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How can my company achieve and maintain WCAG compliance?

Improve accessibility to your organization’s digital content and chart the steps to ensuring and maintaining WCAG compliance.

Web Accessibility Content Guidelines (WCAG) provide industry-standard digital accessibility benchmarks. The World Wide Web Consortium (WC3) created and continues to update these guidelines so that people with disabilities can read, interpret, and navigate online content. Most global accessibility regulations, including aspects of federal anti-discrimination laws in the US, are derived from WCAG.

The most recent major update in June 2018, WCAG 2.1, introduced 17 new success criteria improving coverage for cognitive disabilities, low vision disabilities, and mobile accessibility. [i] It also includes various levels of compliance for businesses and public organizations. And this blog will guide you on how to get there.

Start with a basic compliance check

You can get a quick idea of how well your company’s digital content adheres to WCAG by answering a few simple questions.

Can users access all the functions of your website with a keyboard as well as with a mouse?
Does all video, audio, and photo content on the site have a text alternative (e.g., transcript or closed captions)?
Does the site have alt-text that assistive devices can interpret and read?

If you can’t answer yes to all three, it’s time to plan for a full accessibility assessment and remediation program to see where you stand and how you can get up to speed.

While complete compliance with these comprehensive standards represents a challenge for many businesses, taking small steps can significantly impact the accessibility of your digital content. So before engaging a specialized team to support you on compliance, start by assessing your digital property – website, app, and other online assets for Level A WCAG components.

Level A WCAG compliance can significantly reduce the risk that your business will face claims of discrimination against people who have disabilities. You can conform to Level A by implementing features that ensure your website meets the so-called POUR principles: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust.

Optimize key components for accessibility

POUR is a framework for digital accessibility. But how does it translate into concrete steps for your web developers? Depending on the extent of your online content, you can prioritize the actions listed to come closer to WGAG conformance at your target level:

Ensure that all content can be converted to text, read by assistive devices, magnified, zoomed, or otherwise altered without changing its meaning
Add subtitles, captions, and audio descriptions to all video content
Implement keyboard operability for all components of the site, including buttons, forms, links, and menus
Use a programming language that supports autofill technology
Choose a palette with a high level of color contrast
Emphasize hyperlinks with cues such as underlining and bold instead of color
Remove autoplay video and audio, as it can be difficult to turn off
Add clear, descriptive content for all internal and external links
Structure the site with clear headings, lists, and bullets
Consider the order of content presentation

Next, rank this list of nonconforming aspects of your site by issue severity and estimated size of the impacted audience. Prioritizing the updates in order of importance results in a strong remediation strategy. Many experts recommend taking a find, fix, monitor approach to making the actual updates and keeping up with remediation.

Whether you have an in-house web team or outsource digital content development, provide the necessary tools and resources to create accessible online assets. Internal stakeholders, including developers, testers, content creators, and staff, should receive periodic accessibility training. It’s essential to stay abreast of the upcoming changes to WCAG to avoid falling out of conformance.

When you use the checklist above to prioritize corrective and point-forward actions related to your organization’s online content, you will have completed the first step in understanding conformance with WCAG guidelines.

Taking the next step

As you and your team work through the checklist toward achieving Level A compliance, you are now better placed to identify an external team you would like to work with for the next level of WCAG compliance. This is a team with the technical depth and accessibility guidelines knowledge to conduct a thorough compliance assessment of your digital assets and support the subsequent remediation effort.

Understanding the POUR standards better

An accessible website should meet the POUR standards established by WCAG, which means all digital content and functions published by your organization should be:

Perceivable: Users must be able to perceive content on the website by hearing, seeing, or touching it. If they cannot use one sense to take in and understand the information, they should be able to use a different one. Plain text tends to be the most flexible format, which makes it the most perceivable way to upload content. You can also improve accessibility by making digital publications available in multiple languages.

For example, adding a descriptive audio transcript to a video makes it perceivable by using either vision or hearing.

