Five Contract Pain Points Post COVID-19

As the world slowly starts to open up and adapt to a new normal, legal departments are looking for ways to decrease legal costs and optimize processes via technology.  Here's why.

1. Queues have grown, but work environments have shrunk

When businesses shut down, so did the work. Now, as companies begin to open up, new work will start to pile up. Coming back to your laundry list of pending negotiations plus new tasks creates a tremendous amount of old and new work volume that will need to be managed simultaneously.

As a result, legal teams now exist in an environment where technology is necessary, not a nice-to-have. To keep up, they need to adopt technology to streamline their growing work volumes when time is a precious commodity.

2. You can't walk next door and ask your co-workers for advice

Gone are the days where you can walk over to your co-worker's desk to pick their brain. Now, we're dealing with Zoom fatigue, a never-ending workday, and kids running around the house as we try to get our contracts redlined and negotiated.

As a result, legal teams need centralized information in an easy-to-use interface that they can access from their makeshift home office at all hours of the day and night.

3. There’s less time to iterate and adapt

Organizations are being asked to simplify and streamline the workstreams. Because negotiation is inherently complex, updating the terminology and approach to each negotiation is extremely important to drive business decisions faster. Managing this along with an increased workload is challenging.

As a result, there is a strong need for legal professionals to activate self-service throughout the negotiation lifecycle without increasing risk for the organization. This can only happen through advanced technology.

4. Negotiation policies and playbooks have changed

Unfortunately, even organized playbooks are mostly irrelevant now. Times are changing, along with the needs of the economy, and there's no time to update your playbook. Policies that may have been standard six months ago are no longer possible. In some cases, you may have more leverage now to push legal positions than you did before.

As a result, legal teams need to use smart processes and systems to calibrate playbooks and streamline their development.

5. Time-draining contract tasks in the pre-signature stage are in the spotlight

In our research, it takes up to two hours to fill out manual contract service requests using the traditional process of filing PDF and Word intake forms. The method of firing up your laptop, opening Word, filling out a form, saving it to a PDF, attaching it to an email, and hitting send is burdensome. This is especially true when we consider the limitations of most home offices when it comes to screen real estate. Without a side-by-side view of contract negotiation frameworks, the process becomes extra cumbersome on all accounts.

As a result, we have developed a roadmap using different technologies to solve your problems. We'd love to talk to you to explore how DocJuris can fit into your negotiation workstreams.

DocJuris brings targeted and resourceful smart contract technology to legal ops. We'd love to explore and discuss these new challenges with you to develop an intelligent system that meets the needs of your legal teams. Contact us today to schedule a demo.