What Exactly is a Smart Contract Repository?
The term, contract repository (or document repository), sounds fairly simple — it is a place to store your contracts and other legal documents. Yet, leading organizations that leverage a smart contract repository understand that it is so much more than that. It is a single, central, and secure location for all of your documents — one that offers intuitive and interactive capabilities across the business.
That might seem like a mouthful. But fortunately, ContractPodAi offers a proven, powerful contract management solution that is easy to understand and simple to use.
Choosing a Smart Contract Repository
So, you grasp the concept of a contract repository. You realize that your company needs one. But how do you find the right technology that meets your needs — at a cost that fits your budget? Here are some important steps and questions to consider and ask:
- Evaluate your current contract lifecycle management (CLM) process: It is important first to get a baseline of your organization’s contractual processes. How do you organize your contracts right now? Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, shared google drive — or, even more archaic, a filing cabinet? Who has access to the contracts and how do you ensure others cannot access them? How do you track a contract’s status?
- Establish your contract management software goals: Have meaningful conversations with key stakeholders in your business to understand how a contract repository would benefit them. Does your legal team need greater visibility into all existing contracts? Do they waste valuable time on repetitive tasks, like searching legacy contracts, ensuring updated compliance regulations, monitoring key renewal dates, and locating disparate data?
Also, how do other departments engage with your contracts? Do they have easy access to agreements? Is there seamless collaboration between teams? And how do you track updates or changes to each agreement?
- Consider scalability: Whether your organization is new to the market or has been around for decades, it is important to choose a repository solution that scales for you and with Contracts are a critical component of business practices, and they are not going away. Therefore, successfully migrating your historical, current, and future contracts into a system is imperative. But scaling beyond that is just as important. Understand the opportunities to add valuable functionality to gain an even greater return on investment (ROI).
- Choose a trusted source: Integrating a contract repository system into your business requires a trusted partnership that allows you to integrate CLM best practices. Work with a team that has expert knowledge of both the legal side and the technology side. And do not get hit with hidden fees associated with those services! Demand transparency from the beginning and beyond.
Transform Your Workflows With ContractPodAi Cloud
Key Contract Repository Functionality
AI + Contract Repository
Artificial intelligence is more than a buzzword. It is an essential component of a robust contract management system (CMS). A true, AI-powered repository ensures optimal performance across the board: compliance requirements, business objectives, and document validation. It sends automated alerts, provides performance analysis, suggests risk, and drives integrated workflows.
Discovery and Rapid Search
Spending tens, hundreds, or even thousands of hours searching for legal documents is not only frustrating, but also a huge waste of time and resources. In fact, according to Gartner, 25 to 40 percent of a lawyer’s time is spent on tasks that do not require a lawyer. This results in $2.7 million in lost productivity.
To save that time, a smart, centralized contract repository stores and organizes all of your agreements in a single location and offers rapid, powerful search and discovery functionality. Let your legal team focus on what they do best: strategic decisions and other critical legal tasks.
So, how does it work? You can search all of your contracts — anytime and from anywhere — by using common filters, like contract names, metadata, and IDs. You can leverage advanced filtering to find groups of contracts quickly or even specific clauses. And you can save all of your searches to use again in the future.
Version Control
Disorganized, inadequate contract management leads to many problems and major business disruptions. One of those disruptions occurs when there is a lack of contract version control. If your contracts are not tracked and versions are not identified properly, the following pains may occur:
- Time wasted doing redundant work
- Misplaced, hard-to-find, or even lost key information
- Confusion amongst invested parties
- Financial implications due to extraneous billed hours
- Security and confidentiality breaches
Benefits of a Contract Repository
- Prevent data fragmentation: Ensure that no matter how many legacy or new contracts you have — regardless of contract types or how many people need access to them — your data stays organized, trackable, and secure.
- Improve accuracy through automation: Unfortunately, humans make mistakes. But you can reduce human error through automated data entry and digitization. (Aberdeen Research found that administrative costs associated with contracts are reduced by 25 percent to 30 percent by implementing automation.)
- Track contracts effectively: Experience complete visibility into all of your contracts, from simple to complex.
- Create efficiency: Stop spending so much time on repetitive, administrative tasks. Instead, find contracts or even clauses quickly and easily while gaining useful insights.
- Mitigate the risk of non-compliance: Allow your AI-powered repository to identify risk and send alerts regarding internal and governmental compliance issues.
- Create a single source of truth: Consider that The Journal of Contract Management estimates that 71 percent of businesses can not locate at least 10 percent of their contracts. A smart contract repository enables you to access one source, anytime and from anywhere, for better version control, real-time contract data analytics, and greater security.
- Take back control of your processes: Ensure all team members follow the same contract management processes to enforce consistent, efficient workflows.
Contact ContractPodAi to discover how your organization can save valuable time and money with our smart contract repository. Our team of legal and technology experts will help you jump-start your contract lifecycle management journey and see benefits immediately.
