Top Issues Facing General Counsel in 2012

A recent survey of more than 100 general counsel at American companies conducted by Corporate Counsel, in partnership with ALM Legal Intelligence, revealed that compliance and cost are the primary issues concerning general counsel in 2012.

According to the survey, 61% of respondents identified the increasing number of regulations and their growing complexity as their biggest issue. At the same time, legal departments have suffered budget cuts. And despite those shrinking budgets, 68% of respondents anticipated an increased workload. In fact, “53 % said the second-biggest issue they face, after regulations, was the pressure to do more with fewer resources.”

Traditionally, legal departments have used manual, labor intensive processes for creating their contracts. Legal staff would copy and paste existing material and then modify the content to meet specific needs or to accommodate customer requirements. To minimize risk, especially when faced with increased regulation, this approach demands the close attention of the general counsel and senior members of the legal team. Plus, the need to manage risk—to ensure the accuracy of the documents and to support regulatory compliance—dictates that organizations rely on subject matter experts at every step of the process.

Confirmation that too much time and resources are spent on each contract, comes from the recent Corporate Counsel Survey Report which found that over 30% of respondents spent more than an entire day to review a single contract. Assuming 8 working hours a day, and 125 contracts per month – these companies are spending 12,000 hours annually on contract review.

If contract creation was automated and contracts were created using pre-approved, compliant templates, much of these review costs could be eliminated while maintaining compliance with increased regulations. The cost savings in review time alone is just one element that helps an investment in contract automation software have a high return on investment.

If you’d like to learn how contract automation software can help you manage compliance and cost this year, please contact us.

Just Released: Corporate Counsel Contracts Report

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably know that we recently conducted our second Corporate Counsel Contracts Survey at the Association of Corporate Counsel Annual Meeting. The results have been tabulated and the report is now available. You can request your complimentary copy here.

This survey was a follow-up to one we conducted in 2009, and explores a variety of issues affecting the contracts process, the level of adoption of document assembly software and the most common methods of contract management.

Contract management has long been important to the overall success, profitability and risk management of organizations. Now, with business increasing, law departments are finding they need to be more efficient in order to keep up with the heavy demand for new contracts, often with no increase in headcount. And once the contracts are created, the information or data they contain must be accessible to help management make informed decisions about the business.

General Counsel are not only tasked with reducing the organization's risk, they also need to be mindful of legal spend. This is leading some law departments to adopt more automation. In a recent post on Prism Legal, Ron Friedman suggests to general counsel that they," Get More For Less."

He goes on to say that, "The best way to lower cost is to work smarter. For all work - inside or outside - make sure you apply process improvement techniques, legal project management, the appropriate technology, and knowledge management."

For more information on contract automation technology, contact your local Exari office. The survey results are also available in webinar format. To request a copy of the webinar, click here.

New Corporate Counsel Contracts Survey [On Demand Webinar]

We recently conducted our second Corporate Counsel Contracts Survey at the Association of Corporate Counsel Annual Meeting. The survey was a follow-up to one we conducted in 2009, and explores a variety of issues affecting the contracts process, the level of adoption of document assembly software and the most common methods of contract management.

The results were previewed in a recent webinar which is now available on-demand. You can sign in here to view the webinar. During the presentation you will see that the poll responses from attendees at the live webinar closely mirror the survey results.

New to this year's survey is a ranking of the top contract risks. Approximately ¾ (71%) of respondents reported being concerned about the risk of revenue leakage as a result of their contracts. Results from this survey have been compared to results from the 2009 Corporate Counsel Contracts Survey to assess how the practice of contract management is maturing.

The full results report will be available to readers of this blog after the first of the year, so please check back. In the meantime, have a wonderful holiday season.

Photo credit: Dom W

Edens & Avant Licenses Exari to Optimize Commercial Lease Creation

Edens & Avant, one of the nation’s leading private owners and developers of neighborhood shopping places, has licensed Exari Document Automation Software to automate the various documents and contracts involved in the commercial leasing process.

The leasing group is implementing the solution to help them get their deals done more quickly and respond to a push from the executive level to achieve rent starts more quickly. Exari will be integrated into other systems internally such as ERP and Business Process Management (BPM) to streamline the process, avoid manually rekeying data and errors.

Will Ponder, Vice President of Investments, Southeast, Edens & Avant said, “Successful implementation of Exari will allow for fast, efficient production and negotiation of leases. Within certain parameters, we plan to empower our leasing reps to produce a lease themselves using Exari, which will eliminate time-consuming data entry and non-value-added legal review, thus getting leases out the door to potential tenants on the same day that the terms are approved."

We are pleased to welcome Edens and Avant to the Exari Community and look forward to helping them achieve their goals. To learn how you can streamline your leasing or other document intensive process, please contact us.

Document Assembly and Contract Management Resources

We have expanded our resource library to provide additional tools and information on document assembly and contract management topics. The latest addition is a set of on-demand webinars. The library also contains whitepapers, case studies, demo videos, and several other free contract automation resources. It's a place to learn best practices and keep up to date with the latest industry trends.

The webinars are conducted in partnership with industry experts, ranging from Forrester Research to InsideCounsel Magazine. When possible, we have also made the accompanying presentations available for download.

Currently we offer three complimentary webinars with a fourth coming soon:

1) Managing OTC Derivatives Documentation in a Central Clearing Environment
The panel of experts discusses the new documentation requirements of central clearing and explores how financial institutions are changing their documentation management to reduce bottlenecks and avoid increased legal costs and operational risk.

2) Mitigate Risk in Your Sales Contracts
A preview of new data from an InsideCounsel survey on the "state of sales contracts," discussing how to use benchmarks to compare business process to best practice, and providing strategies for law departments to help improve their sales contracts processes in order to reduce risk.

3) The 4 Stages of Value from Contract Management
Speakers from Forrester Research and Exari discuss insights and lessons learned on how to best evaluate and implement a Contract Management (CM) system. Beginning with assessing your business problems, you will learn different strategies on how to phase in and measure success and ROI.

The fourth webinar, Corporate Counsel Contracts Survey Report 2011, is coming soon. Based on the Corporate Counsel Contracts survey conducted at the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) Annual Meeting, this webinar reveals early findings from the survey of 100+ General Counsel.

As a leader in the document automation and contract management industry - we are pleased to share relevant and insightful content with you. We encourage you to check our resource library frequently for new content and to make use of the document assembly and contract management resources. If you would like to be notified of new content, including upcoming webinars, sign up to receive our monthly newsletter.

If there are other types of content you'd like to see in the library, please tell us below in the comments.

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