Contract Authoring Everything You Should Know

Amongst the legal documents that lawyers create at large, contracts are the most tedious and lengthy ones. Authoring these, itself is a process that takes up time, energy, and peace. However, once you get the contract signed and executed, life’s easy! Why? Because you have everything penned down in black and white. But what if you forget to add in a standard clause? Or what if there is a spelling mistake?

With so much information, wishes, and demands to be compiled in a single document, it is human to miss out on things. Inefficient contracting often stems from a clustered authoring process. Clauses can be decentralized, item management would be inadequate, so on and so forth. Looking at the bigger picture, having an inefficient contracting process has serious impacts on the business; misplaced clauses, overlooked deadlines, additional liabilities which were not checked for, and much more.

A digital tool, like a well-tuned CLM, will be the best option for you to create flawless contracts for your business. Let us dive into the details and see what exactly goes on in contract authoring.

What Is Contract Authoring?

The authoring of a contract is nothing but its creation. Penning down all the terms, the minute details, and the will of the parties into black and white. Contracts since their inception are collaborative legal documents, they combine the intention of the stakeholders, formulate that into key clauses, dates, deadlines, counterparty information, pricing, so on and so forth.

Let us understand in-depth how automated e-contracts help you simplify the process of contract authoring:

Smart Authoring: A well-tuned CLM tool has pre-saved templates. This helps you in authoring faster and accurately. Drafting contracts with the help of automated templates are a blessing for lawyers. All the necessary, yet easily misplaced fields are already included in these ready-to-use templates making it a rapid way to draft contracts.

Apart from the ready templates, CLM platforms also offer customizable templates. The software can learn using complex AI & ML algorithms and save these for future reference.

Faster Collaborations: When all of your team members are working on the same platform, collaborations become very easy. Everyone can see what the other is working on and can add their comments in real-time. This enables faster collaborations and the entire process of authoring a contract becomes effortless.

Easy Negotiations: Negotiating the contracts is probably one of the most elaborative steps in the lifecycle of a contract. Contracts come to an agreement only when everyone involved in it is satisfied with the terms. To negotiate terms, there need to be exacting negotiations. Parties need to collaborate and come to mutually acceptable terms.

With the help of a contract drafting cool, negotiations become a straight process. With better visibility into negotiations, companies are also able to reduce negotiation risks rapidly.

Unearth Intelligence: Another advantage of automated contract authoring is that your contracts are very standard across verticals. There is a uniformity in contracts which makes it easy to streamline information. With a centralized repository that a CLM offers, all the critical data is easy to find. This makes information available for everyone involved in the process and also makes it possible to derive actionable insights.

With the right data available, it is possible to derive intelligence from the contracts and gain a complete overview of the contracting portfolio for a company.

Take-Aways:

Contract authoring has always been a key concern for the majority of lawyers. However, drafting them is no less a headache. With an automated contracting tool that gives ready templates, a chance for customizations, and streamlining, automated contract authoring is now a highway!