Other strategies to improve the perceive-ableness of digital assets include:

Adding alt text to any non-text content you publish online, including audio, video, and static images
Providing alternative content with equivalent information, which must include at a minimum:
- Prerecorded audio and video for time-based media
- Sign language and closed captions for both prerecorded and live audio
- Audio descriptions for prerecorded video
Structuring and sequencing content so assistive devices can interpret it
Adding instructions that do not require sensory descriptions for comprehension
Ensuring users can easily toggle content between portrait and landscape views as needed
Providing visual cues such as graphics and bolding instead of or in addition to color
Using a high-contrast color palette
Offering an accessible mechanism to stop audio and video that auto-plays on your site or altogether discontinuing autoplay features
Allowing users to zoom text size by at least 200% in their browsers without using an assistive device

If you want to work towards Level AA compliance in the Perceivable category, you can ensure each of your site’s pages has more than one access point and provide a visible keyboard focus indicator for each user interface.

Operable: This term refers to the tools your audience uses to access, navigate, and comprehend the content on your website. All your site’s controls and menus should support operability with a keyboard as well as a mouse.

Users must be able to navigate the platform and interface with a keyboard, mouse, voice, switches, or accessible alternative input devices. People with vision impairment often use a keyboard rather than a mouse to get around online. Switches and voice commands assist those with mobility challenges. Every component of the website, from headings to menus to links, should have a clear and labeled purpose. All content should be free of blinking lights or flashing images that could trigger seizures.

Other Level A compliance guidelines for this category include:

Allowing users to adjust the length of timed content
Ensuring that blinking items have no more than three flashes per second
Offering the ability to bypass blocks of content
Including descriptive titles for all the pages on your website
Ensuring that alt text for links relates to the destination URL
Requiring only a single click for all pointer-based gestures on the site
Providing mechanisms to turn off or remap keyboard shortcuts
Understandable: Both the controls used to operate the system and the information presented should be readable, predictable, and consistent. Content development should consider the needs of individuals who have cognitive impairments, speak English as a second language, or have learning or other disabilities.

Most importantly in this category, your site must use a programming language that supports assistive devices. Adding HTML language attribution in the metadata of online content can facilitate this type of access.

When a user receives an input error, the site must identify and detail the error in writing. Components of the site that require content input from users must have clear, understandable labels.

WCAG also requires your site to respond to input in a predictable manner. For example, if a user focuses on a specific component of the interface, its context should not change. Changing a setting should not alter the context unless the user receives notice of the expected change.

Robust: Most users and types of assistive technologies can successfully interpret digital content, even as standards and devices evolve in the future. Best practices require a standard programming language such as HTML and/or a standard alternative when the site uses non-standard technology. Robust websites and apps are also free of coding errors that can hamper accessibility.

WCAG describes online content as robust when most individuals and assistive devices can access and interpret it successfully.

In Level A, WCAG requires markup languages to avoid parsing, with correctly nested elements, unique I.D.s, no duplicate attributes within elements, and complete start and end tags for elements as needed. In addition, all interface components have a name, role, and value that assistive devices can determine programmatically.

Moving to an advanced level of compliance

Level AA and AAA conformance require more complex implementations. Level AA content maximizes accessibility and meets the mandated standards of federal compliance. At the same time, AAA-conforming sites typically include public service organizations a6a.nd federal, state, and local government agencies.

Partnering with an expert in this space can help your company achieve WCAG compliance at the appropriate level without disrupting your digital operations.

Reach out today to schedule a discussion with an iBridge team member to learn how we can help your business reach and keep conformance with WCAG standards.

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Reach out today to schedule a discussion with an iBridge team member to learn how we can help your business conform with WCAG standards.

Technology

Steps to Global Digital Accessibility Compliance

Contending with International Requirements for Digital Content Accessibility

Digital content accessibility standards ensure everyone can access public online content. These standards address features that provide and enhance accessibility, experience, and comprehension for people with cognitive, intellectual, hearing, dexterity, mobility, or visual impairments.

To avoid inadvertent discrimination as the business landscape becomes ever more global, companies must comply with domestic and global standards for content accessibility. Begin with the basics about some of the most common worldwide systems to bring your business closer to conformance.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) provide a framework for Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust online content (POUR). An international coalition, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), created and continues to update WCAG to keep up with the technological evolution. The current standards establish three levels of conformance – A, AA, or AAA, depending on the company and various other factors.

Conforming to WCAG helps your company avoid violations of the Americans With Disabilities Act and other anti-discrimination laws.

Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

The United Nations developed the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) to detail the human rights of people with disabilities and eventually serve as a basis for legislation to protect these rights. Two articles of the CRPD apply to digital content accessibility:

Article 9, Accessibility, emphasizes the importance of understanding the issues that may prevent people with disabilities from using and comprehending your online content. Under this article, businesses should address accessibility as early as possible when developing digital offerings such as websites and apps. It also requires providing teams in your organization with training and support on these issues while adapting your digital publications to meet accessibility guidelines
Article 21 addresses freedom of expression and opinion, and access to information. This article mandates that businesses and organizations offer various formats of accessible content at no additional charge, defaulting to open formats whenever possible. The accessible version of publications should be available immediately to prevent inequalities in knowledge and information for people with disabilities.

Country-Level Regulations

Besides broad compliance with CRPD and WCAG for your organization, a business should familiarize itself with the detailed digital accessibility guidelines in its five largest international markets.

While WCAG aligns with compliance laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act in the United States, other countries may impose requirements not covered under these global standards. Besides checking the websites for the applicable local governments, you can contact the ministry or department of technology in those nations.

Global compliance with digital content accessibility regulations becomes more complex as your organization expands to new markets. Partnering with an experienced team can efficiently align your company’s online assets with the needs of individuals with disabilities.

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Reach out today to schedule a discussion with an iBridge team member to learn how we can help your business conform with WCAG standards.

Technology

Legal Support System Can Add Positive Value To Existing Legal Team

Most attorneys will attest that paralegals play a vital role in the growing legal industry. From conducting investigations, preparing legal briefs, and meeting clients on behalf of lawyers, to adopting complex and changing legal technologies, the legal support staff has grown significantly more important and taken on increasing responsibilities in recent years with increasing responsibility.

Paralegal services have become essential to any legal team, creating more opportunities and job openings than ever. Recently, a poll by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that more than 250,000 paralegals and paralegals work throughout the US. It is estimated that legal support services will increase by 15% over the next few years, and it is getting harder to find and hire paralegals.

How has the legal industry changed with time?

As the legal profession became more complex in the late 1960s, lawyers needed additional help to handle their workload. Lawyers began looking for experienced and talented attorneys to handle the tasks associated with solving cases.

Historically, paralegals were responsible for administrative and clerical work, which soon expanded to gathering evidence to preparing witnesses for cases; the paralegal and the paralegal’s roles have evolved from non-existent to ever-expanding.

The growing demand for paralegals has allowed universities to launch associate degree and certificate programs in paralegal training. Today, over 1,000 colleges and universities offer professional law programs ranging from one-year certifications to master’s degrees.

Approximately 250 of these professional courses are accredited by the American Bar Association. As a result, many law firms have grown in size and hired paralegals.

Until about 2005, it was commonly understood that there were two broad legal business categories:

Low volume, high value, complex work on the one hand
High volume, low cost, routine legal work

Law firms pursued the first category, calling them “high-end,” “big ticket,” and considered them price-insensitive. Law firm fees weren’t the decisive expense for big deals and disputes. Small legal support firms take on the second category of jobs, considered “routine” or “business as usual,” that a crowded marketplace had to offer at competitive prices.

The prevailing opinion at the time was that technology and knowledge management had a much broader scope for routine work where processes could be standardized than for high-end jobs where customers received a high-end touch of reliable service.

From 2005 onwards, however, as cost pressures on clients and law firms mounted, a new possibility emerged—that even the most complex and high-value deals and disputes could be disaggregated, broken down into parts. And most importantly, some of these components, such as document review or using cheaper labor (e.g., outsourcing or paralegal employment) or technology (at least in general), are now more mature and proven.

The common elements of more complex work are distributed to new companies (initially outsourcers of the legal process) and new entities within law firms that can do this work remotely at a low cost. On the other hand, the leading practices within law firms will continue, for the most part, as they have for decades.

How are legal services going to benefit businesses?

Over time, the role of law firms has also changed. Apart from the practice of law, they are responsible for performing legal research work on cases, processing investigations involving large volumes of documents, extracting relevant information from documents for attorneys, and providing litigation support.

Many expected functions are critical and time-consuming tasks for lawyers, but with the help of technology, legal support staff can efficiently complete all these tasks. This brings us to the next point: Technology.

Technology has transformed the role of paralegals into a strong multi-tasker with practical legal knowledge and customer service skills, but also legal technology experts. You can take advantage of this tectonic shift no matter the industry or area of law you practice.

As technology changes, legal services outsourcing has become a common practice for lawyers and law firms. It is a cost-effective solution that helps lawyers streamline their processes and get things done better, faster, and under budget. They have built-in expertise in handling paralegal matters such as litigation, contract management, and legal education.

How are legal services going to bring changes in the market?

