Typically, the buildout of a contract playbook requires many hours of work from a number of professionals within an organization. A playbook helps to frame a company’s contract negotiation tactics and procedures. This process typically involves stakeholders from across the company. Playbooks are used by myriad professionals – from lawyers and paralegals to contract managers, HR, procurement, sales teams, and others.
Perhaps surprisingly, many corporate legal departments do not have a playbook because it’s such a time-consuming endeavor upfront. In fact, only a small percentage use them, according to Sylvie Motz, director of practical law at Thomson Reuters. And even if they do have a playbook, are in-house counsel updating it on a consistent basis? Likely not given other higher priority work that will always come before it.
In an earlier post, we covered the “5 Benefits of Building a Digital Contract Playbook”: increased speed, stronger data security, better control and governance, contract compliance/risk mitigation, and avoiding a reputation crisis. The unifying thread across all these benefits is consistency. Through AI-based contract markup, based on a contract playbook, businesses attain a greater level of accuracy by the re-use of knowledge, standard clauses and contract templates.
Faster = Better Bottom Line
According to World Commerce & Contracting, poor contract management continues to cost companies 9% of their bottom line. A contract playbook can improve the bottom line by standardizing agreements across contract types, increasing the speed of business. Stakeholders from both parties can use the playbook for an answer versus manually tracking it down from someone who might not even work at the company any longer.
With AI-based technology, businesses can literally build a contract playbook in minutes. By building a legal playbook in BlackBoiler, users can help mitigate risk and ensure compliance by automatically incorporating organizational and industry standards and playbook guidelines during the contract redlining process.
Contract playbooks are built around the contract type containing reviewed and approved legal language that reduces risk for the organization. BlackBoiler is contract-type agnostic. We currently have customers using BlackBoiler for M&A contracts, NDAs, service agreements, MSAs, construction agreements, real estate leases, vendor agreements, clinical trial agreements, and more.
Not only does AI-powered contract review provide significant time and cost savings while also reducing risk by standardizing the contract review across business units, it also allows for valuable data and historical knowledge that companies can leverage in each new negotiation.
Don’t Work in Isolation
BlackBoiler’s machine learning models can learn from everyone on your team to benefit the entire team. The combined editing knowledge and work of your entire organization is derived from past agreements. Building a playbook typically takes as little as 10-15 minutes. With that, you can capitalize on automated markup and review technology to increase the speed of business.
The faster firms and legal departments can adopt contract playbooks, the faster they can learn and identify loopholes to fix internal systems. Request a demo with BlackBoiler to learn how you can have more control over your contracting processes.
