A major Pharmaceutical Manufacturer, committed to a holistic approach to the health and well-being of people, strives to create innovative, original pharmaceutical and nutraceutical products. This manufacturer partners with hundreds of other organizations, from health clinics to academic medical centers, to deliver novel solutions to healthcare challenges.

For the lean legal team within the American branch of this Pharmaceutical Company, managing hundreds of agreements presented challenges. The team knew that they needed to make the legal function more accessible to the rest of the business and simplify and accelerate contract approvals. That required minimizing both review time and the number of documents that needed legal review so that the legal team could focus on more strategic work and avoid outsourcing reviews to expensive outside counsel.

The legal team decided to start by creating self-serve contracting processes. Many of the agreements they work with are of a similar type and contain standard terms. Streamlining the process of creating largely identical agreements would allow them to focus their time on individual edits that require their attention, enabling them to be a more strategic partner to other business units.

The legal team needed a solution that would help them intelligently automate the production of contracts with pre-approved, standardized language. The Pharmaceutical Manufacturer turned to Evisort’s proprietary, contract-focused artificial intelligence (AI), which offers features for managing everything from contracting workflows to e-signatures.

The team decided to start their contract transformation journey by automating the creation of Confidential Disclosure Agreements (CDAs), which are relatively standard contracts of three to four pages. Anytime the business engages with a potential partner, such as a clinical site, the possible partner must sign a CDA. This means that every time the manufacturer expands operations to new locations – a key priority for the company’s growth goals – the legal team is inundated with CDA review requests and, subsequently, change requests from the prospective partners. With their high volume, relatively low risk, predictable edit requests, and minimal approval process, CDAs were a perfect way to get started and prove the value of adopting contract lifecycle management technology.

The company’s legal team used Evisort to prepare a CDA template containing the company’s ideal language and make it easily accessible in a central location. They also identified backup positions for negotiation so that colleagues from other parts of the business would know whether a counterparty’s request was within acceptable parameters.

Documents within those predefined parameters don’t require sign-off from the legal team, so equipping team members with this built-in pre-approval process ultimately reduced the number of documents the legal team had to review. The reduced number of legal reviews, coupled with Evisort’s fast, intuitive search and workflow tools, significantly expedited the negotiation of new CDAs.

Before adopting Evisort, it could take the Pharmaceutical Manufacturer’s legal team up to five business days for a CDA to reach the front of the queue. After adopting the AI-powered CLM platform, however, processing a CDA with changes now takes just 10 minutes. That’s a colossal time savings with quantifiable metrics for the legal team, and it helps the rest of the business move faster so the business can meet its growth goals.

Now, the company’s legal team is ready to expand their use of Evisort to other, more complex types of contracts, to further minimize escalations and reduce the amount of time the attorneys and paralegals spend reviewing documents. This expedited review applies not only to new deals, but also to business transformation. As the business integrates with one of its sister companies, the legal team is using Evisort to quickly search for assignment provisions throughout the other company’s contracts.

In addition to speeding up contract review, the team is also using Evisort to identify their preferred language from existing contracts, using those ideal clauses to generate new contract templates, increasing efficiency across the entire contract lifecycle.

Investing in contract intelligence has provided benefits beyond time savings. From enhancing business intelligence to making the pharmaceutical manufacturer more attractive to legal job candidates in a competitive hiring market, the legal team sees their investment continuing to pay dividends as they expand their use of the Evisort platform.