Your legal team has an important role to play when your business is looking to reduce expenses, and your contract portfolio should be the first place you look for solutions. By understanding the specific details contained within your agreements, you can simultaneously reduce the risk of missing key contract deadlines and identify the most significant opportunities to reduce spending across your organization.  

Terminate, Renegotiate, or Renew? A Guide to Controlling Contract Costs offers practical tips for legal teams looking for ways to cut costs across your organization.

What does it take to be an effective contract manager in today’s business landscape? In addition to a lot of hard work and the right attitude, it’s also beneficial to learn the ins and outs of both your industry and your company’s contracting process.

Below are four tips to help the modern contract manager succeed in this often challenging role.

In response to current events, many businesses are quickly implementing temporary remote work policies for their employees, requiring a reassessment of corporate operations, policies, and procedures. Although the work-from-home movement has been steadily gaining steam in recent years, there are plenty of organizations that are unprepared for this major change. 

Maintaining business continuity when away from the office is especially important for your in-house legal team. Tasked with the responsibility of staying on top of the details in your company’s legal documents, implementing and refining corporate policy, and ensuring critical corporate communications comply with company protocols, your team must operate effectively at all times, especially when business operations require quick modification.

But beyond business operations, this time of uncertainty also has a real human impact on individuals. The sudden transition to a remote environment can leave employees feeling unclear about priorities and expectations, and disconnected from colleagues and company culture. The good news is that with a little planning, communication, and a few simple tools, your team can feel some sense of normalcy when away from the office.

Here are three ways to help your legal team succeed in a remote work environment.

Adjusting to a general counsel role can be especially difficult because you won’t succeed by simply being an excellent lawyer, or having a thorough understanding of industry regulations, or knowing how to expertly mitigate and reduce risk. You have to excel at all of those things (and more), in combination with having a strong background in business strategy and an ability to manage others, all while successfully navigating organizational bureaucracy. 

Having an idea of what to expect can help make for a smoother transition into the corporate counsel role. Here are some things to expect in your new position.

As a new corporate counsel, there’s a good chance you’re still going through the onboarding process and trying to get a full grasp on the status of all the responsibilities you just inherited. Even if you’re an experienced GC and have worked in many different industries at companies of all shapes and sizes, taking over such a significant position is never an easy task, and it can take months to truly feel comfortable in your role.

You clearly have a lot on your plate as corporate counsel, but knowing what to expect can help make for a smoother transition. Here are some things to expect in your new GC role.

For any agency or organization that works with contracts on a regular basis, the concept of contract lifecycle management (CLM) is likely a familiar one. It's no secret that CLM plays a vital role in any organization that leverages legal agreements. Specifically, CLM is used to track and manage every aspect of a contract for its performance, compliance, and other success factors and through every stage of the document's lifecycle (from execution to renewal or expiration). The management process itself begins when a contract is proposed and continues throughout the delivery of the promised good or service and into contract renewal.

During your search for contract management software, you will undoubtedly reach the natural point in the process where you compare and contrast a long list of features offered by a number of software vendors. Choosing the software that comes with the most robust feature set is one way to make a decision, but it won’t necessarily guarantee that you’re getting the best value or the best solution for your specific needs.

Here are some questions to ask during the contract management software search that should help you decide whether you can realistically implement and adopt the software and ultimately achieve long term success working with the vendor.

Every company has to put measures in place to ensure that they control spending and are responsibly managing their budget. Non-profit organizations in particular are under the microscope when it comes to their finances, and must demonstrate that grants, gifts, and other financial contributions are going directly into programs and initiatives that support their mission. Any wasted dollars could potentially lead to reduced funding in the future from both private donors and federal programs. This also means that any expenses for software or administrative support - like contract management software - have to be justified and increase the organization’s ability to serve.

For non-profit organizations with limited budgets, those tasked with managing contracts cannot afford to let opportunities to reduce spending or improve efficiencies slip through the cracks. ContractWorks provides non-profit organizations like Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) with an easy-to-use, cost-effective solution to sign, store, and track their corporate agreements, and offers special pricing discounts exclusively for non-profits.

Non-profit organizations have a noble mission: working together for the common good in pursuit of educational, charitable, or scientific goals. In order to achieve these goals, non-profits often need to sign and maintain various contracts: real estate leases, vendor agreements, federal grants, employment contracts, and many more.

However, these contracts are not without significant risks and challenges, many of them unique to non-profit organizations. Successful contract management for non-profits will require you to address the 4 challenges below.

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 Dena Watkins, Marketing Specialist at ContractWorks. Dena is a key member of the ContractWorks Marketing team, and plays a significant role in coordinating industry events, designing marketing materials, managing projects, and much more.