One of the most important metrics for any direct sales team is time-to-close, which is also one of the rare areas where the legal team can help sales representatives drive up company profits. Time, as they say, is money, and the longer it takes to close a sales deal — as in, time-to-close — the less time a sales representative can spend developing new, additional deals. The shorter the time-to-close, the higher your company revenues (and sales commissions). So, how can legal help bring down time-to-close? That’s just one of the use cases we detail in our newest eBook, “How Legal Can Part ..read more

The term “contract management” means many different things to many different marketers and software vendors, so before you purchase a contact management solution, you need to know what the term “contract management” implies and what functionality each contract management solution actually offers. To help you sort out this (sometimes intentionally) confusing mess, LinkSquares has composed our latest eBook: “The 3 Types of Contract Management Software (and How to Buy Them)“. In “The 3 Types of Contract Management Software (and How to Buy Them)”, we break down the three main categories of ..read more

The legal professional is perhaps the single most-cited example of work that artificial intelligence software is ready to transform, if not eliminate outright. While AI isn’t going to “end” lawyers anytime soon, legal professionals absolutely need to have a basic understanding of artificial intelligence and the impact it is poised to have on the practice of law. LinkSquares’ newest eBook, “How Legal Professionals Should Evaluate AI Solutions“, can give you the perspective you need to brace for AI’s impact on your legal team. Before you decide to buy any AI solution, you need to know wh ..read more

Henry Ford is rumored to have said of his Model T automobile, “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” If you asked a corporate legal team what they need to handle a sprawling portfolio of contracts, they’d tell you, “single a do-everything contract management tool.”  And they’d be just as wrong as Henry Ford’s hypothetical focus group of horse enthusiasts. Most contract management tools are designed to optimize one of three steps in the contract “lifecycle.” Pre-signature contract drafting Multi-party electronic contract signature Post-sig ..read more

Contract management software is a term that has many meanings (thanks to marketers), but most of this software is designed around the premise of “never writing or signing another bad contract.” But what about the contracts you’ve already signed? Before you adopt a software solution that controls how you draw up and authorize new agreements, you need to clean up and organize the contracts you’ve already got in-house. Here’s how. Step 1: Get All Your Contracts in One Place Before you write any new contracts, you need to round up all your old ones. In many, if not most organizations, le ..read more

The traditional legal-team response to a backlog of uncatalogued and unanalyzed legal agreements has been to throw people at the problem. This is all fine and good if you’re in private practice and want to rack up some billable hours for a client, but for in-house counsel, there needs to be a better response to a contract backlog than “a truckload of interns.” Fortunately, artificial intelligence has made managing a massive contract portfolio a task that doesn’t necessarily require a small army of legal professionals. Modern AI can actually read contracts and can do it faster and more accu ..read more

For sales-centric organizations, there is a temptation to have Salesforce software manage more than just your sales cycle, but also your customer support, your project management, and even your contract portfolio. The only problem with this strategy is that Salesforce is a sales tool, not a contact management tool, and trying to force that square peg into a round hole has a number of negative consequences for your organization. Salesforce is particularly bad at contract management for two reasons: Salesforce can’t actually read contract language Salesforce relies on sales representativ ..read more

When your startup is gearing up to raise money, you’re bombarded with advice on the steps you need to take, and the services you need to adopt, to make your business appealing to investors. But an area that even the most thorough funding-prep checklist or how-to article tends to neglect is contract management. Investors want to know that you have a sustainable business model and that you have maximized your chances for success. That means minimizing your risk, which requires that you have a comprehensive and consistent handle on your contract portfolio. For example, imagine you offer a ..read more

Henry Ford is rumored to have said of his Model T automobile, “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” If you asked a corporate legal team what they need to handle a sprawling portfolio of contracts, they’d tell you “a do-everything contract management tool.”  And they’d be just as wrong as Henry Ford’s hypothetical focus group of horse enthusiasts. Most contract management solutions today handle pre-signature contract creation or post-signature contract storage and management, but not both. That’s a feature, not a bug. Post-signature contr ..read more

As a Chief Legal Officer or General Counsel, it can often feel like you and your legal team are fighting the proverbial “never-ending battle” against a backlog of poorly organized, poorly understood Non-Standard Contracts. Compounding this problem can be an influx of similar agreements that appear due to a merger, acquisition, partnership agreement, or a deal with a major vendor (who absolutely won’t let you redline their boilerplate Master Services Agreement). No one understands the problems that “Non-Standard Contracts” can cause. Otherwise, they might stop foisting them on you.  One ..read more