Do you feel like you're wasting a lot of time researching and organizing your contracts?
Are you planning to set up a contract library to provide your teams with simplified and efficient access to your company's legal documents?
Contract library, contract management software, contract library: these are terms that you regularly come across when talking about dematerialization of contracts.
Whether you are a Seraphin.legal user, exploring for the perfect contract management software or just curious, we hope this definition will help you see things more clearly.
What is a contrathèque?
It is a solution, a tool that allows to mutualize contract models within an organization and to archive and therefore centralize all signed contracts in one place. It is a real contractual database!
Like a Drive, a Sharepoint or Dropbox, it allows you to collect the legal documents received and signed by your company. But unlike these different tools mentioned, a contract library has been thought and designed specifically for contracts. We'll explain the benefits of this a little further down in this article.
What is the need for a contra library?
Before thinking about the contrathèque as a functionality, it is essential to ask ourselves what need this type of tool meets.
The contract library meets a need for centralisation and pooling of contractual resources.
- Centralise all signed and ongoing contracts in one place
- Pool all contract models to give autonomy to non-legal teams and standardize the company's contractual policy.
🗂 Centralize contractual archives
71% of companies are unable to locate at least 10% of their contracts according to a study conducted by the Contract Management Journal. With a contract library, all legal documents, i.e. contracts, clauses, negotiation history are accessible through a simple search.
The analysis of existing practices in terms of contract management within companies reveals numerous difficulties:
- Inconsistent management of contractual archives
- Difficulty in extracting the data requested according to very specific criteria (subject of the contract, country of execution of the contract, co-contractor, clauses, amount, etc.)
- Dispersal of contract data in different tools or servers
- Difficulty in finding original contracts signed electronically via different accounts
- A lack of visibility on the contractual exchanges before and after the signing of the contract when it comes to documenting a dispute
However, contractual records are extremely important. As you know, a contract sets out the rules of the game and is a reference in your relationship with your partner. A contract is not a piece of paper to be put away in a drawer, but a mine of strategic information.
Emmanuel Tannay, Contract Manager at Schneider Electric, reminded us of the importance of this in an episode of Words of the Lawyers.
"I take the piece of paper and try to get as much useful information out of it as possible. The piece of paper is not just the 20 to 70 pure contract terms. It's also the annexes. The HSE annexes, the annexes relating to exchange orders, the annexes on price breakdowns: all types of annexes. You have to take these annexes and try to highlight the most important elements to explain to the project team what the rules of the game are in the context of the execution of this project. After that, it's all about trying to influence them to try and keep them within that framework!
🗂 Mutualise contract templates with self-service access
More than 60% of corporate sales managers believe that contract inefficiencies slow down revenue recognition and 50% believe that operational bottlenecks result in lost opportunities. This is a topic that is causing the most tension in some companies.
Moreover, on both sides, the frustrations and fears are legitimate.
This is why we have chosen the no-code on Seraphin.legal. Combined with the contractual expertise of lawyers, the no-code is without any hesitation one of the most useful and promising advances to avoid the financial consequences of poor contract management.
A dynamic contract library will allow you to make your contracts available in self-service. Teams are autonomous in the creation of their contracts without any risk of untimely modifications. Only the parameterized fields will be customizable and all these data will be re-exploited to allow you to perform analyses.
The challenge is twofold:
- Empowering teams in order to speed up contractualization without losing legal certainty
- Use the data from your contracts stored in your contract database for your contractual analyses
For example, here is the nightmare that can be prevented by a contrathèque like Seraphin.legal👇
What are the advantages of a contract library?
Such a solution allows access to legal documents from anywhere in the world. The accumulation of contracts can quickly pose a problem for a legal department but also for all the people in the company who want to quickly access the information contained in a contract: financiers, sales people, etc.
With a contract library, it is possible to access very simply to an information which interests you. Opting for such a tool means having access to all contracts whenever you want. With Seraphin.legal, you can for example centralize and easily find your contracts thanks to a powerful search engine.
What are the functionalities of a contrathèque?
It brings together a set of features designed to create a powerful contract library to centralize and pool your company's contractual resources.
To make things clearer, we have deconstructed a contrathèque with a description of the different elements that make it up and screenshots of the associated interfaces 👇
A document library such as Drive or Sharepoint allows documents to be centralised
Tag system to give visibility on the status of the contract (under negotiation, under signature, signed)
Search engine with a system of filters allowing a precise query on all contractual data
Contract generator allowing to create from a pre-automated template
Summary sheets to summarise the most important information: purpose of the contract, parties to the contract, duration of the contract, contract amount, RGPD clause, etc.
Contract information sheet
Contract activity feed to chronologically record each action taken by a contributor
The contract workflow from creation to execution of the contract
What is the difference between a contract library software and a contract management software?
Some people tell you about contract management software?
But what's the difference between a contract library software and a contract management software?
Well, none, again.
The contract library software is in reality only one brick of a contract management software. Indeed, a solution, a tool that integrates a contract library also offers features that allow to create, negotiate and sign contracts online in a secure manner.
To match the reality of your practice, a contract management software must cover the entire life cycle of the contract: from creation to execution and monitoring of the contract.
As a reminder, here are some examples of features recommended by World Commerce & Contracting :
- Centralized contract library and a structured process to create your contracts or reuse your existing templates
- Configurable contract verification and validation workflow
- Bond management features
- Performance indicators to assess and monitor the performance of the contracting process
Are you interested in this topic? To go further, here are some contents which could interest you:
- How to enrich a contract database with contract sheets?
- Centralise and pool your contractual resources from a contract library
- Contract management software: definition and benefits
Choose to combine contractual performance and legal certainty
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