Poorly managed contracts can result in delayed deals, increased risk, reduced financial and operational performance, regulatory penalties, missed deadlines and deteriorating relationships.
Many in-house legal teams are required to manage high volumes of contracts. Increasing pressures to reduce costs and improve performance place greater emphasis on efficient contract management and avoiding time-consuming activities that erode in-house capacity without creating any material value.
Poorly managed contracts can result in delayed deals, increased risk, reduced financial and operational performance, regulatory penalties, missed deadlines and deteriorating relationships.
Effective contract management can deliver savings across all parts of the supply chain, allowing your team to focus on strategic activities that drive growth. Harmonising and centralising contract management delivers the added benefit of enhanced productivity and consistency via automation.
Our contracting solutions can help you:
We are here to help in-house legal teams outsource the management of their contracts. Details of the contract services we provide are below:
Customised managed legal services allow end-to-end contracting solutions from matter intake to post-signing obligation management.
We can efficiently implement a framework to prepare drafts or address third party paper and negotiate high-volume contracts with reduced negotiation cycles. Our process-driven workflow is supported by data analytics, providing clients real-time visibility into the negotiation process.
We provide a fast, high-quality service using standardised templates and AI automation tools, including our NDA+ solution which is tailored for non-disclosure agreements.
Decentralised contracting practices and too may templates increase contract risk and potential liability. We harmonise, standardise and simplify templates to create clause libraries that promote consistency and drive automated contract generation. Our methodology combines analytics and expertise to identify standards, recommend clause improvements to mitigate negotiation friction, eliminate siloed practices and implement a reliable approach to managing risk.
Our Contract Intelligence solutions ensure our clients remain compliant, maximise the financial return from their contracts, minimise their legal and financial risks, and enhance overall contract performance.
Our processes give you access to normalised, accurate data from contracts to allow for efficient and cost-effective obligation management, remediation and repapering. Our obligation management and risk analysis service help you to track, manage and fulfil contractual commitments with detailed performance metrics by using advanced analytics, AI and machine learning technology and advisory support for offering deep insights into risk exposure and opportunities for improvement.
We offer technology and process enabled services to allow the review, repapering and negotiation of contracts to facilitate pre- and post-merger integration and response to changes in regulation, policies or procedures.
Our contract remediation and repapering solutions optimise efficiency, reduce risk and ensure consistent, high quality contract management.
Our Legal Operations & Technology Consulting team supports clients to select and implement the right CLM system for their needs or remediate existing systems.
Following implementation, we offer comprehensive support for the day-to-day operation of many CLM tools, ensuring clients maximise their ROI and optimise engagement across their business. Our team accesses CLM systems to provide administrative services which reduce your manual workload and enhance document management. We offer customised dashboards for real-time visibility into contract statuses, key milestones and performance metrics to create smoother contract negotiations, improved compliance and greater contract visibility.
Our client, an India-based Multinational Bank and Financial Services Company, had a series of loan agreements with detailed indices in their portfolio. These indices were LIBOR-linked, a benchmark being phased out on December 31, 2021. Our client needed to remediate each loan agreement and index to remove all references to LIBOR and replace it with the newly-selected benchmark ahead of the deadline, a tall task to achieve in-house with limited resources and time.
The Legal Operations team at DWF collaborated with our colleagues in DWF’s Legal Advisory division to provide an integrated solution for our client. Our Advisory division worked with the client to create contract templates designed to efficiently change the indices from LIBOR to either SONIA or Base Rate, as applicable. Once the templates were created, DWF prepared all draft amendments, and validated key terms provided by our client within the indices. These drafts were then shared either with Advisory for ‘international reviews’ or to the client for ‘domestic reviews’. DWF’s remediation and negotiation team monitored the execution status for each review and ensured that each item was closed ahead of the deadline.
The client had about 30,000 contracts spread across 10 different business units globally, none of which had been added to the client’s central CLM repository. In addition to not having these contracts stored centrally, the client had also identified 90 different metadata fields that needed to be extracted from each contract, with a particular focus on detailed financial information so that the various business units could have quick insight into the obligations of their contracts.
Within their CLM system, the client already had about 15,000 contracts that DWF had previously abstracted and loaded into the system. However, these contracts had only ~40 fields abstracted, meaning 50 of the above-referenced 90 fields had not been abstracted for these existing contracts. In order to have fully up-to-date records, the client also needed this additional information abstracted from these “legacy contracts".
The Legal Operations team at DWF designed a workflow that covered end-to-end contract management for both the new contracts and the legacy contracts. This included sorting all the new contracts to connect related agreements, creating a playbook to detail the client requirements around abstracting the 90 metadata fields, reviewing, abstracting, and uploading all new contracts, and simultaneously reviewing and updating the legacy contracts in the CLM tool itself. The types of contracts reviewed included Master Service, Confidentiality, Direct Purchasing, Distribution, License & Supply, Pharmacy Services, Quality, Statement of Work, Software License, Veterinary, Rebate, Pharmacovigilance, Master Purchasing (IT), and Marketing & Supply Agreements.
Our client, one of the ‘Big Five’ publishing companies, possessed data related to nearly 30,000 royalty payments as the result of a recent acquisition. In order to understand the royalties that had been paid as well as those that were still obligations, the details of these historic royalty payments needed to be added to the client’s home-grown royalty-tracking database. Because the information needed to be captured quickly to precede a major technology advancement by the client, and because a technology-based extraction and migration solution was not possible, the resource-constrained client turned to DWF to perform the task accurately and efficiently.
The Legal Operations team at DWF first gathered any existing guidance materials from the client to understand the basics of the home-growth software application. From there the team created a draft processing playbook. The next step was to schedule a walkthrough demo with a working member of the client’s team to refine the playbook and fill in gaps in the existing guidance materials. Following a successful small team proof of concept in which DWF uncovered several additional scenarios that were not contemplated by the client team, the parties finalized the playbook, trained and activated a larger team, and worked through the collection of royalty records, reporting on productivity and progress as the project went forward. Using a combination of people, process and technology, DWF captured all necessary royalty metadata into the client’s database, prioritizing key accounts and identifying and reporting on duplicate and false entries along the way.
The client faced significant challenges managing a vast global portfolio of contracts across multiple teams, hindering efficiency and consistency. Initially, they sought our help to handle confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements for a specific project team. Recognising our effective solutions, they expanded our role within a year to include managing contracts for two procurement teams, the Mergers & Acquisitions team, and in-house legal documentation for their operations in India, Malaysia and South America. Our intervention transformed their contract management into a streamlined, efficient, and cohesive system, significantly improving turnaround times, consistency, and control over their global contract portfolio.
The Legal Operations team deployed a group of seasoned lawyers to support the workflow and manage escalations effectively. We established a comprehensive protocol and developed a playbook to ensure all parties adhered to a unified plan of action. Our team meticulously reviewed and redlined a variety of complex contracts, including agreements related to services and goods, raw materials, consultancy contracts, security services agreements and IT software installation agreements, to name a few. By identifying potential issues and offering strategic recommendations, we helped the client standardise their contracts and secure more favorable terms.
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