Watch: How Accenture Legal Got a Seat at the Table with Contract Intelligence

When does an enterprise turn to legal for contract insights – during the normal run of business, or only when a problem arises?

At Accenture, prior to the adoption of an enterprise-wide CLM system, it was most often the latter.

“In our organization, the legal professionals are given a lot of respect. But nonetheless, people didn’t turn to us for insight,” Christina Demetriades, the General Counsel for Europe at Accenture, recalls in this recent conversation with Icertis Chief Evangelist Bernadette Bulacan. “They didn’t necessarily turn to us at the beginning of an issue – they might turn to us when there was a problem.”

That changed with the adoption of the Icertis Contract Intelligence (ICI) platform. With Icertis, the Accenture legal team has been able to centralize contract data from across Accenture’s client engagements, which in turn provides key insights into how sales deals are being managed and where there is risk and opportunity across the business portfolio.

“We are able to be at the table with a voice at the very beginning to talk about the way in which we see speed-to-close being impacted in sales, or we can see the number of [upcoming] terminations and expiries,” Ms. Demetriades notes. 

“We can be part of the discussion of important things that are happening in the business in a way that we couldn’t before we had the technology.”

She says this has not only been game-changing for the legal department, but for all functions in the business rooted in contracts. 

“Incredibly transformative for other corporate functions,” she says. “That’s been the interesting thing – internal audit, compliance or our colleagues responsible for geographic and other services, all want to understand what’s in their contracts.”

View the clip above for more insights into how Accenture’s legal team is delivering more with Icertis, and watch the entire conversation here.