Despite this call for change, the legal market has not responded at scale yet. In the global legal market valued at approximately US$850-900 billion, only 1.5% is served by alternative providers.

First, as noted above, traditional law firms did not face competitive pressure until they were forced to change. From this perspective, law firms were much more motivated to stand their ground than to create and manage a new uncompetitive market space. So they are more defensive than aggressive players.

Second, the lack of innovative new services is compounded because traditional legal services and traditional law firms are protected by regulation in most jurisdictions. This is perhaps most evident in the United States. The network of law firms in the United States is so vast that there can be no effective competition for non-legal professionals. Again, it is argued that the incumbent did not need to change, and the market regulates alternative providers.

The third-way law firms rely on their reputation under regulatory protection. They often complain that alternative provider innovations and new business models have yet to meet our customer’s needs fully, wants, and desires. Legislative innovation involves improving old processes and not introducing fundamentally new, fascinating, and commercially relevant services to customers.

When customers are presented with new solutions, systems, and business models that significantly reduce costs while maintaining the quality they demand, they will undoubtedly turn to these alternatives. An enlightened customer is why law firms change and are indeed their biggest threat.

Engage with iBridge LLC for a thoughtful discussion on transformation and innovation; it helps everyone.

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Legal

What Does e-Discovery Mean?

You want to reduce costs and maximize the value of every dollar spent. eDiscovery processes simplify everything from collecting, processing, normalizing, gathering, and hosting data to redacting data for transferring privileged information, providing productive web-based survey capabilities, and formatting select electronic records for production and analysis.

What is e-Discovery?

The essential aspect of e-Discovery refers to identifying and analyzing electronically stored information (ESI) in response to a request for production in court proceedings or investigations. iBridge is highly experienced in processing every type of electronic record, including email, documents, presentations, databases, voicemail, audio and video files, social media, websites, and more.

The discovery process in a digital world is often complicated by the sheer volume of electronic data generated and stored. In addition, electronic documents are more dynamic, unlike printed evidence, and often contain metadata such as timestamps, author and recipient information, and file properties. Retaining the original content and metadata of the ESI is necessary to prevent allegations of theft or falsification of evidence in subsequent proceedings.

How does an expert in the eDiscovery market help you serve clients better

Having an expert eDiscovery partner has several benefits when your client or business uses any tech for document creation, handling, or storage.

Among those, the five most important benefits that iBridge LLC provides are:

Minimizing Cost: While eDiscovery software offers more than just cost savings, it’s essential to understand how much time companies and departments can save with eDiscovery tools. A study found that Thomson Reuters takes about 51 minutes to find essential documents during proceedings. With the right eDiscovery technology, you can take it down to minutes. That time can then be allocated to higher-value tasks, allowing businesses and firms to provide better value to their customers.

Minimizing Error: One of the challenges of e-Discovery is the numerous documents that need to be managed. A small case may produce only one or two gigabytes worth of records, but this data may be composed of hundreds of files, many of which may not be related to the case itself. This applies especially to electronic communications. For example, by simply CC’ing someone in an email, dozens or even hundreds of emails might be added to the production. Appropriate eDiscovery tools can help you screen this massive pile of data by checking the relevance of your documents and eliminating redundant or irrelevant information.

Data Protection: Most legal teams understand the importance of protecting sensitive and personal information in many documents, but they do not always know the best way to protect it. Redacting content from a printed copy can be challenging enough, but digital files are fertile grounds for all sorts of mistakes. Without specialized eDiscovery software, legal departments and firms often commit traditional editing errors, such as black-boxing (redaction) the text or changing the reader’s color to match the document’s background, leaving the data visible to those who know how to access it. You can ensure that your organization complies with relevant privacy laws by editing sensitive content using an e-Discovery partner with the appropriate eDiscovery tools.

Compliance Work: There are complex standards for preserving ESI to maintain document integrity, and failure to comply with these laws can result in significant fines and penalties. Digitizing a document is much easier to save than maintaining a physical file. Still, without a dedicated ESI e-discovery solution, the job can quickly become a hassle. Manually saving a file to a hard drive without a well-planned structure is a recipe for misplaced files. To make matters worse, improperly converting a file from one format to another can change or delete metadata which is essential for demonstrating ESI compliance.

Better Accessibility to Data: Courts and legal entities often still rely on paper for many processes. However, the discovery process must be able to manage a variety of digital file formats when collecting documents, images, and other sources. Some legal departments believe they can rely on a patchwork of software to handle this data.

