A smart contract repository is a must-have for all businesses

The first and most essential step to better manage your legal contracts is to set up a centralized contract repository to store all your contracts.

A contract repository is a place where your contracts are stored. In the past, prior to the advent of technology solutions, it was often a filing cabinet or even an entire storage room, where paper copies of signed contracts were kept (not always in a well-organized manner, let’s be honest), with only a few people having a key or a badge to access it.

Nowadays, while these filing cabinets or storage rooms may still exist to store paper copies, most contracts are fully digitized (or at least an electronic copy of each signed contract is made) so they can be retrieved effortlessly and quickly.

This new way of storing contracts electronically has a lot of benefits, including reducing storage costs while making it easier to retrieve copies of signed contracts, but digital contract storage comes with its own challenges:

• You need to store all your electronic copies of contracts in one place, as it helps create a consistent view of them (if each business team stores their contract on their own server or uses their own software, top management will lack global vision).
• You need to store electronic copies in a well-organized manner with strong search capabilities in order to be able to retrieve signed contracts in a few clicks.
• You need to properly manage who can access the electronic copies of your contracts, just like you managed the access to your filing cabinet or storage room.
• You need to ensure that your employees save the electronic copies of the contract they’re managing where they should, rather than just keeping them in their mailbox or on their desktop.

AODocs CLM, a Contract Repository Built on Top of Google Drive

With AODocs CLM, our contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution, your contracts are securely stored on your company’s Google Drive. They are owned by a technical account within your Google Workspace domain, with access and ownership configured for the library. AODocs is built on top of Google Drive, with additional features and an additional security layer to properly safeguard your contracts and any other critical documents.

By storing all your contracts or other legal documents in AODocs CLM, you can:

• Store contract records with configured corporate ownership (corporate ownership): Use the repository instead of the My Drive of your employees or, worse, on their desktops or old emails with an ownership and offboarding process to preserve access when employees leave.
• Configure who can access your contract records: With AODocs, you can set up specific access rights per contract (or type of contract per type of contract). For instance, ensuring that only your HR teams will be able to access employment contracts. Or an account manager will have access only to the contracts of the clients he is managing, rather than having access to all your clients’ contracts.This ability to set up granular permissions allows you to share confidential and personal data only on a need-to-know basis, to support your confidentiality rules. Legal and privacy reviewers should determine the applicable obligations; permissions alone do not establish compliance.
• Search your contract records: Use metadata, filters, as well as full-text searches (thanks to our OCR technology) to easily find the contract you need with just a few clicks. Retrieval depends on consistent metadata, indexed content and the user's access rights.
• Properly save and manage all versions of a contract: AODocs CLM allows you to manage multiple versions of the same contract. During negotiation, you can store all versions of the same contract to be able to easily look at or restore a past version or run a comparison check between two different versions.
• Integrate with your e-signature tool to automatically save signed contracts: AODocs CLM integrates with DocuSign and Adobe Sign and allows you to easily send contracts for signature, track that they have been signed, and, most importantly, automatically save back the signed contracts into your central contract repository (as the last version of the concerned contract). Moreover, thanks to its API, other e-signature integrations require supported APIs, field mapping and a tested signature-status and signed-file return path.
• Review recorded actions on your contracts: In AODocs CLM, review the supported document events and the available user and timestamp information in audit records. Confirm event coverage and retention for your use case.

AODocs CLM is Not Just a Contract Repository. It’s a SMART Contract Repository

AODocs CLM is more than just a centralized contract repository. Yes, it brings you corporate ownership granular permissions, version control, strong search capabilities, and audit log. But it brings so much more. It’s engineered to:

• Set up alerts and reminders to prompt follow-up on key events (e.g. payment date, renewal date, etc.)
• Extract Google Sheet or Excel reports for audit or reporting purposes. Do you want the list of all your effective contracts above $100k? How about a list of all contracts that shall be renewed in less than three months? Where the required metadata and export functions are configured, filtered results can be exported to a Google Sheet or Excel.
• Set up advanced dashboards to gain a global perspective of all your contracts, showing the information that you deem to be important.

Beyond a smart contract repository, AODocs CLM can bring a lot more to your business, notably with automated contract generation, real-time collaboration, dynamic approval workflows, etc.

Check our earlier blog post on “Why Should You Automate Your Contract Management Process” to find out the 10 key benefits of a CLM Solution.