Never heard of no-code in contract management? No reason to panic, you don't have much of a backlog. If the no-code has become popular with sales, marketing and product teams in the tech world, it still suffers from a lack of awareness when it comes to applying it to contractual language.
The no-code applied to contract management is without a doubt one of the most useful and promising advances in the optimisation of contractual processes.
We explain the benefits to you in very concrete terms.
Giving autonomy in the creation of contracts without losing legal certainty
Not being able to move forward quickly on a contract and fearing the loss of an opportunity in the absence of responsive feedback from the legal profession.
Give autonomy to non-legal teams in creating their contracts and take the risk of legal and financial risks arising from the conclusion of the contract.
This is a subject that crystallises the most tension within some companies. There are legitimate frustrations and fears on both sides.
52% of Legal Departments consider the legal department to be effective in delivering value to the business.
More than 60% of commercial managers believe that contract inefficiencies slow down revenue recognition. In fact, 50% believe that these operational bottlenecks result in lost opportunities.
To balance the scales, many legal teams have opted for self-service contracts that are still secure thanks to the no-code.
The no-code in contract management is not only a source of time savings, it is also and above all a guarantee of protected contracts.
The teams can therefore make available to the various teams concerned the contractual resources that are useful to them in order to move forward with their activity without fearing the modification of parts of the contract.
For their part, the sales teams are able to start the contractualisation process in the best possible conditions by following an automated workflow set up by the legal team.
Audrey Gillessen, Legal Manager of Ornikar, told us in an episode of Paroles de Juristes: it is essential to make your team members responsible for their contracts.
He would like to send the full contractual documentation to secure the agreement of his future customer.
There is no need to wait or ask anyone else, as Ines, who is in charge of commercial contracts within the company, has provided the sales team with all the useful templates according to the type of sale.
To generate his contract, Marc simply fills in a form with his client's information and that of the service sold (besides, no one knows them better than the person selling them!). Marc can see his contract being generated in real time. Marc will not be able to accidentally modify a RGPD clause or a limitation of liability clause.
Once this stage is over, Mark can send his contract directly to the client for proofreading, revision and online signature.
Note that if the company's contractual policy implies that contracts must be systematically validated or validated above a certain amount or other conditions, the person(s) authorised to validate contracts will be immediately notified by email between the contract creation and signature stages.
Enabling the legal profession to innovate, autonomously
Since 2015 and the rise of legaltechs, the legal world has regularly asked this question: should lawyers learn to code?
At Seraphin.legal, we believe that lawyers do not need to learn how to code to automate their contracts. It is our responsibility as innovative actors evolving on the legaltech market to implement simple graphical interfaces allowing to automate contracts in no-code, i.e. without writing a single line of code.
If one of your goals is to free up the time of legal teams by empowering your internal clients, your contract management software should allow you to automate your contracts without technical expertise. This will also allow you to block entire sections of your contracts to reinforce the legal security of your commitments. Only the fields to be edited will be modifiable from a form.
In addition to automating your contracts, no-code applied to contract management should give you the possibility to create customised workflows.
The objective is to guide the teams in charge of contracting with a predetermined path.
- You are free to add the steps that seem necessary for this type of contract
- Involve the right people in the company when it comes to negotiating, approving or making a contract. sign the contract the nature, amount or other criteria.
How does it work? On Seraphin.legal, our no-code editor allows you to create blocks, variables and display conditions to create the document creation form.
This allows a static document to be transformed into a dynamic document. |
Dispatch the validation of contracts to the appropriate contacts
Not knowing who to validate a contract with and constantly wasting time by chat, email or in person to find the right person.
Being left with a contentious contract that has not been sent to legal for validation by the operational teams. Whether you are a lawyer or a member of a non-legal team, you may recognise yourself in one of these two experiences.
Internal approval is a major issue, regardless of the number of people in your company, your field of activity or the volume of contractual production.
While the legal teams participate in the drafting and negotiation of the contractual project for certain contracts and guarantee upstream control of legal risks, this is not necessarily the case for all contracts signed by the company.
The complexity lies in ensuring the compliance of commitments that the Legal Department is not involved in.
Obviously, if they could your legal colleagues would do it.
Nevertheless, lack of time and facing the time-consuming aspect of this process, internal validation can be a real bottleneck when done manually.
The advantage of no-code in this stage of the contract life cycle is that it removes all the friction created by the multiplicity of manual tasks. Going back and forth by email, downloading files, finding the right contact person etc...
On the other hand, the automation of this process allows you to reconcile performance and compliance. By eliminating time-consuming tasks, you gain in efficiency by reducing the time spent while securing the signature process.
Remove time-consuming tasks
92%: the proportion of time-consuming tasks in the contracting process
Proof by example is the best way to demonstrate the added value of no-code in contract management in the face of the multitude of time-consuming tasks that constitute this process.
Here are some of the time-consuming tasks eliminated by no-code.
| Time-consuming tasks | Replaced by |
|---|---|
| Gather important information about the operation to be contracted | A dynamic form (contract generator) in which the person in charge of the contract can enter the information |
| Complete the variable fields of your contracts by deleting and inserting information collected by your colleagues | A dynamic form in which the person in charge of the contract can enter the information |
| Download the contract locally and share it by email or chat with the person in charge | The contract is communicated to the person in charge of the next stage as soon as the first stage is validated |
| Find the right person to negotiate, validate or sign the contract | Contract workflows are already pre-determined according to the criteria determined by your company. The contract takes its course and will always be sent to the right person at each stage of the contract life cycle. |
| Search for information related to a contract managed by an operational person to create a contract record | The contract form is generated automatically after its creation |
| Manually compile all contracts and their information in a due date tracking spreadsheet and in your diaries | Reminders are scheduled and displayed in a due date management calendar to give you chronological and prioritised visibility. All contract information is attached to each due date record. |
| Spend 1 to 2 hours each week on contractual reporting. | All the data collected throughout the life cycle of a contract is used to enable you to manage your contract activity through a statistical dashboard. Export this data in Excel format and save 1 to 2 hours per week. |
Gaining visibility through data collection
It's a Friday, it's 5 p.m. and you have to take one or two hours of your time, as you do every week, to do your weekly reporting on contract activity.
A necessary evil to have more visibility on the state of your contractual process, what works, what does not work and to draw from it axes of progression or valorization.
On the other hand, manual reporting is time-consuming and unreliable.
- Contract data is static and does not automatically feed back
- Detailed reports are built manually (1 to 2 hours per week)
- Legal teams do not have figures to support their arguments, assumptions and decisions
- The company has no visibility on the state of the contractual process at a given moment
Once the no-code has been integrated into your contract management, the essential information is now automatically displayed in your statistics dashboard each time your contract reaches a certain stage.
Without being an expert in Excel and its functions, you can generate your reports in a few clicks and customise them by selecting the criteria that interest the people who will read them.
Choose to combine contractual performance and legal certainty
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