In legal practice, violations of obligations, losses and penalties often occur only because the party to the contract forgot about the deadlines for performance or did not prepare for the performance of the contract.
For example, the manager responsible for the execution of the contract resigned from the company, and the new one has not yet become up to date. Or the employee responsible for the execution of the contract fell ill and did not warn about the due date. Situations may be different.
But the result of such situations is the violation of obligations, the payment of compensation and penalties. And if, on the contrary, your company's counterparty violates its obligations under the contract and your employees did not track it in time? This can lead to a business process stoppage, losses and a violation of your company's obligations.
At the stage of concluding an agreement, lawyers and relevant management are responsible for formulating its terms and agreeing with the other party.
And what happens to the contract further, after the agreement of all its conditions by the parties?
How is the contract signed?
What happens if you need to change the terms of the contract or even terminate the contract?
Does someone monitor the compliance of the terms of the concluded agreement with the interests of the company during the term of the agreement, taking into account changing circumstances?
Can the contract be amended so that the company earns or saves more money?
All these and many other questions related to the conclusion, execution and termination of contracts are answered by such an aspect of management theory as "contract management".
Usually lawyers become contract managers, but this is not the rule.
The initial stage before concluding a contract, in addition to real actions aimed at concluding a contract itself, includes obtaining and analyzing information: analysis of the market, industry, market participants, potential counterparty opportunities.
But we will not delve into the work of a contract manager in detail, but consider the possibilities for optimizing this work in order to make the work of a contract manager more efficient.
Efficiency can be provided by the Contract Lifecycle Management System (CLM-system).
Such a system includes:
- document designer,
- tools for their coordination both within the company and with the counterparty of the company (electronic document management system - EDMS),
- tools for remote signing of documents (electronic signature),
- automatic tracking of key deadlines for the fulfillment of obligations under the concluded contract with the possibility of automatically generating and sending claims to counterparties,
- formation of statistics on concluded contracts (which part of the contract has been executed, how long it is valid, how long it took to approve, etc.),
- information storage (database) containing structured information and documents related to contracts.
At the stage of preparing draft contracts, of course, the typification of forms of contracts and other documents (acts, invoices, additional agreements) and the creation of a constructor of contracts (documents) will certainly help.
Botman.one allows you to make a designer of any documents very quickly and without programming knowledge. This constructor supports any, even the most complex, variability of documents. Documents can be generated in pdf, docx, xls formats. The data in the generated documents is automatically substituted from the internal information systems of the company and the Unified State Register of Legal Entities. The creation of such a constructor of contracts (documents) allows you to reduce the time for preparing documents several times and eliminate errors when filling them out.
You can sign a contract with:
- an enhanced qualified electronic signature, which allows, in the event of a dispute, to identify the signatory and confirm the immutability of the signed document, or
- a simple electronic signature, which generates more risks, since it does not allow 100% confirmation of the identity of the signatory and does not encrypt the content of the document.
Tracking the deadlines for the execution of the contract occurs automatically: the system in advance, before the deadline, sends appropriate reminders to the responsible employees.
Thus, with the CLM system, the contract manager will work more efficiently, make fewer mistakes and, thereby, save money for the company, save it from losses and fines.