CLM support in practice

Contract management is a vital function for any business that deals with multiple parties, agreements, and obligations. However, it can also be a time-consuming and error-prone process, especially if it relies on manual tasks and outdated tools. That's why many businesses have moved to contract management software and solutions to manage their contracts and business risk.

Although the challenges of implementing a contract management tool have been well documented, what happens once your Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) solution has been embedded into and adopted by the business? How does your CLM adapt to business changes and scale to support new workflows, resource changes and ensure that your auto-generated contract templates are up to date?

Vario’s Consulting: Process & Technology service line supports in-house legal teams in overcoming these challenges. We help to streamline their contract management processes, ensuring that they can continue to focus on their day-to-day operations.

How do Pinsent Masons Vario support CLM for Clients?

• We offer a holistic and tailored approach that meets client's specific needs and goals.

   

• We leverage our legal and business expertise, as well as our in-depth knowledge of many different CLM solutions to provide advice on how to best utilise the technology to streamline and optimise the contract workflow and templates, following best practice.

   

• We help clients to align their workflows with their existing processes, policies, and systems, and ensure that the solution is compliant with the relevant regulations and standards.

   

• We offer flexible and scalable support, ranging from project management, requirements gathering and implementation to ongoing maintenance and improvement, depending on the client's requirements and budget.

   

• We provide a more comprehensive service that maximises the value and potential of the CLM technology, ensuring that our clients are up to date with the latest features and that they are prepared for any new functionality.

CLM Support in Practice – Case Study

The best way to explain how we work with clients is to talk about our experience actually working with them. The case study below is a great example of when we have worked with a business to support them in relation to CLM.

Who was the client?

A large life sciences client had embarked on the implementation of a leading CLM solution. While they had made considerable progress, their business had recently experienced rapid growth and they needed support with advanced configuration to meet the growing needs of the business. This advanced configuration included the coding of new contract templates, creation of new approval workflows and the need for a custom intake form for the new contract templates.

What general points do we cover with clients?

We worked with the client to initially understand their business needs and how that applied to the new functionality needed within the CLM solution. This allowed us to properly engage with them. Not only to understand their technical needs, but also their underlying processes and provide guidance as to how the processes could be optimised and scaled within their CLM.

A key part of the work we were doing was to fully scope the current functionality of their CLM platform against the new requirements. Throughout this process, we were able to advise on new functionality needed, and also identify new functionality not previously identified by the team to help streamline their existing processes.

What specific needs did the client have?

Once these general aspects had been covered, we were able to move on to addressing more specific matters to suit the client’s situation. Some of the things we covered were:

1. Support in relation to coding new multi-lingual contract templates. In addition to following best practice, all of the formatting had to be consistent with their company branding as well as existing template formats.

    

2. Adapting the platform to meet new requirements. One area that was identified for development was in relation to the creation of new approval workflows. Each of these had to be appropriate to the risk profile of each individual contract. Another area was the creation of new fields specific to the different contract types.

    

3. Support in relation to testing and knowledge transfer. When we work with our clients, we are careful not to bombard them with a technical solution that they are unable to maintain after a project has been completed. We offered this client training support to ensure that the end users understand the new functionality, and could quickly embed it into their day-to-day operations.

What was the outcome of our work?

As a result of the work carried out by our team, the client’s in-house legal team can now engage with their internal business customers in an effective manner. They can manage all of their contracts from “request”, right the way through “execution” to “termination” or “renewal”. A centralised contract repository, automated notifications on key activities, and powerful reporting give the legal team control and oversight of their entire contract estate.

We have since been engaged by this client on further template and workflow automation projects covering a range of topics. If you think that our team might be able to help your business, then please get in touch to see how we can help.