It is vital for any legal team to keep up with the latest advancements in technology, particularly when adopting these new technologies can increase efficiency. Your in-house legal team can certainly benefit from moving to a Contracts Management Solution (CMS) which can provide a secure and easy to manage repository for your documents. Before you start to choose a Contracts Management Solution, read our guidance below on how best to manage this process.
- Most importantly, you need to ensure that you have the necessary team in place to help with the project management that is required to implement such a big change.
- Once the appropriate team are in place, start by considering where the CMS system would fit within your wider business and how it would work with other systems already in place.
- Review the current processes for managing contracts- analyse how they work, what the requirements and limitations are and where improvements could be made.
- From this you can decide which features you require from a CMS, and start to work out which type of product you need to look for.
- Make sure that all stakeholders who will be impacted by a change to the CMS are sufficiently aware and on board with the decision.
- Once you are ready to begin shopping around, make sure that you do your research across the market as there are many different types of CMS systems out there.
- Talk to the experts; many systems can be made bespoke to suit your exact requirements so find out exactly how your preferred system could work for your business.
- Once you have a shortlist of systems you’re interested in, ask around to find out if anyone in your network is already using them and what feedback they can give.
- Make sure the CMS system you want is future-proof; is there a limit on the number of users and/or documents?
- The final step is preparing for implementation. Provide full training for all staff and check if there is support included in your package.
