The contract creation process is riddled with inefficiencies, right from when a contract request is initiated to all the internal back-and-forth for finalizing the terms.

But in the modern business world, no legal team has the time or resources to spend on inefficient operations. Luckily, you can automate and speed up this process to generate contracts quickly and efficiently — without having to create them from scratch or duplicate old contract versions.

Here’s how to nail your contract generation process.

What is contract generation?

Contract generation is an automated, streamlined process for drafting and customizing legal agreements. It’s the first stage of the contract lifecycle, and includes the use of tools and tech to enable faster contract creation.

What does the contract generation process typically look like?

The contract generation process typically involves three stages:

#1 Creating contract templates and playbooks

The very first step to efficient contract generation is to standardize your high-volume contracts and create contract templates within your contract management system. This ensures that you have all your important clauses in one place without having to dig around in past contracts or continuously refer to your playbook.

This step also involves creation of playbooks that will govern your templates and boilerplate contracts, detailing different fallback versions of clauses, key terms, and more.

#2 Generating contracts on your contract management platform

Once you have your templates in place, business teams like Sales can generate these contracts independently without having to send a request to Legal to do it for them. All they would need to do is fill in the questionnaire form with the party and deal details, which will populate the contract with the necessary information.

#3 Sending generated contracts out for internal review and approval

Once the contract has been generated, it will then get routed for internal review and approval according to the workflow settings you selected during the first step. This may involve legal review, finance approval, conditional approvals based on deal terms, etc.

5 ways to efficiently generate contracts (with SpotDraft)

The contracting process can be complicated and time-consuming. If you’re trying to streamline your contract generation process, we’ve outlined 6 efficient ways to generate contracts, depending on what type of contract it may be and who’s on the other side of the deal.

#1 Use pre-approved contract templates to automate high-volume contracts

Contracts like NDAs, MSAs, and purchase order forms, which have a fairly high volume during the normal course of business, can be standardized as contract templates.

These pre-approved templates will enable business teams to send out fully compliant contracts independently within minutes, without having to route everything through the legal team. This, in turn, will allow legal teams to focus on strategic legal work, complex contract and compliance issues, and negotiations.

#2 Send personalized contracts to multiple counterparties in one go

There are some contracts and agreements, such as invoices and employee agreements, that are often sent out in bulk to vendors and employees. This often becomes an extremely tedious process that takes up a lot of time and manual effort.

Instead, you can automate this process with contract management platforms like SpotDraft, which allow you to create campaigns and send out personalized contracts to multiple parties at the same time. This way, you’re able to save hours on manual work and track the status of all your contracts in one place.

#3 Share ready-to-sign links for non-negotiable contracts in seconds

SpotDraft allows you to create pre-approved, boilerplate contract templates, such as NDAs or user consent forms, that can be sent out to counterparties immediately. You can share these as a unique link (some of our customers even turn them into QR codes!), where the counterparty can then fill in their details and sign.

#4 Embed contracts within your website or app to quickly onboard users and vendors

You don’t need to ask counterparties to sign contracts through your CLM’s interface or, worse, manually after you send them an email. With SpotDraft, you can easily embed your boilerplate contracts to your website, allowing users and vendors with access to quickly execute contracts with you.

SpotDraft user, Pepper Content, uses this feature to bring educators onto their platform, making the onboarding process 94% faster for them!

We partnered with SpotDraft to embed the entire signature collection flow as a part of the onboarding. It converted a time-consuming process that required constant follow-up into a frictionless experience for our end users. The SpotDraft team has been a true partner to us.
‍
— Anirudh Singla,
Founder & CEO, Pepper Content

#5 Execute Clickthrough agreements in seconds

Use Clickthrough agreements (also known as clickwrap or click-to-accept agreements) to allow users, vendors, and counterparties to quickly accept contracts such as terms of service, privacy policy, subscription agreements, consent and authorization agreements, and more.

You can embed these agreements within your sign-up or onboarding flows, and track status of different versions accepted by different users.

Bonus: Streamline contract authoring with our MS Word contract editor

If you deal in a lot of complex, highly-negotiated contracts for which you can’t create templates, worry not. You can make that process as seamless as possible through SpotDraft’s integration with MS Word, so you can host your workflow and processes on your CLM without having to ditch the familiar MS Word environment.

This will allow you quick access to your playbook within your CLM, segregate comments for your team and for external parties, assign tasks, and so much more.

See it in action here: Announcing: Microsoft Word on SpotDraft

Why you need a contract generation software to automate contracts for you

Skeptical about whether you really need a tool to do all of this for you? Here’s why a contract generation software or an all-in-one CLM platform like SpotDraft can be so valuable for you:

#1 You’ll save hours and days in time

If you’re creating contracts manually every time the legal team gets a new request, you’re losing time that can be spent on more strategic work that will drive impact for the business. In such cases, the legal function usually gets stuck in a vicious cycle of trying to keep up with day-to-day requests and putting out fires as they come in.

#2 Version control is easier

Creating contract templates and playbooks, and hosting them on your contract generation software, will save you from the nightmare that is version control. You will be better positioned to negotiate and close contracts faster by having your best language, fallback clauses, and latest versions of contract templates right where you need them.

#3 Enhanced user and customer experience

Most non-lawyers generally think of contracts as a hassle. By automating and streamlining this process for them, you’ll make collecting signatures and consent easier for both parties, improving both their experience as well as your contract closure metrics.

Choose SpotDraft to automate contract generation for you

Ready to simplify contract generation for you and your team? Get a demo of what we have to offer today.