Because legal contracts are often highly sensitive and require coordination between multiple internal stakeholders, it’s critical for legal teams to manage them in a way that complies with departmental and organizational policies. But getting a contract through its review and approval workflows can be painful due to the numerous manual tasks involved. These include identifying the appropriate approvers, navigating internal policies, manually emailing them with the necessary information, and then tracking responses and approvals reliably. The process is fraught with time consuming activities, is vulnerable to error, and lacks the visibility legal teams need to manage and efficiently finalize contracts.

77 percent of respondents to the 2024 In-House Legal Technology Report reported that time spent on manual daily activities detracts from their ability to work on larger business goals and deliver services in a timely manner. This indicates that optimizing efficiency is now more critical for legal teams than ever before – and reducing the time spent on low-value tasks related to contract approval workflows with automation is a great place to start.

A reliable, easy-to-use CLM feature that lets you automate the process of assigning and routing contracts to approvers based on your internal business policies doesn’t just enhance compliance with internal business processes, it also significantly improves legal operations – saving time, boosting efficiency and making sure nothing falls through the cracks.

Flexible, easy to use automated contract approval workflows builder

With LawVu’s automated contract approval workflows, you can eliminate unnecessary manual work and optimize each stage of the contract approval process. With an easy to use workflow builder and intuitive interface, contract approvals become seamless for all users involved.

Key features

LawVu’s new automated contract approval workflow features include:

• A simple drag and drop workflow builder that you can use to create unlimited workflows. You’ll be able to easily build, customize and update workflows without assistance from IT or other external resources.
• Workflows progress a contract through phases, sending the document to individual approvers or teams sequentially based on the relevant data fields you have in LawVu, such as contract value, region, department and more.
• Notifications (both in-app and via email) for approvers, including all the context needed to review, approve and decline contracts without clicking between screens or systems.
• The ability for reviewers to easily add notes to create more context, as well as to add approvers on an ad-hoc basis.
• The ability to quickly view the status and full history of approvals for each contract.
• The ability to approve contracts from anywhere with the LawVu mobile app, improving working relationships and collaboration.

Efficiency gains are just the start

Busy legal teams gain tremendous value from automating low-value tasks – simply removing the overhead of sending emails and micromanaging routing processes removes bottlenecks and saves valuable time. But the benefits of automating contract approval workflows extend far beyond efficiency. Additional advantages include:

• Better compliance: More reliable adherence to internal processes with automatic tracking and auditing.
• Reduced risk: No more work falling through the cracks with automatic assignments and notifications.
• Enhanced visibility: Easy to understand contract approval status and history supports business continuity and faster information retrieval.
• More bandwidth: With less admin work on their plate, reviewers have greater capacity to focus on critically analyzing contracts.
• Enhanced data security: Move away from the high-risk practice of managing contract approval workflows through email by using a centralized, encrypted platform – reducing the likelihood of a data breach or accidental data sharing.

How to get started with automated contract approval workflows

If you’re a LawVu customer and are currently utilizing our contract management features, simply reach out to your LawVu representative or use the 24/7 support chat feature for a demo – as well as access to everything you need to learn about these new features and get started.

If you’re not currently using LawVu’s contract management capabilities, request a demo now to discover how the LawVu legal workspace could save your team valuable time and effort, generating the data and analytics you need to communicate value and manage contracts more efficiently.

You can learn more about contract management with LawVu here.