The accelerating pace of business has created many new opportunities for today's enterprises, and with it new and heightened risks for them to navigate.
The Dual Roles of a General Counsel
To help them succeed in such an environment, companies are relying on their general counsel to play an increasingly strategic role in determining a path to success. For inside legal teams, this means balancing responsibilities that can seem at odds.
"The greatest challenge for general counsel and other inside lawyers is to reconcile the dual–and at times contradictory–roles of being both a partner to the business leaders and a guardian of the corporation's integrity and reputation," Ben W. Heineman Jr., former General Counsel of GE, says in his book The Inside Counsel Revolution: Resolving the Partner-Guardian Tension.
"The greatest challenge for general counsel and other inside lawyers is to reconcile the dual–and at times contradictory–roles of being both a partner to the business leaders and a guardian of the corporation's integrity and reputation,"
When it comes to contracts, this dynamic is on clear display. Legal teams are tasked with ensuring that an enterprise's contracting process does not expose it to legal liability; yet with the quickening pace of business, they are also being tasked with finding ways to process contracts faster.
Just how much faster is the pace of business today? According to Vala Afshar, chief digital evangelist for Salesforce, it took airlines 68 years to reach 50 million users. It took cell phones 12 years. It took Twitter two. Another startling statistic, this from Eric Meyhofer, the head of Uber's Advanced Technologies Group, who recently noted to the New Yorker: "We went from zero to seventy billion dollars in seven years. Ford went from zero to seventy billion in seventy years."
Such speed means that enterprises must be equipped to quickly adapt to changing business climates and trends, including with how they negotiate, execute and manage contracts. Slow contract processing means being left behind by competitors.
Enterprise Contract Management Helps Companies Accelerate Legal Operations
To meet the challenge, legal teams at leading companies are turning to enterprise contract software to better manage their contracting processes.
The Icertis Contract Management (ICM) platform was built to help legal teams work faster, smarter and more efficiently.
ICM gives legal teams 360-degree visibility into the contracting process, which ensures consistent terms. One Icertis customer, a global pharmaceutical company, was able to create contracts four times faster after deploying ICM.
ICM can also simplify contract authoring by automatically suggesting the correct structure for each agreement, eliminating those clauses that do not apply. Using automation to enforce standardization reduces the risk of maverick contracts. Having compliant contracts that adhere to corporate guidelines means fewer delays later on in the contract lifecycle.
ICM is easy-to-use, with a modern, intuitive interface that makes contract creation simple and efficient, with a step-by-step wizard and self-service tools that anyone in your organization can take advantage of. ICM also offers seamless Office 365 integration, allowing legal departments to manage contracts without leaving Word. And ICM's industry-leading intelligence surfaces complex contract nuances and details to protect your organization.
To learn more about how enterprise contract management is changing the way legal teams are doing business, download the 16th Annual LDO Survey "Finding CLM Value for Legal in the Age of Generative AI".
