The larger the company, the more the contracts – that is a given. The larger the company, the more divisions. The larger the company, the more these divisions work in silos. All companies run on contracts – buy-side and sell-side. When moving to a new enterprise or contract management lifecycle system no one wants to leave these legacy documents with an empty new system.

How can you organize all the contracts?

Create a shared repository – either a shared network folder in Sharepoint or a document sharing platform. Assign a person responsible for a department/division, or a geographic location that has the responsibility of “herding” the contracts from different individuals.

Design a consistent folder structure – e.g.

• \All Contracts\Country\Division\MSA\Masters (or Amendments) or
• \All Contracts\Country\Division\Client Name\MSA (or Supplier etc.).

The responsible person should be given a deadline to collect all the documents. During that time, some curation can be done. Deduplication? Remove unsigned or partially signed documents? The thought process is to decide what documents need to be migrated into the CLM.

With the documents now collected centrally, work with all groups to decide the data points (attributes) that need to be extracted from these to migrate into the CLM agreement record. See earlier blog posts on what data points need to be extracted.

There is no “one size fits all”. But hopefully, this blog will get you thinking.

Feel free to contact us to brainstorm your specific case.