In my earlier blog, I had given 5 steps to choosing a CLS.  Not all CLS’s are created equal.  You may first want to see what you require to manage your contracts.  What salient information do you really have in your legacy agreements? How does it vary? What’s important to you? Do you want to track obligations?  Some companies only want a repository of contracts.  First, determine what you would like to have taking a five step approach, then see which of your requirements fit with which CLS vendors.  Re-iterating, here are the 5 steps….

1. Get a count of your active and inactive contracts
2. Categorize them into the types of contracts (e.g. supplier contracts, partner contracts etc.)
3. Take the time and effort to go through a sample of them to find out what would you like to know from these contracts and make a list of all key data elements, by contract type.
4. Write out some of the queries you would like to run on these contracts to make better use of them
5. List out the feature set of the system.  Do you want to have workflow and authorization because many people contribute to the contract?  Do you want a collaboration room?  Do you want templates for contracts?  Who are the users? What do each of the users require?