At ContractWorks, our employees come from a variety of experiences and backgrounds, each with a unique set of skills and talents that align with our overall mission of providing simple, smart document management solutions.

We’re proud of the team we’ve assembled, and we think it’s about time you get to know the people that are innovative, agile, and committed to fulfilling the needs of our customers.

This month we’re catching up with Brendan Shanny, Software Engineer at ContractWorks. Brendan plays an important role working to improve the ContractWorks software by listening to customer feedback and incorporating new technologies.

As technology companies continue to experience rapid growth and expansion, you’ll need to have the proper tools and processes in place to manage the challenges that accompany that growth. Managing corporate contracts only gets more difficult as you introduce more customers, employees, vendors, service providers, and other professional partners into the equation. Small teams responsible for a handful of relatively low-risk agreements might not have a clear need for dedicated contract management software, but what happens when your company has 30, or 300, or 3,000 contracts on file, all with varying terms and end dates? What happens if your business expands and now your legal team is spread across multiple states or countries? For most companies, there comes a point in time when the existing manual processes in place stop working.

A failure to address legal risks before they turn into actual problems can be devastating in the business world. From breaches of contract to compliance failures, companies that do not take steps to recognize and address their legal exposure can end up on the hook for damages, fines and penalties, and reputational damage.

But though some element of risk is generally inherent to conducting any type of business, not all exposure should be seen as inevitable. By applying some of the key principles of risk management to contractual and legal dealings, enterprises can proactively take steps to limit their risk of losses, as well as mitigate the level of damage they experience should a breach of contract or other problems occur. This is called legal risk management, and here are four key habits the best teams typically possess to inform their approach.

One of the largest gatherings of influential women in law is right around the corner. ALM’s Women, Influence and Power in Law Conference (WIPL) will be held October 16th-18th at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park in Washington, DC. The three-day conference will host an elite audience of 600+ senior leaders and decision makers and will provide a jam-packed agenda featuring renowned keynote speakers, dynamic discussion-based panels, peer-to-peer learning, and interactive technology workshops.

With so many choices for attendees, we have highlighted three items that should not be missed.

Technology companies manage thousands, if not tens of thousands of contracts. These include:

• Contracts with resellers and distributors of your software or hardware

• Patents, trademarks, and copyrights that protect your intellectual property

• License agreements for the use of technology belonging to other companies

• Contracts with employee workers and contractors, including NDAs and non-competes

• Equipment leases, real estate contracts, etc.

And that’s not counting contracts and licenses with customers, which for B2C tech businesses may amount to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of contracts.

Maintaining high revenue and low costs is the basic goal for any business. This model applies to the individual departments within a company as well, including the legal team. However, this can be difficult to accomplish, especially during growth phases when you’re looking to add new members to the team. In this article, we’ll discuss the common challenges involved with keeping legal costs low while continuing to grow revenue, and how implementing contract management software can help.

Healthcare companies are responsible for managing many types of corporate agreements, including contracts with their physicians and caretakers, service providers, equipment vendors, building owners, and others. For organizations that employ hundreds of doctors and nurses and care for thousands of patients across dozens of facilities, it’s easy to see how details of a specific contract could be overlooked or an individual contract could get hung up in the approval process sitting in a stack of papers on an executive’s desk.

Having the appropriate contract management tools in place is critical for any company managing a large volume of corporate documents, but especially so for those companies operating in a heavily regulated industry like healthcare. Missing one deadline or losing track of the status of a single physician agreement simply can’t happen.

Here's a look at how Catholic Health Services uses ContractWorks to effectively manage their contracts:

Conducting contract due diligence both before and after a merger or acquisition is critical to the success of a business transaction. The state of a business’s contracts holds important information about the value of the business, as well as potential liabilities. Before finalizing a merger or acquisition, contract reviews are a form of investigation. The acquiring business needs to understand any and all contract features that could cause challenges down the road.

Here are four things to look for before an M&A transaction is finalized:

There are few better illustrations of how far technology has advanced over the decades than your smartphone. In 1945, scientists booted up one of the earliest versions of the computer: it was a hulking machine that took up 1,500 square feet, weighed in at 30 tons and had memory and processing capabilities that are barely a fraction of those of today’s pocket-sized devices.

Technological innovation has transformed almost every aspect of life since then, from your cell phone to, yes, contract management. And while even the most die-hard luddite isn’t performing their work on a slow, antique processor, many organizations remain mired in outdated practices and methods of handling important corporate agreements. Some of these outdated processes even predate those apartment-sized computers!