While procurement and legal teams align to similar business goals—improving productivity, digital transformation, enabling commercial outcomes–their functional differences often create conflict when it comes to contracts and the buying of legal services.
Legal potentially over rotates on contract risk, while procurement many not have the expertise needed when contemplating changes to terms and conditions. The success factors involved in buying third -party legal services present challenges as the success factors are unique.
If legal and procurement are not aligned with each other it may create serious consequences as it relates to risk and price. Vital to a healthy working relationship across these functions is a centralized contract repository and process workflows. By working within a robust contract management system, legal and procurement can decrease contract risk around compliance, reduce the risk of loss or errors on contact paperwork, and help to sharpen and speed up the contract process altogether.
An integrated contract management solution creates can create competitive advantage by:
- Centralizing visibility into contracts for prioritizing by value or urgency
- Automatically flagging obligations and deadlines
- Extracting data that creates insights into cost savings opportunities, negotiating leverage and qualitative insights into vendor performance
- Improving staff productivity by reducing email exchange, ad hoc contract amendments and random intake requests
- Dashboards that help manage vendor risk and ensure compliance
These benefits position legal and procurement to deliver increased cost savings, reduced risk, and improved commercial outcomes.
For more information on contract management solutions and best practices, please contact us.