Even as digital solutions are gradually adopted in legal practices, there is still much to be done in the discovery process. With the dramatic increase in electronic documents over the last few decades, eDiscovery has emerged as the most misunderstood and mismanaged part of the litigation and investigation process. iBridge is here to help you understand and manage it properly.

iBridge’s eDiscovery services are designed to assist corporate legal departments and law firms increase operational efficiency without compromising quality or security. A thorough and experienced eDiscovery team and supporting technology can make or break your case, but it doesn’t have to break the bank. Talk to us about our eDiscovery services!

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Legal

How to Choose the Right Document Review Tool?

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Document review encompasses a wide variety of pre-trial preparation activities. Analyzing for privilege before production? Doc review. Determining the relevancy of thousands of unrelated documents to your case? Doc review. Tagging topics and hot docs? Doc review.

With the proliferation of electronic records, reviewing thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of documents, can seem daunting or impossible. But nothing is more critical to the success of your case or investigation than producing the right documents and finding the needles in the haystack.

What are the purposes of document review?

Document review aims to determine what information falls within the scope of discovery, i.e., is relevant and non-privileged.

Document review is the stage in which litigants determine the information they will produce to their opponents, or alternatively, the stage in which the opponent’s production is analyzed.

Document Review can also be used for other purposes, including regulatory investigations, subpoenas and third-party requests, internal investigations, and due diligence assessments regarding mergers and acquisitions.

What is the process of document review?

Today, most document review is achieved through human review teams working with specialized technology, often called technology-assisted review (TAR). Attorneys and legal support teams must understand the legal and factual aspects of the proceedings and make the necessary decisions regarding privileges and responses. Still, they must also understand the ins and outs of the review technology itself. These processes become easier as technology advances, but validation is still part of the e-Discovery Reference Model (EDRM), where you can often find the most significant cost savings.

Paralegals or other document reviewers typically label documents as privileged, relevant, or responsive. These specifications are called “tags.” Reviewers may apply case-specific tags to the issue depending on the review protocol, sensitivity tags specifically denoting ‘hot’ or ‘smoking gun’ documents, or auxiliary tags such as positive, neutral, or negative. Tags are a valuable work product for lawyers and should be retained whenever possible for documents involving multiple lawsuits.

With the right eDiscovery software, internal teams can quickly initiate legal holds, perform targeted retention and collection, process data super-fast, and securely view documents.

If you choose to work with iBridge LLC, we provide:

Cloud-Based Service: Investing in in-house cloud-native processing applications is an excellent opportunity for legal teams to save time and money and improve data security throughout the eDiscovery process. Find a solution based on an authentic cloud architecture. Don’t compromise on data security.
Well-organized: Before you start the culling process, you need to bring the data into your system and lay the foundation for successful eDiscovery. An adequately loaded and organized dataset can save time at every step. Everything from logical data storage to consistent naming conventions is smoother with iBridge.
Smarter Review– Once you’ve processed and organized your data and eliminated unresponsive information, you can start reviewing your documents. Streamline your process with standard features in modern eDiscovery software that is available with iBridge.

iBridge’s document review services are designed to assist corporate legal departments and law firms increase operational efficiency without compromising quality or security. A thorough and experienced document review team and supporting technology can make or break your case, but it doesn’t have to break the bank. Talk to us about our document review services!

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Legal

What is Computer Forensics?

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Cyber forensics is the application of investigative and analytical techniques to collect and preserve evidence from specific computer devices for presentation in court. Computer forensics aims to conduct a structured investigation and maintain a documented body of evidence to understand exactly what happened to a computing device and who was responsible.

Computer forensics is data recovery using regulatory compliance policies to validate the information in legal proceedings. The terms digital forensics and cyber forensics are often used synonymously with computer forensics.

Digital forensics begins with gathering information in a way that preserves its integrity. The investigator then analyses the data or system to determine if it was changed, how it was changed, and by whom. The use of computer forensics is not always associated with crime. The forensic process is also used as part of the data recovery process, collecting data from crashed servers, failed drives, reformatted operating systems, or any other situation where a computing device stops working unexpectedly.

How are computer forensics and Cyber Security going to help in your work?

In civil and criminal justice, computer forensics helps ensure the integrity of digital evidence presented in proceedings. With the widespread use of computers and other data-gathering devices in all fields, digital evidence and the forensic processes that collect, store, and investigate it are used to solve crimes and other legal problems. It is becoming more and more critical in an increasingly digital business environment.

