Navigating Legal Complexities: Five Essential Takeaways from Our Recent Roundtable

Legal departments are grappling with unprecedented challenges as businesses strive to meet the demands of a rapidly changing future. In-house legal teams must become more agile and proficient in navigating the risks and implications of geopolitical conflicts, regulatory compliance, and the complexities of business transformation. To tackle these issues head-on, we regularly host roundtables with heads of legal operations, where we delve into the pressing concerns facing leaders and celebrate their successes.

5 Essential Takeaways

From our latest roundtable, we’ve distilled five key takeaways that highlight how solutions like Knowable can effectively mitigate these challenges and drive operational excellence.

1. Data Inconsistency: The primary role of an attorney is to negotiate the best deals, but they don’t spend much time making sure dates are accurate in Salesforce once the deal closes. Despite efforts to enforce data accuracy, one of our attendees performed a review using Knowable and discovered that 60% of their dates in Salesforce were incorrect, highlighting a critical gap in data accuracy that required automation and the elimination of manual data entry. Despite internal resistance to new technology, attorneys found the amount of time they saved locating contracts, assembling contract families, and determining active status irresistible.
2. Strategic Change Management: Capitalizing on a company acquisition that doubled their contract volume, another Legal Ops team shifted from in-house tools that delivered disparate and inaccurate data to Knowable with the help of their Office of Integration. They now benefit from structured metadata that provides precise and reliable answers to their critical questions every single time.
3. Reducing Dependencies: We heard about a sales team that initially relied on the legal department to clarify business terms like termination rights, which should ideally be easily accessible to Sales. To address this issue, Legal Ops granted the sales team access to Knowable. This shift allowed the sales team to independently manage, review, and analyze contracts, as well as generate usage reports. By empowering the sales team, the legal department significantly improved collaboration and efficiency between the two departments.
4. Cost Savings: For privacy projects, one of our attendees regularly hired external counsel for manual contract reviews—a time-intensive and costly practice. By leveraging accurate contract data centralized in one place through Knowable, it’s now easy to determine the active status of contracts, identify those with privacy clauses, and target the affected agreements without scrutinizing every contract in their portfolio.
5. Essential Requirements: With growing global scrutiny, responding quickly to changing regulatory frameworks and increased litigation demands is critical. A deep understanding of contracts is becoming essential, and transforming your process requires a clear grasp of contract relationships and hierarchies. Implementing a contract system of record (CSOR) has made it faster and easier for all our clients to conduct targeted searches that focus users on relevant information for each project.

In the ever-evolving landscape of business and regulatory challenges, legal departments must adapt and innovate to stay ahead. As our roundtable participants proved, leveraging a solution like Knowable can transform data accuracy, streamline strategic change management, reduce dependencies, and achieve significant cost savings. More legal operations teams can enhance efficiency, better navigate regulatory demands, and proactively contribute to their organization’s success—all by embracing the future of post-signature contract management.

Join a Roundtable

You do not need to be a Knowable client to appreciate a focused conversation on real-world, executed agreement problem-solving! We recognize the immense value of learning from your peers and will continue to provide opportunities for you to gather and connect firsthand. If you would like to be invited to a future roundtable, please submit your request here.