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When organizations enter into a business relationship with customers, vendors, or suppliers the means of establishing the relationship is by signing a contract.

Most of the organizations have legally vetted contract templates with standard clauses when entering into an agreement with the second party. However, for various business reasons, some clauses are changed or a new language is introduced before entering into an agreement. There are also situations where an organization is expected to accept a complete third-party paper to get into the business.

When hundreds of contracts are exe

How are contracts mostly handled?

Contracts are an integral part of the business in any organization. Depending on the type of the company and how long the company existed there are several ways contracts would have been created and managed. However, whatever the contract management process that an organization might be adopted, there will be a lot of active contracts that are still written on paper or signed/scanned and stored across document repositories or network drives or any existing contract management systems. Just having these legacy contracts on your systems does not help the org

Organizations have evolved in the way the contracting process is carried out. While some are managing their contracts using the combination of MS Word and email collaboration, some have adopted automated contract management systems to help with contract drafting, redlining, and authoring.

The signed contracts are scanned and stored in various contract repositories across the organization like Google drives, SharePoint, FTP locations, file folders etc or are stored in the digital repository of the contract management system being used. This means every organization will have a certain volum

Every organization has business relationships with Vendors, Partners, Customers, and contracts are the most important instruments establishing the business relationship and establishing the performance obligations of the parties involved. Depending on the type of business an organization is into, there can be outbound contracts (to the market) and inbound contracts (from the market).

In most circumstances, if any organization is entering into a business relationship with a customer and selling its products or services then standard legally vetted agreement or contract templates are used to

It is understood that across the world around 60% of the medium to large-scale enterprises are handling contracts manually using word templates or excel spreadsheets. Word templates are basically used to draft the contracts including necessary clause redlining and commenting and once authored these contracts are scanned and stored in various repositories across the organization. Depending on the nature of the organization and their business model sometimes these contracts are consolidated and stored in a centralized repository like SharePoint where different department users have access depen

Contracts are essential to any type of business and they determine the obligations of both the parties entering into a business relationship. Most of the organizations use their internal legally vetted contract templates when signing up with the other party but in some cases, there will be a need to agree to the other party paper which is also called the “Third-party paper”.

When an organization uses its own templates, they are sure what they have agreed to and what are the risks and obligations in the event of not honoring the terms of the contract. But when it comes to accepting third-pa

Contract review with in-house legal teams or external legal firms is common and, in most cases, organizations use standard vetted templates while entering a business relationship with customers or suppliers.

Organizations will use only the standard legally vetted contract templates when signing up with any vendor or customer but it is possible that standard contract templates of your organization are not accepted by the other party and in turn expect you to agree to their standard template. This is called “accepting third-party paper”. When you accept third party agreements here are some

Understanding Contract analysis and review
Contract Analysis is a process of understanding what is within your contracts. The main purpose behind trying to understand the ingredients of any contract is to see what are your organization’s obligations with respect to the contract being analyzed and what are the associated risks for the organization in the event of failing to perform these obligations.

Most organizations prefer to this as Contract Review, and this is most likely performed by either an external legal counsel or using in-house legal teams. The normal contract review process ha

It is a known fact that the success of any organization is solely dependent on the volume of business they do in a fiscal year along with how they were able to effectively manage risks arising from the contracts they have signed with their vendors, customers, partners, and employees

To start with, let's understand the various ways an Enterprise can be exposed to potential risks regarding the contracts.

Unable to trace the signed contract on time
Contracts are managed by various stakeholders across the organization and several copies are rotated back and forth until the final contract i

Organizations across the world, depending on their nature of business will have contracts located across repositories and possibly in multiple languages. Unless the contracts are digitized and brought into a central repository there is no way one can know what is inside these contracts and if there are any potential risks with any of these contracts. Traditional contract management processes fail in terms of speed, time, and resources required to get to the bottom of each executed contract.

Let us understand a use case
As a practical use case let us take an example of an organization that