Contract Negotiation Software: How To Reduce Time & Cost

Content

• What is contract negotiation software?
• When do you need contract negotiation software?
• How does contract negotiation software help businesses?
• Contract Redlining
• Version Control
• Real-time Collaboration
• Audit Trail
• A Single Source of Truth
• Legal AI
• Conclusion

Before signing the dotted line and making a business relationship official, there are a few details to iron out. Parties must settle on terms and conditions that protect all their interests. However, negotiating contracts is easier said than done. It takes a lot of back and forth between the stakeholders to reach advantageous provisions.

Throughout this, businesses must ensure everyone stays on the same page, keep track of all the contract versions, and find means to collaborate in real time. Manual processes make it more painful than it has to be. That’s where contract negotiation software can help. We will discuss their features and benefits in this blog to help you save time and money.

What is Contract Negotiation Software?

Contract negotiation software is a specialized tool designed to automate and streamline the negotiation process. Negotiation is the dialogue parties to a legal agreement partake in to arrive at agreeable rights and responsibilities. 

The software enables multiple parties to review, comment on, and edit contracts within a single platform. As a result, the stakeholders can work together more smoothly, eliminating friction and miscommunication from the process. Whether building contracts from scratch or working on third-party agreements, negotiation tools can help businesses achieve favorable terms faster and easier.

When do you need Contract Negotiation Software?

Every business that onboards vendors, customers, or employees needs a simple and easy negotiation process. While contracting has become more digital, most organizations depend on email chains to move communication forward. It is hardly feasible for businesses looking for faster results. 

• Collaboration Issues

When businesses employ traditional techniques like emails, faxes, and paper contracts to negotiate contract terms, there are bound to be miscommunications. Multiple internal and external stakeholders must contribute to the process to reach terms favorable for everyone. It results in numerous strings of communication and countless contract versions. That does not mean well for the contract negotiation process. 

• Tracking Changes

The legal agreement goes through a lot of changes throughout the negotiation process. All the involved parties have their remarks and modifications to add to the document. Businesses must keep track of all these alterations to get to the final document. Any interruption to the contract's updating process may call into question its quality and integrity. It will further complicate and delay the approval process. As such, it will be difficult for the parties to move the approved agreement to the signature stage. 

How does Contract Negotiation Software help businesses?

In the fast-paced business world, when you have numerous legal agreements in the pipeline, you need efficient solutions to see them through. Contract negotiation software enables multiple parties to collaborate on contracts simultaneously without losing track of the objective or outcome. They can agree on deals faster without compromising their quality or accuracy. Here’s how: 

• Contract Redlining

Redlining involves the stakeholders reviewing and editing the contract copy during negotiations. Earlier parties made do with papers and pens to make these remarks. Thankfully, most organizations are moving to electronic documents, which makes the process much simpler. They can make the alterations and suggestions online without struggling with paper copies. 

Party A alters the contract, and Party B can accept, reject, or make their own during redlining. The contract negotiation software keeps track of who made what changes to the document. Thus, there’s accountability even if multiple internal and external parties are part of the process. This collaborative editing allows businesses to get to the final document without confusion or errors.

• Version Control

Contracts change hands multiple times during the negotiation process. Ensuring everyone is on the same page and working with the same document version is demanding. Moreover, businesses must maintain a record of all the changes the contract copy went through. If there are any future disagreements, the parties may need to refer back to previous versions.

The version control feature of contract negotiation software records all changes, remarks, and conversations about a contract. Thus, users have a comprehensive overview of the evolution of a contractual agreement and can compare it to identify alterations. Stakeholders can negotiate and edit legal documents without worrying about erasing the essence of the original copy.

• Real-time Collaboration

Parties can get together in person all the time to negotiate contracts. Due to COVID-19 and global businesses, most contracting procedures now happen remotely. There are video calls, messages, and emails to communicate efficiently. However, these traditional mediums lack the nuances necessary for contract management. As the complexities and parties in the process increase, normal communication channels create confusion and delays.

