Contract automation is the process of using technology to automate the production of draft contracts.
Document automation technology can also be useful for generating other common documents such as job offer or RFPs for instance.
This technology is often used by lawyers to speed up the drafting process but also offers the opportunity for business users to generate documents themselves. Typical users outside the legal time include colleagues from sales, procurement or HR.
Contract automation is the process of using technology to automate the production of draft contracts.
Document automation technology can also be useful for generating other common documents such as job offer or RFPs for instance.
This technology is often used by lawyers to speed up the drafting process but also offers the opportunity for business users to generate documents themselves. Typical users outside the legal time include colleagues from sales, procurement or HR.
For busy lawyers, typing or copy/pasting information from one place to another in order to tailor a template to a specific matter is not a great use of their time. Neither is it ideal that business users might find themselves waiting longer than they might like to receive a first draft from the legal team.
Even where certain templates are drafted by business users themselves, lawyers often find themselves spending a lot of time telling colleagues where they can find certain templates or precedent documents over and over.
A solution which speeds up these processes – whether by streamlining the drafting process for the lawyers – or by empowering business users to find and draft documents themselves, is a win-win for both groups. (For some ideas on where to start and what sort of documents you might look to automate see our related post: Legal document automation: beyond the NDA.
At a commercial level, inefficient contracting processes can delay agreements or even result in them being abandoned altogether. With contracts sitting at the heart of most businesses this can hit the bottom line quickly.
With no system in place, different users may use different and/or incorrect templates. Documents produced using automation software will always be based on the correct template ensuring consistency of approach and avoiding the risk that agreements are concluded on incorrect/outdated terms.
Also, since document automation software controls how and what is changed in the template, there is far less risk of human error affecting an individual agreement or – even worse – the precedent itself.
Inconsistent contracting also compromises the value of contractual data since data may be missing or captured in a way that makes it hard to track/monitor across a group of contracts.
Automating a document with Tabled requires no coding or other technical skills and can be done by lawyers quickly and easily without support from IT colleagues, consultants or from us!
The process is just 3 simple steps:
1) Create a new automation form and add an appropriately named field for each element you want to automate (e.g. Landlord Name, Length of Lease etc);
2) Upload your precedent document – this opens in a preview window, alongside a list of the variable fields you created in step 1 above; and
3) Place your cursor where you would like to insert a field and then click on the field name to insert it, repeating until all fields are in place.
Once complete, the automation form appears on your legal front door, ready for your lawyers and/or business users to start generating documents.
Executed documents can be stored in Tabled’s contract repositories in which you are also capture useful metadata including data which helps with ongoing contract management e.g. renewal dates and set Tabled to automatically issue reminders in advance of those dates.
Using Tabled it is possible to draft multiple documents simultaneously via a single intake form, helping to speed up workflows.
Your Tabled workspace can be loaded with pre-automated documents based on standardised templates such as the oneNDA.
While many solutions focus solely on contract automation/management this ignores the fact that contracts are not a separate, self-contained element of the legal team’s work. Contracts are typically just one part of a broader matter management and collaboration process.
Our document automation features are accessed via your ‘legal front door’ together with intake/requests (or ‘legal ticketing’), template access and self-service knowledge resources such as FAQs and interactive workflows that help business users to find the answers or resources they need.
Bringing all of these features together gives business users a more convenient and consistent experience, supporting adoption across the board and presenting legal in the best possible light.
For the legal team, Tabled provides an easy-to-use platform to manage matters, contracts, knowledge and data all in one place which supports efficient but secure collaboration whilst also creating a robust audit trail.
For many teams, Tabled presents an opportunity to avoid the hassle – and expense – of procuring and maintaining multiple separate systems.
To find out more, please request a sign up for a demo using the form below.