Contract lifecycle management (CLM) has not been a straightforward exercise and here’s why it requires expert legal understanding and understanding of information that contains legal language.

Many third-party providers lack the expertise to extract and manage contextual information. That said, the current advances in text analytics and natural language processors have made this process significantly smoother. Finally, legal teams are seeing the value in having an effective contract management process. However, this comes with its own set of challenges.

Challenges in designing an effective contract management process

Legal firms are struggling to find answers to these challenges when implementing a contract management system:

• Understanding the return on investment (ROI)
• Determining the right technology for their business requirement
• Implementing and adopting the solution across the board
• Creating a central repository of legacy contracts

These challenges are further compounded by the availability of different technologies and solution providers in the market. Choosing the right partnership for your business and clients plays a critical role in the overall success of the project.

Cenza + CLM partners = happy clients

We work with our CLM partners’ clients right from contract discovery to contract migration. After onboarding a new client, the CLM provider refers Cenza and we help the clients by walking them through the following five steps:

1. Introduction: The CLM partner introduces us to the client for preliminary discussions on the scope of the project.
2. Consultation: After understanding the scope of the project, we outline the next steps in the client’s contract migration and meta-data extraction tagging requirements. To ensure the project moves at a faster clip, we provide a full project scope and a pricing estimate.
3. Agreement: The client and Cenza mutually agree on the scope of the project, signing a contract stating the same.
4. Access: The client shares access to their CLM platform and the contract repository.
5. Completion: Our team of reviewers diligently reviews contracts on the platform, conducts quality assessment checks, and migrates the data to the platform. After the project is completed, our reviewers leave the platform.

What’s on offer? A wide range of services

During the initial call, we understand the client’s requirement to custom-build workflows that are tailored to their unique business needs. To support the migration, our services include pre-processing up until the completion of quality assessment and migration.

Here’s our complete process, broken into different steps:

Once the client provides us access to their CLM platform and legacy contracts, our team takes over. These legacy contracts may be in different formats, hosted on different solutions such as Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. We assist in document collection or the contract discovery process. Our skilled team works with you to gather, consolidate and unify all pdf contracts and data from multiple sources and formats.

In the pre-review process, the Cenza project manager will create and share a project plan and guidelines document with the client. This document will contain the project scope, process, review methodology, instructions, and other relevant information.

Our contract team is fully trained according to the guidelines outlined in the project plan to ensure compliance.

One of the key issues we address is deduplication. Here’s a quick overview of how we manage deduplication:

• Use deduplication tools to eliminate duplicates
• Perform a manual review to ensure that all the documents are unique

While running the deduplication check, if Cenza identifies any partially executed agreements, we check for the full version of the contract. In case of non-availability, we raise the issue with the client via a query log for further redressal.

Our expert reviewers use optical character recognition (OCR) software to convert data in a scanned document into an editable format, which is then proofread and vetted.

After vetting the files and removing all the duplicates, the files are saved according to the agreed naming convention, such as Counterparty name [] Document Title [] Effective Date.

To ensure all the stakeholders are in complete agreement, Cenza reviews a sample set of contracts and sends it to the client for confirmation. Based on their feedback, the project guidelines may be amended and the contract review team retrained before the review process begins.

Cenza supports contract data review, extraction, and quality assurance

Using a highly skilled team of qualified lawyers and experienced contract reviewers, Cenza extracts the meta-data from the contracts and bulk uploads the associated contract into the platform. (Read this blog to understand the importance of contract metadata extraction in the contract legacy migration process.)

Cenza follows a robust quality assurance process, with extensive experience in platform repositories to ensure high quality across the contract collection.

Whether you’re a client or a solution provider who could use some expert advice on contract migration and CLM implementation, let’s talk. Schedule a call today.

Frequently Asking Questions

What is Legacy Contract Migration?

Legacy contract migration is the crucial step in CLM Implementation. It is essential to ensure a smooth transition of contracts from one platform to another. Contracts are the vital components for CLM to deliver its objectives. It involves processes that start with Contract Discovery, Creating Repository, Pre-processing, Contract Review, and Metadata Extraction.

What is Contract Extraction?

Contract extraction is the process of extracting information during a CLM implementation to effectuate the system such as rights, obligations, agreement dates, and contract values from the contract. The extracted data is fundamental for a CLM system to deliver contract insights, streamline the contracting process, and enhance the compliance rate.