Contract negotiation software creates a single platform for parties to collaborate productively. Whether internal stakeholders, such as legal, finance, sales, or procurement, or external stakeholders, they can work together efficiently on the contract lifecycle without switching multiple platforms. They can discuss terms, make comments, and review changes, all while maintaining comprehensive records.

• Audit Trail

Visibility is key to maintaining the integrity of the negotiating process. All the key players must have insight into each stage of the contract lifecycle. When businesses depend on traditional methods and disjointed systems to carry out the task, there’s little to no timely information sharing. Everyone involved won’t have real-time data on document status, changes, or the next move.

Contract negotiation software provides audit trails detailing all edits, actions, and interactions done in connection with legal agreements. This transparency sheds light on dates, times, and stakeholders. Thus, businesses have a chronological report of all the activities done as part of the contracting process. For any disputes or questions that may arise in the future, they have electronic records to clear them up.

• A Single Source Of Truth

Contracts must uphold certain organizational, industrial, and legal standards. A centralized storage location for approved agreements enables businesses to review their track record and identify feasible terms. Thus, they can standardize content across the board and fast-track negotiations. Even when teams have self-serving contracts, the quality and legality of the content are guaranteed.

It prevents businesses from reusing unfavorable or inadequate language or clauses in their future contracts. When contractual agreements are competent and favorable, they’re much more likely to pass through the negotiation process without much fuss. It fast-tracks contracts through the reviewing and approval cycles.

• Legal AI
  

Contractual agreements are long and complex documents. Manually going through them during drafting, negotiations, and reviews can be time-consuming. Moreover, there’s always the probability of human error when multiple stakeholders are part of the process. The advanced AI capabilities available today enable users to automate contract-related tasks.

Most contract negotiation software enables businesses to extract relevant clauses from contractual agreements. Thus, parties can review and revise the terms and conditions of multiple documents in no time. AI also facilitates clause comparison to identify similarities and differences in the language, purpose, and applications. Companies can also automate contract summaries to highlight deviations in third-party agreements. This efficiency allows us to accelerate the negotiation process and prevent discrepancies.

Conclusion

Negotiation software empowers businesses of all sizes to accelerate their contracting process. They can close deals faster, make procurement painless, and bring efficiency to the entire business operation. However, these solutions still lack the means to draft, approve, sign, and manage business contracts. Consequently, companies end up depending on multiple platforms to carry out their contract management lifecycle.

Dock 365, an all-in-one contract management software, allows users to automate the entire contracting process, including negotiation. They can create, negotiate, and manage agreements of all kinds within a single platform. Moreover, our solution leverages your existing Microsoft 365 environment to improve security and usability. Some other advanced features include:

Templating Capabilities: Drafting contracts from scratch can take up a lot of time. Dock 365 allows users to customize standard templates and clauses to create contractual agreements for all kinds of purposes. They can maintain a quality selection of templates for clickwrap agreements, NDAs, SOWs, insurance agreements, or contracts for any other purpose to speed up the process.

Automated Approvals: The intuitive platforms allow businesses to route their agreements through reviews and approvals using automated workflows. Thus, the document gets to the appropriate person without any errors or delays. The relevant stakeholders can receive timely alerts regarding the progress.

Painless Execution: Dock 365 offers integration with secure and user-friendly electronic signature solutions, including DocuSign, Adobe Sign, and Sertifi, to accelerate the signing process. Thus, businesses can get the approved agreement to the final stage and legally execute it within the CMS platform. 

Integrations: Negotiation involves departments and individuals beyond the legal team. Dock 365 integrates with business applications like Microsoft 365 Business Central, Orack NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and Salesforce CRM to create a free flow of information. It enables users to access contracts from any of their existing platforms. They can also leverage party data from ERP and CRM systems to create contracts.

Post-contract management: Even beyond negotiation and execution, Dock 365 allows businesses to stay on top of contracts to guarantee compliance and performance. They can set up alerts for relevant obligations, contract milestones, and tasks. The CMS platform also generates comprehensive reports for contract performance, risks, and compliance to provide actionable insights.

From AI to OCR, there’s a lot Dock 365 can offer to make legal processes painless for businesses. Explore our competitive plans to transform your contracts today!