How to improve your contract drafting process with Gatekeeper

Drafting a contract requires efficiency, accuracy and collaboration both within your business and between external parties. Without these things in place, contract drafting can cause bottlenecks and slow down time-to-signature - a metric that many businesses use to measure their performance.

Working with contract management tools can automate the drafting process, decrease the likelihood of errors and improve collaboration throughout the entire process.

Below, we take a look at how tools from Gatekeeper can improve your approach to contract drafting and improve your overall management of the pre-signature stages of a contract’s lifecycle.

1. Unlimited users for effective stakeholder engagement and collaboration

Drafting a contract can require the input of multiple stakeholders. These can include Contract Managers, in-house Legal teams, finance departments and Vendor Managers, as well as the original requester who could be from any part of the business.

The more complex a contract, the greater number of stakeholders are likely to be involved to provide guidance on expected outcomes and to check the accuracy of any clauses, terms or language being used.

Gatekeeper supports business collaboration by offering unlimited users on each of its plans. Regardless of how many stakeholders your contract drafting process involves, you can have confidence that each department can work together and provide their input in a timely and efficient way.

Contract Management Software gives businesses the best results when it works for the entire organisation. Unlimited users within Gatekeeper allow seamless collaboration throughout the contract drafting process and beyond.”

2. Unlimited Microsoft Word templates so you can standardise contract drafts

If your contract drafting process looks different each time it’s completed because you’re starting from scratch and doing so manually, your business is wasting valuable time and money. By standardising the way you draft contracts, you’ll save your teams a huge amount of time and reduce levels of contract administration.

Gatekeeper allows you to generate unlimited Microsoft Word templates. All required data is merged from key fields, so you can quickly create contract drafts including Non-Disclosure Agreements or Master Service Agreements with a single click. These templates ensure that the contract drafting process is standardised and simplified.

If key contract metadata is missing from the contract draft, Gatekeeper ensures it cannot be approved within the platform or progressed throughout the organisation - minimising the risk of contract ambiguities, contradictions or incomplete causes.

Best practice contract templates from Gatekeeper create greater efficiencies, improve accuracy and allow users to create templates specifically for Microsoft Word."

3. A native Microsoft Word-compliant solution for redlining

Contract negotiations often lead to agreements needing to be revised or redrafted. Your teams, especially Legal, work best in the programs they are already familiar with. Gatekeeper offers a native end-to-end redline solution that is Microsoft Word compliant, allowing your business to redline its own contracts or those delivered by your suppliers.

By ensuring legal representatives are able to work in their preferred solution, Gatekeeper helps to minimise the friction in the negotiation process. No need for anyone to learn a new system.

This usability will increase adoption throughout your organisation. Any edits made to a contract draft can be tracked through Gatekeeper, so your business is given full visibility of what has been changed, when and by who at any given time.

Unlike manual contract drafting processes that can lead to fragmentation via the creation of multiple versions of the same document, Gatekeeper ensures users only download the latest version.

This is achieved via a ‘check-in and check-out’ system, which means all teams can have confidence that they are working with the most up-to-date and accurate information.

Microsoft Word is the preferred option for many businesses. Gatekeeper was designed to accommodate your contract drafting and redlining processes, rather than work against it.”

4. A clause Library allowing teams to self-serve pre-approved agreements

Repeatedly drafting contracts that contain the same clauses is time ill-spent. High volume contracts such as NDAs and MSAs can add extra pressure on Legal teams, preventing them from focusing their expertise on others of the business.

Gatekeeper allows businesses to build a Clause Library containing approved boilerplate content and pre-approved Legal agreements. This gives teams the flexibility to generate compliant contract drafts with a much quicker turnaround.

This speed is given a further boost by Touchless Contracts - a patent-pending technology that allows teams to self-service contract drafts at scale.

Gatekeeper’s patent-pending Touchless Contract technology combined with its extensive Clause Library allows teams to generate contract drafts with no input from Legal.

Wrap Up

Contract management software provides businesses with a set of aligned tools that work together to automate, standardise and streamline contract drafting.

Whether you’re looking to improve collaboration, reduce time-to-signature or simply improve the accuracy of your drafts so they require less redlining, Gatekeeper can help.

If you’re ready to talk to our experts about improving your contract draft process, contact us or book your demo today.