The first and most essential step to better manage your legal contracts is to set up a centralized contract repository to store all your contracts.
A contract repository is a place where all your contacts are stored. In the past, prior to the advent of technology solutions, it was often a filing cabinet or even an entire storage room, where paper copies of signed contracts were kept (not always in a well-organized manner, let’s be honest), with only a few people having a key or a badge to access it.
Nowadays, while these filing cabinets or storage rooms may still exist to store paper copies, most contracts are fully digitized (or at least an electronic copy of each signed contract is made) so they can be retrieved effortlessly and quickly.
This new way of storing contracts electronically has a lot of benefits, including reducing storage costs while making it easier to retrieve copies of signed contracts, but digital contract storage comes with its own challenges:
- You need to store all your electronic copies of contracts in one place, as it’s the only way to have a global view of them (if each business team stores their contract on their own server or uses their own software, top management will lack global vision).
- You need to store electronic copies in a well-organized manner with strong search capabilities in order to be able to retrieve signed contracts in a few clicks.
- You need to properly manage who can access the electronic copies of your contracts, just like you managed the access to your filing cabinet or storage room.
- You need to ensure that your employees save the electronic copies of the contract they’re managing where they should, rather than just keeping them in their mailbox or on their desktop.
AODocs CLM, the Only Contract Repository Built on Top of Google Drive
With AODocs CLM, our contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution, your contracts are securely stored on your company’s Google Drive. They are owned by a technical account within your Google Workspace domain, so you retain complete control over your data. AODocs is built on top of Google Drive, with additional features and an additional security layer to properly safeguard your contracts and any other critical documents.
By storing all your contracts or other legal documents in AODocs CLM, you can:
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Ensure all your contracts are stored in one place and owned by your company (corporate ownership): No more contracts being saved on the My Drive of your employees or, worse, on their desktops or old emails (and no more risk of losing such contracts when said employees leave your company).
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Gain complete control over who can access your contracts at any time: With AODocs, you can set up specific access rights per contract (or type of contract per type of contract). For instance, ensuring that only your HR teams will be able to access employment contracts. Or an account manager will have access only to the contracts of the clients he is managing, rather than having access to all your clients’ contracts.
This ability to set up granular permissions allows you to share confidential and personal data only on a need-to-know basis, which is often required to comply with data privacy laws (such as GDPR) or your contractual confidential obligations. -
Search instantaneously within all your contracts: Use metadata, filters, as well as full-text searches (thanks to our OCR technology) to easily find the contract you need with just a few clicks. You will no longer spend hours locating an old contract, nor will you have to call all of your colleagues to ask if they know where it is located.
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Properly save and manage all versions of a contract: AODocs CLM allows you to manage multiple versions of the same contract. During negotiation, you can store all versions of the same contract to be able to easily look at or restore a past version or run a comparison check between two different versions.
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Integrate with your e-signature tool to automatically save signed contracts: AODocs CLM integrates with DocuSign and Adobe Sign and allows you to easily send contracts for signature, track that they have been signed, and, most importantly, automatically save back the signed contracts into your central contract repository (as the last version of the concerned contract). Moreover, thanks to its API, AODocs CLM can integrate with any other e-signature tool that you may use.
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Find out who opened, modified, copied, or performed any action on your contracts: In AODocs CLM, any action done on your contracts (from opening a contract, to modifying it or making a copy) is kept in an immutable audit log, with the name of the user who performed the action and the time that the action occurred.
AODocs CLM is Not Just a Contract Repository. It’s a SMART Contract Repository
AODocs CLM is more than just a centralized contract repository. Yes, it brings you corporate ownership granular permissions, version control, strong search capabilities, and audit log. But it brings so much more. It’s engineered to:
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Set up alerts and reminders so that you will never forget key events (e.g. payment date, renewal date, etc.)
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Extract Google Sheet or Excel reports for audit or reporting purposes. Do you want the list of all your effective contracts above $100k? How about a list of all contracts that shall be renewed in less than three months? It will take you less than a minute to identify these contracts and the result of your search can then be exported to a Google Sheet or Excel.
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Set up advanced dashboards to gain a global perspective of all your contracts, showing the information that you deem to be important.
Beyond a smart contract repository, AODocs CLM can bring a lot more to your business, notably with automated contract generation, real-time collaboration, dynamic approval workflows, etc.
Check our earlier blog post on “Why Should You Automate Your Contract Management Process” to find out the 10 key benefits of a CLM Solution.