The average person never sees much of the information devices collect. For example, a car’s computer continuously collects information about when the driver brakes, shifts gears, or changes speed without the driver’s knowledge. However, this information can prove very important in solving legal problems or crimes, and computer forensics is responsible for identifying and storing this information.

Digital evidence doesn’t just help solve crimes in the digital world, such as data theft, network breaches, and illegal online transactions; it also solves real-world crimes, such as robberies, assaults, hit-and-runs, and murders.

Organizations often use multi-tiered data management, data governance, and network security strategies to protect sensitive information. Well-governed and secure data helps streamline the forensic process when reviewing data. Organizations also use computer forensics to track information about the system or network compromises that can be used to identify and track cyber attackers. Companies can also leverage digital forensics experts and processes to assist in data recovery during system or network failure due to natural or other disasters.

What are the types of computer forensics?

There are many computer forensic investigations, each dealing with a specific aspect of information technology. Some of the main types are listed below:

Database Forensics: Examine information contained in both databases and associated metadata.
Email Forensics: Recovery and analysis of email and other information contained in email platforms.
Malware Forensics: Scan code to identify potentially malicious programs and analyze their payloads. Such programs may contain Trojan horses, ransomware, or various viruses.
Memory Forensics: Collects information stored in your computer’s random access memory (RAM) and cache.
Mobile Forensics: Investigation of mobile devices to obtain and analyze the information contained on mobile devices such as contacts, sent and received text messages, images, and video files.
Network Forensics: Monitor network traffic for evidence using tools such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems.

iBridge’s forensic services are designed to assist corporate legal departments and law firms increase operational efficiency without compromising quality or security. A thorough and experienced forensic team and supporting technology can make or break your case, but it doesn’t have to break the bank. Talk to us about our forensic services!

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Legal

How ‘Best Practice’ Contract Management Systems Work – II

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Each stage of a contract’s lifecycle must work at optimal efficiency for businesses to develop a framework of best practices. An automated contract management system can help streamline these processes, improve workflows, and reduce risk. Best practices are integrated with legacy programs and quickly rolled out across all departments.
How Best Practices Impact the 5 Stages of a Contract’s Lifecycle
Automated systems help streamline contract management tasks throughout the entire lifecycle of a document. There are five stages to a contract’s lifecycle, stretching from creation to storage. Well-designed solutions enhance best practices at every stage.
Creating Contracts
Centralized systems allow users to log in via standard internet browsers and create new contracts online. Customized HTML forms make drafting agreements easy and consistent. Users can enter data into open fields, text boxes, drop-down boxes, or radio buttons.
Companies can also create templates to maintain consistency and include all required legal terms.
Permission levels determine who can access or alter contractual details, such as the customer’s name, the commencement date, and the details of the service. By allowing varying levels of access, businesses can reduce the number of approval requests and increase productivity. For example, if the user is permitted to create or update specific details, he or she can perform the task quickly online without seeking additional approvals.
Negotiating Contracts
Negotiating the terms of a contract can quickly digress into a cluttered heap of email chains and faxed revisions. Smart contract management solutions simplify this process by logging all edits, responses, and revisions in one centralized database. Users can see when documents were downloaded, faxed, or emailed and who completed each action. This minimizes errors, which means negotiations can move forward smoothly.
Source: Pixabay
Signing Agreements
Businesses can employ barcode and image capturing technology to identify specific contracts, ensuring that each agreement matches its corresponding signature. Users can upload signed agreements directly to contract management systems and store them in centralized databases.
Storing Contracts
Paper contracts can become damaged, misplaced, or even lost when stored in filing cabinets. However, businesses can safely store digital copies in secure online databases and easily view, update, and edit them whenever necessary.
A centralized, automated system gives businesses access to a contract’s entire history, regardless of staffing changes. This allows businesses to monitor contractual agreements over time with greater consistency. The terms and conditions within each contract are automatically tracked, and renewal alerts are sent to relevant parties. Automating these processes reduces the number of manual tasks and develops a series of robust best practices.
Reporting
The speed and ease at which a centralized system can find and categorize contractual data allow users to focus on analyzing reports and projecting trends instead of conducting manual searches. By reducing the time spent searching databases, businesses can create a framework of best practices that better utilize the employee’s time.
Compliance and Integration
Integrating systems with existing programs enhance best practices. A comprehensive contract management system that updates, verifies, and monitors compliance issues can help reduce human error and mitigate risk.
An integrated contract management system that works with existing sales, procurement, and marketing teams can streamline processes across all departments. Users can initiate billing requests seamlessly, kick-off downstream delivery workflows quickly, and track sales data.

