Contract Management Process Audit
19 Questions to Review and Optimize Your Contract Workflow
In its simplest terms, contract management is the process used to create and oversee a contract throughout its lifecycle. This lifecycle can involve multiple stages from initial consideration to termination. Throughout the contract lifecycle, lawyers play a critical role in managing expectations and ensuring party objectives and rights are appropriately accounted for.
Employing practices to meet these expectations should be high on every lawyer’s priority list. What helps is having a well-defined contract management process to advance business arrangements and deliver greater value, efficiency, and transparency.
Lawyers should devote the time and effort to maintain a contract management process that can help deliver results, including:
- Achieving the expected benefits and value of the arrangement
- Cooperative and responsive parties
- Parties easily understanding their contract obligations
- Fewer surprises, misunderstandings, or disputes
- Creating a clear path for contract changes to the mutual satisfaction of both parties
- Easily monitoring and updating the engagement for compliance
- Readily accessible records of the engagement
Sample contract management process audit
How you approach the stages of contract management requires careful consideration of your operations, resources, and requirements. Use the sample questionnaire below to audit your contract management process and understand what works and what doesn’t.
[Download our Contract Management Playbook for a template of the sample audit questionnaire below, plus more contract management essentials.]
Identify your contract management process and how it’s maintained
- Do you have a contract management process?
- Is your contract management process documented?
- Do you have documented and defined roles and responsibilities?
- Can all parties easily participate in the process? Are these workflows documented?
- Do you know the location of your contracts?
a. Are they in a central location?
b. Are they easy to access? - Do you maintain your contracts manually or electronically?
- Do you have contract templates and standard clauses? Are they readily accessible for use?
- Do you use a contract management tool? If so, does the tool navigate all, some, or very little of your process?
- If there is no tool, do you intend to or have the budget to purchase and implement a new contract management tool?
Establish periodic reviews to evaluate your contract management process and address issues as needed
- Has the process been reviewed or audited in the past three years? If so, were there findings and were they addressed?
- Do you review your process periodically? If so, what’s the frequency (e.g.: annually, quarterly, monthly)?
- Do you review your process when:
a. Your practice changes (e.g.: scope, size, location, clientele)?
b. Your requirements change because of new or updated laws or regulations?
Understand your process challenges to determine how to address them
- Are parties finding it challenging to know what to do and when?
- Are your contracts difficult to find because you maintain them across different channels?
- Are you duplicating drafting efforts because you can’t locate similar contracts?
- Did you miss any compliance dates (like required regulatory filings) or other important deadlines (like a report submission date) set in your contracts?
- Are you losing contracts or having a hard time locating them due to poor recordkeeping, like inadequate storage or lacking criteria associated with each contract to help organize them?
- Are you working from different versions of the same contract? Are you lacking templates or a library of sample clauses?
- Are you spending more time managing administrative steps (like filing, searching, or rewriting duplicative content) than substantive measures (like negotiating the terms of engagement)?
[Download our Contract Management Playbook for a template of the sample audit questionnaire above, plus more contract management essentials.]
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An effective contract management process is critical for attorneys juggling multiple agreements and roles. Download the Contract Management Playbook to learn how to streamline your contract workflow and deliver greater value, efficiency, and savings.
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See it for yourself. Request a demo to see how Contract Solutions can optimize your contract workflow with AI-powered drafting, editing, and negotiating tools.