Creating the first version of a document is just the beginning. It might need to be approved, discussed, and signed. If the document is a contract, there’s a need to handle invoicing, renewals, price increases, comply with recurring audit requirements, administer change control requests – all things that require proactive attention, and invariably subject to notice periods.

Alas, your carefully-tailored document, created and approved by internal procedures, might get issued to a business -counterpart who tries to impose their own views on what happens next. It’s hard to standardise a process that involves people from outside your organisation.

What is CLM?

CLM is an acronym for ‘contract lifecycle management’. It’s a concept that recognises that contracts need to be managed, not just left in a filing cabinet. Not just contracts – other documents have a lifecycle too. For example, collecting documentation for a clinical trial has some complex workflows.

A contract management system can help with such things. Want to know all the contracts due to expire? Need to chase colleagues to provide input for a document? Need to remember to send a document to your operations team? A contract management system does that work.

Until recently, organisations bought a tool to do document assembly, a tool to manage workflows, a system to store documents, and used spreadsheets, calendars and inboxes to keep track of key information. Integrating those tools spawned IT projects and consultancy fees in the search for a ‘joined-up process’ or a ‘single source of truth’. You get the picture. Some systems combined those functions but had a focus on just one function, and the other features were lacklustre. Unfortunately, it’s hard to see the shortcomings from a demo. The gaps tend to emerge only when you configure a system for a real project.

That said, some organisations made it hard for themselves by trying to use technology to automate a manual process that was sub-optimal or vaguely defined. Manual processes worked because human intervention made them work – the rules were fluid, inconsistent, and vulnerable to mistakes. They yielded data that was not always reliable.

Start with Legito

Legito has a full-feature document automation toolset but it also supports the messy real-life ebb and flow of documents within and between organisations. The no-code design negates the need for consultants. Users have intuitive tools to share documents, extract information from documents, move documents through processes for approvals and signature, follow-up key dates (for example, for price increases or renewals).

The features are built by the same development team so that each feature is consistent and integrated with the other features. You can use the same features to manage documents that were not created by Legito. It was designed to aid collaboration as well as creation. It’s for teams who need to get work done, not just generate documents. 

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