Legal

How ‘Best Practice’ Contract Management Systems Work – I

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The term Best Practices refers to corporate procedures that improve the efficiency of day-to-day operations. However, every business is different and requires more than just a one-size-fits-all solution. Therefore, customized systems are necessary for enhancing the specific processes that govern each business. Sophisticated contract management solutions work alongside legacy programs to create best practices that address the unique needs of each company.
What Are Contract Management Best Practices?
Contract management is a framework of processes that addresses the creation, storage, and reporting of legal agreements. These processes rely on the efficiency of the entire network. Best practices involved paper logs and physical filing cabinets. However, these methods can expose contracts to avoidable errors and impede productivity.
After a contract is created, it must be filed in a robust storage system that allows users to access documents quickly. Without an efficient storage system, new contracts can be lost or damaged. Similarly, without a consistent process for creating new contracts, categorizations can become messy, and finding documents can be time-consuming. One must develop best practices throughout the entire lifecycle of a contract to garner optimal results.
What is Contract Management Lifecycle?
The lifecycle of a contract encompasses every stage of its journey, from creation and negotiations to storage and reporting. A streamlined system allows businesses to complete each step using the most efficient solutions. There are five main stages in a contract’s lifecycle, each relying on the integrity of the other four:
Creation – The user designs or generates a new contract and enters specific data into the contract to reflect the terms of the agreements.
Negotiations – The user edits, updates, and changes details between parties as the terms are negotiated.
Signatures – The user sends the contract to all relevant parties, and the agreement is signed.
Storage – The user stores the signed contract in a database.
Reporting – Users can draw reports from stored data and use them to project trends.
There are many ways a user can perform these tasks. However, the ‘best practices’ approach must simplify the processes while maintaining flexibility and accuracy. Automated systems allow users to navigate these stages with ease and utilize the data more efficiently. For example, when using a centralized online database, alerts can be set to remind users of approaching renewals.
How Can Automated Contract Management Systems Promote Best Practices?
Automated contract management systems allow sales and procurement teams to draft, save, and edit contracts via a centralized database. Users can create contracts online, track changes, monitor revisions, and generate reports through one centralized system. Legal documents can be sent to clients, customers, and suppliers via email or fax, resulting in faster turnarounds. Through using an automated system, these day-to-day practices become more consistent and efficient, allowing businesses to divert more time and resources to generating robust revenue streams.
Integration
Integrating contract management solutions with legacy programs can help boost existing best practices and develop new ones. Users are no longer required to communicate requests across multiple platforms when using an integrated system. In doing so, the once slow, archaic ‘best practices’ of the past transform into one cohesive contract management system.

