The time has come for General Counsel and their teams to deliver true business value, by leveraging complete mastery over their organisation’s contract portfolio.
For too long, contract management has been cast in the “too hard” and “so what?” baskets. And with good reason.
Contract management systems were too hard to implement – data capture was manual and slow, took staff away from their day jobs, and return on investment was questionable and impossible to quantify.
And “so what?” – even if we had all our contracts stored in a system, there was no easy way to make useful sense of the contract data.
We are now at an inflection point due to the confluence of the following events:
- mainstreaming of artificial intelligence in the form of machine learning and extraction technology
- breakthrough mapping of the contract genome
- emergence of the General Counsel who thinks like a CEO
Before we delve further, it might help to summarise the current state of play and how we got here.
The earliest General Counsel were not ipso facto members of the C-suite – the move from private practice to inhouse was in fact regarded as the “soft” option. Unsure of how to find their feet, early inhouse teams often fell into the trap of justifying their existence on terms set by the bean-counters (it was not unusual for general counsel to report through the CFO rather than directly to the CEO). This meant cost reduction was the order of the day – generally by cutting external legal spend and demonstrating internal workload.
Eager to impress with quick wins, many a legal team rushed into implementing matter management systems with the primary purpose of workload tracking and reporting. Legal briefings to the executive team were dominated by narratives of the top matters on the team’s plate, subjectively ranked by each individual lawyer. Risk reporting was secondary and manually compiled, meaning that dark risks remained hidden.
This mentality has persisted through, and probably contributed to, contract management’s “too hard / so what” epoch. Until now.
Contracts are the lifeblood of an enterprise, and legal teams are unique from other cost centres in that they possess the keys to the kingdom. With the three developments above, General Counsel can now realise the potential of mining their contracts for value and pivot the legal department to a profit centre in the process.
IACCM research has identified an average direct leakage of 9% of revenue resulting from poor contract management. There are a range of benchmarks for total legal spend as a percentage of revenue, but for large enterprises generally it amounts to less than 1% of revenue (some say 0.25-0.75%, others say 0.20-1.08%), with one report citing the external spend component at 0.19% of revenue.
The message is clear – legal teams can deliver much more value by focusing on plugging revenue leakage through better contract management than by reducing internal and external legal spend. For a legal department in a large enterprise, plugging just 20% of the leakage could potentially recover 1.8% of revenue and transform the team into a profit centre.
For the first time in history, we have combined 1 and 2 to enable this transformation and roll it out on a large scale.
Machine learning and extraction makes it easy to implement and embed a contract management system into the legal team without outsized capital- or operating-expenditure.
The Universal Contract Model and Compliance Manager means lawyers can fulfil their true destiny by becoming effective risk managers* for the business.
As for 3, well, that depends on you. Are you ready to join the revolution?
* Early in my career, one of the most influential partners I worked for impressed upon me that he saw himself as a risk manager above all else. He was a renowned lawyer with an uncanny ability to pace and narrate his way to ingenious solutions to insurmountable problems, and as a consequence was regularly retained by leading business tycoons. There’s also an untold story here about how a few Scots, Englishmen and an Australian built up the colonial outpost of a mid-tier UK shipping law firm into one of the leading corporate and litigation practices in its region, often sitting across the table from or acting as co-counsel with magic circle and white shoe firms (and Skadden Arps). At one point, our corporate A-team even came precariously close to defecting to Shearman & Sterling. But all this is a story for another day…
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