Meet ContractWorks: An Easier Way To Manage And Gain Visibility Into Your Contracts

ContractWorks isn’t an overhaul of how you work, it’s a way to make your job easier.

Contracts are the lifeblood of corporate legal practice. As corporate legal departments continue to face increased demands without additional resources, the right contract tools become essential for getting the job done. If you’re like many lawyers, though, your current contract repository is likely either mismanaged, incomplete, or some combination of both, and the past year certainly hasn’t made it easier to get on top of organization.

Many contract products today focus on the pre-signature phase, designed to help busy lawyers through drafting and negotiation. Not as many focus on what happens after the contracts are signed and done, even though there’s a mountain of valuable data in those contracts that can be mined and used for both decision-making and future contracts.

ContractWorks was created to address the often-overlooked post-signature contract phase and help lawyers better manage and control their contracts in a centralized, cloud-based repository that allows for easier collaboration, greater organizational consistency, a better way to manage obligations and deadlines, and more. As an added bonus, they’re streamlining the signature process, too.

ContractWorks isn’t an overhaul of how you work, it’s a way to make your job easier.

A Smarter Contract Repository That Works the Way You Work

Everything you do in ContractWorks exists in a centralized repository that resides in the cloud, so you can access it from wherever you happen to be working today. Your ContractWorks experience starts in your Documents tab, where all your documents are stored.

To get your contracts into ContractWorks, you simply drag and drop from wherever they currently reside, and they’ll appear in the system just as you’re used to seeing them. ContractWorks also integrates with Fujitsu ScanSnap for another quick way to upload documents.

The folders structure in ContractWorks is completely customizable, down to the most granular levels of subfolders within subfolders if you need them. The goal is an easy transition to ContractWorks – you’ll have the same organizational structure you’re already comfortable working in, with the benefits of ContractWorks on top. No more struggling to find your contracts in shared folders, on random desktops, or in whatever less-than-ideal place they’re currently stored.

In addition to controlling how your contracts are organized, you can also control who has access to them. ContractWorks has an unlimited user model, which means you can invite as many users as you want to collaborate on your contracts, but you can also limit who sees what. For example, if there are certain contracts that are vital for your HR department, but those HR professionals don’t need to see all your sales contracts, you can create a specific HR team folder and grant users access to only that folder (and any subfolders within it).

ContractWorks goes farther than tools that simply serve as a repository. Managing your contracts means more than just knowing where your contracts are – having full control over foldering structure and granting access means control over your entire body of contracts and how they operate across your organization, not just within the legal department.

Taking Control of the Post-Signature Phase

When you import a contract into ContractWorks, it’s automatically run through OCR and AI, which makes future searching, reporting, and data tracking in your contract library easy.

The ContractWorks system operates around the ideas of tags and templates. A tag is an individual piece of contract data that you track, such as the start date or party to a contract. The tags you choose to track in ContractWorks are completely customizable.

Templates are groupings of tags by contract type. You can save a group of tags to make sure that specific types of contracts are all tagged with the same reportable information. Once all those contracts have the same information tagged, you can compare terms to ensure consistency by running reports or using the highlight tool or the snippet view. So, for example, you can group all your NDAs or vendor contracts together to compare their terms. 

Are all your vendor contracts updated with your most recent security requirements to meet your compliance obligations? You might not currently know the answer to that question, but by working with templates in ContractWorks, it’s easy to immediately find out.

ContractWorks generates a cover sheet for each contract, which allows you to see exactly what data (tags) is in it, so you can ensure that you have consistency in your contracts and be able to replicate that work going forward.

Using a purple color-coding scheme, the cover sheet shows you exactly where in the contract the data was found, so you can make sure everything was scanned correctly, validate it, and be confident that you have an accurate record of all your contract data going forward.

As you import a contract, you can designate the appropriate template to apply as the AI and OCR are run against it. The templating function takes AI a step beyond tracking discrete data points and imposes an outline structure that allows you to get a lot of organized information about a contract very quickly. As you import more contracts and generate more outlines, you’re able to efficiently review your entire contract portfolio and gain a better overall understanding of your various obligations.

The outline allows you to jump straight to specific contract sections, giving you a quick window into non-standard language or potential areas of risk.

ContractWorks is also incredibly helpful for tracking contract end dates (which was actually it’s original purpose). Within ContractWorks, you can enable advanced email notifications that trigger actions when a contract is terminating or due for renewal. 

There’s also a powerful reporting feature, which allows you to create customizable reports based on any tag. For example, you can quickly and easily run a report of all contracts that are set to terminate in the next 180 days or all contracts that allow payment by credit card. You can choose as many tags as you want as filters in a given report.

Certain clauses often become more important based on current events, like force majeure clauses during the pandemic. Many lawyers might not have put much attention on tracking those clauses in the past, but when they suddenly became relevant, there was a scramble to find them. ContractWorks makes that exercise a breeze.

Basically, whatever information you want to track about your contracts, whether within a specific contract type or across all contracts, ContractWorks empowers you to do it.

Signatures Simplified

While much of ContractWorks is built around optimizing the post-signature phase of contracting, it hasn’t forgotten about signatures. ContractWorks incorporates a proprietary e-sign tool that they’ve built in-house, and makes it easy to sign documents.

This feature functions much like the e-sign functionality you’re likely already used to, facilitated by email. You just enter the names and emails of any designated signers and an alert is sent to each until all signatures are obtained. You have visibility into the process and can always see what signatures are outstanding. When a signature comes in, the signed document automatically replaces the unsigned version in the ContractWorks repository.

Even better, you can create nuanced signature workflows based on the type of contract you’re dealing with. Again working off templates, you can create a specific signature flow for internal NDAs that might differ from the preferred signature workflows for other external contracts. Everything is customizable to the way you like to work.

A transparent pricing structure is the icing on the cake. With ContractWorks, there are no surprises or hidden charges, and you always get unlimited users. Just choose the right pricing plan for you based on your document volume and how many e-signature licenses you need.

Everyone can benefit from a better contract repository and better control over the post-signature phase of contracting. With ContractWorks, it’s not just possible, but simple.

Request a demo today to get started.