Legal

Departments That Benefit from a Successful Contract Management System

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Contract management procedures cross departmental boundaries and affect almost every aspect of operations. An automated management system helps streamline these processes and allows each department to create, retrieve, and monitor contract data more efficiently. While the benefits of an effective contract management solution impact all departments in an organization, there are six that can profit from its tools the most.
1. Sales Department
Integrated contract management solutions help sales teams create consistent legal agreements for products and/or services every time someone places a new order. Employees can use audit and revision tracking tools to alert team members whenever a user updates an item, generates a copy or downloads a new contract. Centralized systems allow employees to search for specific versions of the same contract and ensure that all active agreements are up-to-date.
With numerous tools available at the click of a button, sales teams using an automated contract management system can benefit from these advantages:
Increased Revenue – Clearer oversight and alert systems help reduce revenue leakage from missed renewals.
Easy Reporting – Contract status updates help team members generate accurate sales forecasts and meet compliance milestones
Reduced Errors – Automated contract creation helps reduce the number of manual errors when drafting new agreements.
2. Marketing Department
When using an automated system, marketing departments can ensure they use the same branding and content in all product contracts. Employees can input business terms, product descriptions, and pricing into templates and easily amend them. Updated templates automatically become available to the entire organization, eliminating the risk of using out-of-date marketing materials.
Marketing teams can use centralized databases to monitor and analyze specific product lines, special offers, and promotions. They can then use this data to forecast trends and maximize the success of a lucrative advertising campaign.
3. Procurement Department
Procurement teams can pull purchase data, such as volumes and prices, service level agreements (SLAs), terminations, and extensions from centralized contract management systems. Overseeing and renewing buy-side contracts is simple with access to scheduled alerts and company-wide databases. SLA milestones can be automatically reported, reducing the risk of lapsed contracts.
4. Fulfillment Department
Automated events, triggered alerts, and customized notifications help fulfillment teams improve workflow and meet delivery deadlines. Using modern contract management solutions, fulfillment teams can set alerts for when contracts are updated and require review. Without access to a centralized system or the ability to pull current contract data, fulfillment teams may be slow to execute deliveries or confirm that the terms have been satisfied.
5. Legal Department
The policies that underpin contractual agreements must be monitored and upheld. A comprehensive contract management solution helps streamline this process by granting legal personnel access to historical data, such as when an agreement was signed, who updated it, and when a renewal is required. Legal teams can access and update contract templates, ensuring that all terms and conditions are current, inputted correctly, and in the right format.
6. Finance Department
Using an integrated, centralized database, finance teams can avoid inputting the same information into multiple programs. Reporting on the status of a contract is easy, allowing team members to generate accurate revenue forecasts and reports. Using a streamlined contract management system has these advantages:
Increased security by maintaining accurate terms and conditions across all departments
Increased accuracy between reported revenue and contracted revenue through alerts and automation
Improved productivity by reducing service and delivery times through automation
Centralized programs help all departments manage contractual agreements with greater accuracy while protecting against unnecessary errors caused by messy manual systems.

Legal

How ERP/CRM Can Help Streamline Contract Management Systems

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Enterprise resource planning (ERP) programs, customer relationship management (CRM) tools, and Salesforce automation (SFA) systems can streamline processes and improve efficiency. These programs allow organizations to communicate across various departments, access centralized databases, and collaborate on tasks. Each department has immediate access to the most relevant, up-to-date information, allowing employees to improve workflows and reduce risk.
Automated contract management systems produce similar benefits. Creating, updating and monitoring contracts across multiple departments can help mitigate errors and improve workflows. However, these systems must be compatible with existing ERP and CRM programs to be truly beneficial.
Do ERP systems cover contract management?
ERP systems are centralized networks used to improve a company’s day-to-day operations. However, while ERP models are used to streamline a variety of tasks, research shows they do not address the needs of contract management. A study conducted by Goldman Sachs found that “ERP vendors cover 20% – 30% of the needs of most enterprises.” As a result, “50% – 60% of companies have funded extensions of their ERP systems, and most others have relied on offline spreadsheets, standalone databases, or homegrown solutions.” These findings imply that ERP models do not meet the agility needed to run contract management systems, leaving companies to adopt outdated methods.
2 Issues Facing Businesses with Existing ERP Systems
ERP systems that only cover 20% – 30% of a business’s contract management processes may fail to prevent costly errors, such as lapsed renewals, lost documents, and inconsistent legal terms. The solution is to improve and upgrade ERP systems to meet these needs. However, there are two hurdles facing businesses with existing ERP programs in place:
Loss of Investment – Board members may not be eager to introduce new programs that undermine or eradicate their original ERP investment. They may opt to use existing ERP programs and forgo the sophisticated tools needed to streamline contract management tasks.
Incompatibility – Adding a contract management solution that is not compatible with an existing ERP system can lead to a fragmented workflow and decreased efficiency. Asking employees to access multiple platforms that do not communicate across departments can lead to duplicate data entries and inconsistencies.
Therefore, satisfying the agile operations of contract management without diminishing existing ERP investments requires organizations to turn to robust, integrated programs that offer open architecture and access to legacy applications.
Benefits of Integrated ERP, CRM, and Contract Management Systems
By integrating a contract management system with an existing ERP or CRM program, organizations can utilize the positive aspects of their legacy networks while streamlining contract management tasks. If integrated, a smart contract management ERP system can produce these results:
Streamlined communication paths between departments
Increased efficiency in document retrieval and monitoring
Reduced risk of irregularities and subsequent compliance errors
Easy transitions for employees and less administrative training
Opportunity for strategic contract creation by utilizing existing databases
Companies have long benefited from programs that simplify procedures and work across all departments. Integrating compatible contract management solutions into your day-to-day operations can improve productivity, reduce risk, and lower costs.

Legal