The dynamic duo: why contracts and matters make such great partners

Within organizations, often the most valuable progress comes when people emerge from their departmental silos, connect and collaborate to meet objectives and achieve goals.

In a similar way, when all the work of your legal department is connected, ideally on the one platform, legal activities work together, providing greater oversight, improving productivity, and adding a greater level of service and value to the wider business.

Case in point – contracts and matters.

At its core, a contract signifies a relationship between two parties. Therefore, for a contractual relationship to be successful, there needs to be some understanding of the relationship beyond what’s written on the page. The way to access this knowledge is by having all the important details of a contract readily available and connected to the contract. The most effective way to achieve this is by implementing a platform that is home to an in-house matter management solution and a contract lifecycle management solution.

But we already have a contract lifecycle management solution …

While your legal team may already use a point solution to manage your contracts, does the solution work together with other legal activities, such as matters?

Quite often a contract lifecycle management (CLM) provides comprehensive details on contracts, but neglects to provide any perspective on what those details relate to – there’s no ‘setting the scene’ to understand what the contract relates to beyond what’s available in the contract lifecycle management software.

When contracts are managed in isolation within a point solution, there’s no context provided for the contract.

By adopting legal tech that supports a platform approach, such as a legal workspace, you’re able to connect a contract to its corresponding matter, therefore providing context and a system of record.

What will you achieve with contextual contracts?

When your contracts and matters are connected, you have important context for all your legal work. This means you’re able to:

• have a system of record that provides one source of truth, enabling the tracing of a contract’s history through related matters from draft to execution and beyond
• have a continuity of care and knowledge, so if a colleague is away or leaves the organization, all the information is readily available on the legal workspace and not lost in inboxes or left forgotten on a hard drive
• preserve the original intent of the contract, with all matters, emails, documents, and files able to be easily retrieved and reviewed
• save time, as there is no need to search through emails, folders and hard drives to find the context for each contract
• resolve any disputes in a timely manner, as all information about the contract is captured and connected to the contract

LawVu’s Contracts is a CLM and automation software solution for in-house legal counsel. By connecting with Matters, it will transform the way your organization manages contracts and risk.

Contracts is part of LawVu, a legal workspace for in-house legal teams, where matters, contracts, spend management and reporting are all managed in one cloud-based, secure and connected platform. In-house lawyers and legal operators using LawVu work more efficiently, are better connected with the rest of the business and can focus more on creating better business outcomes for their organization.

Download the Contracts & Matters are better together whitepaper, and learn about working smarter and getting time back with Contracts and Matters in one connected legal workspace. Or learn more about the fundamentals of connecting matters and contracts including use cases and tips and tricks on how to do it inside your legal workspace as part of the Legal Tech Fundamentals Certification. It’s free and can be completed in your own time!