Contracts, boards, entity management, compliance: legal departments are swamped with work. As digitalization continues to progress and remote work is here to stay, complexity increases. Fortunately, there are tech tools you can rely on. They help streamline your legal operations in many ways, and automation is one of them.
By automating repetitive tasks, you not only ease the legal department’s workload, you also free up precious time for more value-added tasks, all while increasing accuracy. And the cherry on the cake: legal teams can cut costs significantly with workflow automations.
Why more and more legal departments leverage automation
Legal teams oversee numerous tasks and activities, including corporate governance, contract management, compliance and entity management. Often, their workload grows faster than the resources they have at their disposal to tackle them. The answer is digitization, and the automation of certain tasks that are repetitive and/or time-consuming and don’t require their legal expertise.
Automation reduces the number of manual tasks. It allows you to save time and money while increasing accuracy. That means
- Better compliance, improved risk management
- More time for added-value tasks requiring legal expertise
- A significant reduction of operational costs – up to 40% according to ACC
Specific use cases for automation in legal departments
Do you still need convincing? Let us talk you through some concrete use cases and find out how automation will become your team’s new BFF.
How automation improves the entire contract lifecycle management
Handling large volumes of contracts manually not only is time-consuming, it also increases the risk of human error. Add automation to simple, repetitive tasks to increase efficiency and accuracy.
- Contract creation
When setting up a contract, the legal team requires input from internal and external stakeholders. You can leverage automation to make sure drafts are shared, that all stakeholders can annotate and that it’s always the latest version you’re working on.
- Contract approval
The approval of a contract may be complex and include several steps. Use automation to streamline the entire process. Automatically passing from one step to the next significantly speeds up the approval process, automatic reminders help keep track of deadlines and ensure timely signature and execution.
- Contract update
Need to make edits to certain clauses, change expiration dates, etc.? Automated processes help stay on top of such changes and ensure flawless implementation. Automation also simplifies timely renewal with automatic alerts and reminders.
Automation for streamlined board meetings
Board meetings involve numerous stakeholders in different locations which makes the organization a complex task. The workload can be eased with automation before, during and after the meeting.
- Ahead of the meeting
Automation allows you to synch meeting invites with your favorite tools and calendars, and to track RSVPs. For the meeting agenda, you can leverage automation to easily prepare and structure it, make sure the latest version is available, and edits are pushed to all participants.
Implementing automation for board meetings reduces preparation time by 30% according to International Lawyers Association
- During the meeting
Using a platform with automation features helps increase engagement of meeting participants. Automation enables collaboration from the very beginning, making sure no relevant topic is left out. Members can then attend via their favorite device and securely collaborate on documents in real time.
- After the meeting
You can easily generate minutes based on meeting documentation and integrate audio transcriptions.
Automation also helps with reporting and audit trails of board meetings. Gather data and statistics automatically in a dashboard to keep track of meeting numbers, log activities and documentation insights.
Get on board!
Increased efficiency, reduced costs: automation is a real win-win for legal departments. The secret to successful automation lies in the choice of the right tools. They must be intuitive and easy to use (to boost adoption and speed up implementation time) all the while offering the highest security standards as legal departments handle sensitive information.
Start automating now! If you want to have a closer look at the different use cases and find out how the DiliTrust Governance suite can help, don’t hesitate to ask for a personalized demo.
