Pharmaceutical manufacturer streamlines contract workflows.

Managing multitudes of contracts.

The lean legal team within the U.S. branch of this pharmaceutical company experienced challenges in managing hundreds of agreements. 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. Doing so would require 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.

Streamlining and automating contract lifecycle management.

The legal team needed a solution that would help them intelligently automate the production of contracts with preapproved, standardized language. The pharmaceutical manufacturer turned to Workday Contract Lifecycle Management, powered by Evisort 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). 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 Workday Contract Lifecycle Management, powered by Evisort AI, to prepare a CDA template containing the company’s ideal language and then make it easily accessible in a central location. The team 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 preapproval process ultimately reduced the number of documents the legal team had to review. Fewer legal reviews, coupled with the fast, intuitive search and workflow tools in Workday, significantly expedited the negotiation of new CDAs.

Impacting business outcomes and expanding platform applications.

Before adopting Workday Contract Lifecycle Management, 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 Workday Contract Lifecycle Management 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 Workday Contract Lifecycle Management to quickly search for assignment provisions throughout the other company’s contracts.

In addition to speeding up contract review, the team is also using Workday Contract Lifecycle Management to identify their preferred language from existing contracts and using those ideal clauses to generate new contract templates to help increase 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 Workday Contract Lifecycle Management platform.