It’s the time of year for many to pause and reflect on the year we’ve had and begin to set our goals for the coming year. I believe in having big dreams, but I also believe in setting smart and achievable goals to get there. It helps to make that big dream a manageable reality – both at work and in our personal lives.
When I speak to in-house counsel and ask what keeps them awake at night, one of the most common answers is not knowing where their contracts are and what is in them.
They’re working towards big objectives such as mitigating risk in the organisation, preventing revenue leakage in contracts and building dynamic processes to be able to respond to rapidly changing regulations. Having access to all the contracts and actionable insights into the contract estate sits at the very heart of these objectives.
So where to start? Find your contracts!
1. Which contracts?
Depending on the size of your business and contract estate, you may need to be realistic in your scope to avoid teams being overwhelmed. If your contracts are difficult to place your hands on, you may want to start with an initial priority – perhaps focus on your top 50,100 or 200 customers or prioritise by contract type or spend.
2. Dedicate the appropriate resource
These projects often slip to the bottom of people’s to-do lists – particularly for those colleagues not directly involved but being relied upon to spend time filtering through file servers to find contracts. We recommend assigning dedicated resource to manage the exercise. We regularly second resource into our client’s business to manage the process and even do the trawling where appropriate.
(More on this in a guest article later this month!)
3. Hygiene as-you-go
It often makes sense to either create or maintain some structure around the contracts as you compile them into a single location. Focus on organising contracts by customer or supplier name and grouping ‘linked’ contracts together.
What next?
The contract amnesty is Step 1 of creating a digital contract repository. The end-goal is a digital single-source-of-truth for your contracts – allowing you to locate any contract instantly, use visualisations to gather valuable insights into the entire contract estate and enable one-touch filtering e.g. show all contracts expiring in the next 6 months. Data modelling and mining can be enabled to uncover insights into your negotiation process and help to transform your playbook, significantly reducing contracting times.
A functional digital repository also provides the robust foundation to rapidly respond to regulatory changes. When the next GDPR, Schrems II or Covid-19 comes along, the major challenge is being able to locate all of your contracts. With the contracts in good order, AI models and end-to-end automated remediation processes can be built in a matter of days.
If you’re interested in running a contract amnesty, you can find out more here or contact jonny@syke.tech
Jonny is an expert in delivering and leading legal innovation and automation projects, having previously led the innovation function at global law firm DWF. Jonny leads our data services practice and has a track record of helping clients to enable insight-driven decision making from their data.
Jonny has supported FTSE 100 companies with the implementation of AI technologies and has supported one of the largest global legal technology companies with the development of AI models for its market-leading platform. A lawyer by background, Jonny leads a team of highly skilled legal engineers operating in multiple jurisdictions.
