One of the biggest obstacles to getting any lifecycle contract management system approved is stakeholders not understanding its value in the same way you do.

When people don’t deal with contracts on a daily basis, they may not understand how having the right contract lifecycle management system in place can help your company run more efficiently, save you hundreds of thousands of dollars on things like unnecessary outsourced legal fees, and protect your company against millions of dollars in fines, for not adhering to updated compliance and data privacy laws. Evisort itself harmonizes artificial intelligence with the nuance of legal language to give you AI-powered contract management that really works.

But if senior management doesn’t intrinsically see how a CLM platform can help your company, it may be up to you to convincingly tell the story. Here are five ways to make a business case for investing in the right legal technology.

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1. Clearly describe the problems of not investing in technology

To understand the value of legal technology, senior management first needs to understand some of the challenges and pain points your company is encountering by not using an AI-powered contract lifecycle management system. It’s important to be as detailed as possible, when naming the pain points your system of choice can solve.

Is it hard, for instance, to get a handle on the full portfolio of your company’s contracts, because they are stored on different servers, and you know you are paying for duplicate services you don’t need?

Are you worried that you are missing renewal deadlines, or getting stuck with auto-renewal contracts that you no longer want, costing your company hundreds of thousands of dollars a year?

Because of workflow bottlenecks, are you not getting contracts drafted and signed quickly, making it difficult for sales teams to reach revenue goals, and leading to lost profits?

Pointing out the issues is the first step in any productive investment conversation.

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2. Find specific examples of how your preferred provider can solve your challenges

When you come to a meeting with an easy-to-implement, proven way to solve a pain point, it enables others to move on to other pressing company issues.

For example, when it comes to Evisort’s AI, you can can help your business run more efficiently in a short amount of time by leveraging:

·       Hyper-accurate AI that’s been trained on over 10M+ real contracts                        

·       Automated workflows and market-leading OCR for contract ingestion

·       An easy-to-use platform that minimizes the need for IT involvement to get the platform up and running

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3. Explain the value of quick wins

Do your due diligence in investigating how your preferred technology has enabled other customers like your business to achieve quick wins. For a contract lifecycle management platform, you might consider:

Immediate savings on autorenewals and vendor consolidation.

For example, Evisort tracks all contract deadlines and provides notifications about upcoming deadlines, giving you time to determine whether you still need a specific service or supplier, or if any services are overlapping. Within one month of using Evisort, for instance, Keller Williams immediately found two contracts for services they weren’t using, but were set for auto-renew, providing significant ROI, in just 30 days.

Identification of redundant services and under-utilized contract subscriptions.

You can explain how when you are able to access all your contracts in one dashboard, it’s easy to quickly see where you might have redundant services, or are paying for items that you no longer utilize. This kind of auditing and reviewing system can save your company millions of dollars per year.

Get what you’re owed.

With the right system, you can easily track dollar-saving terms and entitlements, share early payment discounts, and rebate information with finance, and analyze payment terms across offices.

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4. Explain the risks to your company of not using a leading technology

It’s also important for stakeholders to understand how utilizing an intelligent contracting platform does something equally as powerful and arguably more important as increasing cost savings: It mitigates risks.  Compliance failures, loss or misplacement of documents, and breach of contracts can create devastating consequences for your company.

Here are a few ways you can explain how legal technology can mitigate risks.

Quickly find – and allow users to remediate – outdated clauses in a contract.

Once your contracts are centralized in a single depository, you can more easily scan for risk exposures and search out key clauses that need to be updated. The best technology will even make it easy for remediation and triage to be done, right on the platform.

Help you respond faster to breaches.

‍Breaches of contracts cost companies hundreds of thousands of dollars and damage trust with customers. When it comes to making reparations, response time is important. Consider if you need to automatically track all of your company’s contractual obligations, and – if a data breach does occur – in what time frame you need to provide notice to clients or vendors of the data breaches. 

Conduct thorough auditing and reporting.  

Empower authorized employees to search, report, and get notifications on things like data privacy commitments and force majeure clauses. Leading contract-trained AI has even been proven more accurate than human eyes when it comes to document review, helping avoid the costs and risks that come with human error.

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5. Suggest scheduling a live demonstration

Seeing is believing. By scheduling a live demonstration, your team can see, in real time, how your preferred technology provider can address your company’s needs. Strategize with your team before the meeting so they are prepared to ask the questions that are most pressing for their area of the business and can dig into the features and capabilities that will matter most to them. 

Ready to see for yourself how the right legal technology can make a world of difference? Schedule your personal demo of Evisort today!