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Is your in-house legal team spending too much time on the urgent but unimportant matters that routinely arise in an organisation?

This could include:

• Marketing sign-offs
• Request to establish, or just advise on, delegated authorities
• Contract approval forms
• Confidentiality agreements
• Short form agreements (such as short form consultancy agreements)
• Advice on how to apply health and safety or privacy frameworks to particular situations

These do not need to be only for simple contracts. We have recentl worked with the legal team of a large New Zealand company to build an automated workflow that covers both simple and complex consultancy agreements. The agreements can be completed using our online forms by a combination of internal and external project managers, under the supervision of a business manager. Legal, who identified the opportunity and helped to design the solution, are in the background if needed at any time.

Devolving responsibility to the business without giving them the tools to idenitfy and manage risks appropriately could create significant issues in the future.

We can help free your team up by assisting the business to do more themselves, while the legal team can still retain oversight and control. 

We can do this by creating attractive web-forms, branded and styled to look like your own organisation’s, which you can embed into your own SharePoint or other intranet sites, or be sent by email. 

Users can fill in the form, with the automation guiding them by:

• Only showing them questions and options relevant to their situation, and which they are allowed to see and select
• Presenting them with guidance, helping them answer in the way the legal team would if doing it themselves
• Showing error messages and preventing further progress until the errors are corrected
• Leaving certain questions optional, but making those that are essential for the right outcome mandatory
• Giving them a document or answer in the form they need, which might be an editable Word document or a locked-down Word or PDF document. You can decide.

Emails containing details of each form submission can be sent to the legal team or anyone else for easy and immediate oversight, plus all the details are available at any time in the entries database.

You can link the web-forms to your Office 365 account, so the data can also be available there. Over time you'll build up a lot of structured data to help to understand and demonstrate the legal activities being carried out across the organisation, and where there are further areas for improvement. You could use Power BI to turn that data into beautiful graphs that can be easily shared.

You can also easily integrate with digital signing solutions, which further ensures that agreements are entered into correctly and that copies of all contracts are returned to the right location where they can be stored and managed properly.

Expected benefits include:

• Freeing the legal team up to focus on higher priority work
• The business can quickly get on with what they need to do, while legal or others can retain oversight
• If the sales team can close sales more quickly, and on the latest terms (including force majeure and other protective provisions), there will be real business impact
• Better consistency and quality, with less review required
• Easier precedent management, with access to only the latest template versions from anywhere via our secure cloud portal.

You can see more of these solutions in this video: