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Today legal departments use tons of Word files and emails as work instruments, so files like contract templates can be distributed and used in a quick and easy way. This method, as effective as it may be, produces overheads that cost the company a great deal in terms of money and time.
The problem lies in the instruments used: they’re simply not fit for purpose!
If you continue to draft and distribute your contract template this way the cost of compliance will soon become a big problem for the company. In fact, everyday legal teams lose control of their word templates that are adapted, modified, and changed by hr, sales, or procurement teams, sometimes even without their consent, to successfully strike a deal.
Furthermore, in case of a change in the law, synching and updating all those template variations can be extremely complicated, and still, team members can prefer their templates since they already contain all the pieces of information and data required.
- Legal teams need tools that help them to easily collaborate and define contract templates that after approval are easily deployable in all the organization, and substitute the previous versions in one shot.
- Something that facilitates the monitoring and usage of such tools and simplifies the usage during negotiations.
An end-to-end smart legal platform like Trakti facilitates the monitoring of the entire negotiation, signature, and execution process in full compliance avoiding templates divergence and misuse.
Sounds interesting? Let’s dig into how to get a template ready and compliant with Trakti in just 5 steps.
How to create and distribute a contract template in 5 steps
- Create or import your template
In Trakti you can import your templates by uploading a word file. It’s that simple. Our platform will automatically recognize all the clauses and you can model all negotiable elements, variables and transform them into smart contract fields. You can also create a new template from scratch or use one of our free templates, making all the changes you need. Our templates are 100% customizable. Here is a practical guide to creating or importing a template.
2. Collaborate with others
Once your template is ready to be shared with your peers, you can collaborate with your team members to improve it and finalise it. The platform supports collaborative editing for all members of your organization. This way all the people involved can work on the same file at the same time, from anywhere in the world (as long as they have internet) 🙂 . Especially in the case of advanced automation, you will require help from business, procurement, operations, and IT. Trakti is the perfect tool to work together on a contract that is not anymore static but rather a boundary object between professional communities in the organisation.
3. Get approvals on the fly
Thanks to Trakti you can select all members of your team that should approve your template before it gets published and distributed. You can have different approvers for different templates. The system speeds up the approval process and never again will a change be made without the right people knowing about it. And if modifications are required no worries, the templates come back to you so you can modify the necessary clauses and ask for a new approval!
Want to see how it works? Have a look here.
4. Publish the template
Now that your contract template is ready and you got the approval, the system will automatically publish it for you. This means everybody in your company can access the template anytime, from anywhere and can use it to start a negotiation and sign a fully compliant contract.
5. Ask for a review
Each deal has the possibility to be reviewed during the negotiation. A team member can be either part of the negotiation team or the deal coordinator can select any number of reviewers (external too) that can express their opinion by filling in an evaluation template. The review template can be adapted to specific needs (legal and compliance feedback, offer evaluation, etc.) highlighting all the information that is important to you and connected to a deal. Or you can use our ready templates if you don’t need any customization. To see this function in action, take a look at this guide.
How is this different than using Word?
Today tools and processes do create operational bottlenecks, coordination issues, and raise the cost of compliance too high.
Contracts need to be flexible and adapt to any occasion in order to reflect the different kinds of relationships you want to establish with clients and suppliers, but each and every contract must be fully compliant.
Word is a fantastic tool for writing your ideas, projects, proposals and technical documentation but not a tool to be used for legal operations.
Thanks to a smart contract management platform like Trakti you can have all your templates in one place. Plus you can offer to your colleagues, legal as a service, entering in the deal at the right moment and time and clearly understanding the context, avoiding sifting through previously sent document versions and emails.
Picture a world in which the cost of compliance is drastically reduced, your contract is fully automated and you are in the driving seat of technology innovation.
How great is that?
Now that you’ve seen the tip of the iceberg, are you ready to innovate?
Create your free Trakti account and play around with our free contract templates. No credit card is required 😉
Do you want to know more? Here are our guides (and video guides, in case you’re in a hurry) for all contract template-related actions. Click here.
