A contract playbook, a tool that captures the necessary contractual strategies to promote consistency in documents and processes, has several benefits to legal teams. According to Thomson Reuters, playbooks allow for a cohesive strategy and positioning across a team by promoting knowledge capture and pooling best practices in one place. In addition, playbooks list out acceptable and unacceptable risk which creates more certainty during negotiations. This helps close matters faster by minimizing the need for consultation with others on routine points or areas where an organization has a settled policy. Playbooks help save time and money by empowering junior attorneys, paralegals, and other business units to complete the majority of work on recurrent matters, which frees up senior lawyers to devote their time to more complex work.
Playbooks offer a myriad of benefits to legal teams, yet a small majority of lawyers use them. Why? One reason is that creating a playbook is a time-consuming process that isn’t seen as a priority by busy legal teams. Thankfully with BlackBoiler‘s technology, you can quickly build a legal playbook in minutes to then power your automated contract reviews. What are the benefits of building a digital contract playbook?
5 Benefits of Building a Digital Contract Playbook
1) Increased Speed
Contracting has a need – a need for speed. With better speed, law firms can turn around the work faster creating highly optimized workflows.
Within six months, a Global 1000 company using BlackBoiler’s Automated Contract Markup technology cut their contract review time from 45 minutes to 14 minutes, saving 68.9% of the time.
Building a playbook typically takes as little as 10-15 minutes to build. With that, you can capitalize on automated markup and review technology to increase the speed of your processes.
2) Higher Data Security
With the importance of data security and privacy growing stronger, law firms and legal departments are more concerned than ever. BlackBoiler’s digital playbook builder allows you to leverage editing models that don’t rely on data from your older contracts as they might contain business-sensitive or personally identifiable information. Answer questions about your documents and processes, build a playbook from scratch, or add your contracting rules – the choice is yours.
3) Strengthens Governance and Improves Control
Good contract governance is establishing strong relationships with clients and delivering value to businesses and the end-users. With digital playbooks, you can directly achieve the goals of contract governance – clear communication, risk mitigation, and a smooth contracting process.
Deploying playbooks accelerates internal functions leading to better decisions and contract reviews. Digital playbooks give you control over your contracting cycles so that you and your clients can do business better.
4) Improves Contract Compliance
Sometimes, transaction details could be missed, negotiators could find themselves helpless, or they might unknowingly use a strategy that leads to more troubles.
Digital playbook building processes are exhaustive that don’t miss out on transaction nuances and simplify future negotiation processes. Not only does it bring about standardization, it significantly enhances compliance with the highest contractual standards.
Contract negotiation becomes simplified, freeing up time for negotiators to focus on strategic aspects of a transaction.
5) Avoids a Brand Reputation Crisis
Ignoring standard contract compliance not only costs you money but puts you at the risk of a brand reputation crisis. Erroneous language, ambiguous terms, and ill-defined contract standards could be the result. A digital playbook that outlines well-defined standards removes the ambiguity from contract processes.
It becomes easier to do business as negotiation cycles shorten to bring repeat business. Digital playbooks eliminate complexity and encourage consistent language across contracts improving client experience.
Build Legal Playbooks Faster, With More Control
Having control over processes seems like half the work done. When you leverage digital playbooks, you optimize for better outcomes. The faster firms and legal departments can adopt digital playbooks, the faster they can learn and identify loopholes to fix internal systems. Request a demo with BlackBoiler to learn how you can have more control over your contracting processes.
