made by different team members.
Furthermore, when agreements are scattered across folders and spreadsheets, companies risk losing visibility into their sales and procurement obligations, leading to increased redundancies and costs. A case in point is a large healthcare organisation managing multiple vendor agreements across various locations, where scattered storage and oversight gaps amplified inefficiencies and expenses.
According to DocuSign research, many companies lack automation in their agreement management processes, hindering their ability to efficiently identify and update legal language across their portfolios. Specifically, they struggle to automate the identification and revision of outdated clauses, such as those related to corporate responsibility policies, interest rates, payment terms, and legal requirements.
The absence of automation not only prolongs the revision process but also increases the risk of human error and contract inconsistencies. Most organisations lack a centralised library for managing legal text blocks, necessitating manual reviews of clauses across various agreement types. This manual approach heightens the potential for compliance issues.
Even for those with access to a clause library, limited automation tools leave them reliant on manual intervention, especially challenging when dealing with agreements in multiple languages or identifying non-compliant clauses within lengthy contracts.
For enterprises, intricate agreements and nuanced legal language pose significant obstacles to expediting contracting processes and mitigating risks. Many organisations manage numerous contracts, often with variations in language. Depending on their global reach, they may encounter clauses written in multiple languages.
Dealing with such complex agreements, including sales contracts with intricate negotiated terms, presents challenges in ensuring compliance with all contractual obligations and keeping clauses abreast of evolving regulations. For instance, the implementation of the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) in 2023 introduced new requirements regarding consumer data privacy. Meeting these regulatory demands necessitates active clause management and oversight, a task made more challenging in the absence of a centralised clause library and automation support.
When disorganised and inaccurate clauses impede a business’s efficiency, reputation, compliance, and vendor relationships, a centralised, automated clause library becomes essential. DocuSign CLM introduces this transformative solution, revolutionising contract organisation and management.
DocuSign CLM equips organisations with a dedicated clause library, consolidating agreement language for ease of access, revision, and standardisation. This empowers users to efficiently manage agreements, minimizing legal risks amid manual tasks, scattered contracts, and ongoing negotiations.
With automation provided by DocuSign CLM, firms gain insights into their contract obligations, craft precise agreements, and swiftly adapt clauses to evolving regulations, priorities, and offerings. This ensures agility and compliance in a dynamic business landscape.
Copyright FourierIT. 2020