Canadian Lawyer InHouse

JULY 2016 32 INHOUSE that many in-house legal departments have trouble fi nding contract details. So if someone in a business depart- ment needs to know how many contracts contain a certain provision, for instance, "you're working frantically to respond," he says. "That's another drain on your team and your budget." It's easier to extract business intelligence from contracts when you keep the docu- ments in a dedicated management system. The data is searchable, "so when your ex- ecutives come to you and say, 'How many agreements have these provisions?' or 'How many agreements are for this amount of revenue?' you are able to provide that data in real time," Milstone says. Moyse adds that when you use some of the advanced features of contract manage- ment programs, you pave the way for not only better business insight but also better business processes. For example, you can create a library of information to use dur- ing negotiations. Your negotiating team will know that if representatives of the other side ask for A, your company won't necessarily do B but sometimes C. Moyse sums it up this way: "You get to the point where you can determine your playbook for certain types of contracts based on information you already have." YOU DON'T KNOW WHO'S RESPONSIBLE FOR A CONTRACT Olivier Fischer is the managing direc- tor and chief executive offi cer for North America at Legal Suite, which provides contract management and other software for in-house counsel. He says that at some companies, contract management is effec- tively orphaned, considered neither the re- sponsibility of the in-house lawyers nor the business side's purview. That's a mistake. It increases the risk that the company will re- new contracts it should cancel, or that the business will miss a delivery deadline. "You want to make sure contracts are managed from A to Z, because there could be deliverables and payment terms that are im- portant aspects of the contract," Fischer says. Using contract management software, you can assign contract control to a depart- ment or an individual, so your organization is less likely to miss a deadline. A single employee is your main source of contract knowledge. Fischer says some companies rely on a sin- gle employee, or sometimes a small group, to manage contract information. But as he points out, that means important contract knowledge could be lost or compromised if one person leaves the company. Empower managers to upload all agreement details to an information management system and you reduce the risk that your institutional memory will walk out the door. YOU MISSED A CONTRACT DEADLINE "That's more than a warning sign," Mil- stone says. That's a failure of the system." Fischer agrees. He recalls one company's position: The organization realized after a contract auto-renewal date that it should not have continued to participate in the agreement. It had to pay $100,000 to cancel the contract. "When you buy contract management that many in-hou o se legal departments have troubl fi nding contra d some ments in At DW 2 , we know your clients' companies succeed on the basis of the thinking and ingenuity of their people. To protect that brainwork, you can count on green to provide them the best in IP/IT legwork. DWW.com Lawyers, Patent & Trademark Agents After the gray matter's done its work, Green goes into action. Untitled-3 1 2016-06-03 10:56 AM

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