One simple step to speed up contract drafting
Computers can process information a lot more quickly than humans. If you can make computers work for you when drafting contracts you will drastically speed up your contract drafting.
The key types of information you need for contract drafting are document format (e.g. templates), party details, commercial details and alternative clauses. Think about where you keep all those details today. To set up an efficient contracting process you should have that information at your fingertips.
One example is agreement templates. Most people use templates and would never dream about starting an agreement from scratch. But how long does it take you and your colleagues to find your templates. Are other people constantly asking you where your templates are? Are they stored on a drive, email, personal folder or available in the cloud? Personally I could sometimes spend 10 minutes or more finding the right template.
I recently solved this problem at no cost by putting together a list of all my templates in Microsoft SharePoint and then built a search interface using Microsoft Powerapps. Everyone I work with can now easily search the list of about 300 agreement templates by name, type, description, language and department.
I did this to speed up the total time of my own contract drafting. However, I cannot believe how much time I save by not getting asked questions about where a certain template is. The best thing is that everybody is happy because they can quickly find our templates and the time to draft contracts has reduced significantly. This all means we have more time to focus on what is in the contract.
