Brexit and contract law: How to use technology to renegotiate contracts faster in times of changing regulation
What will be the impact of Brexit on contract law?
The changes from Brexit mean that many organisations now have hundreds of commercial contracts they need to review proactively as they are affected by the implications of Britain leaving the EU. For many, this could be a manually intensive task requiring hundreds of hours of legal resources.
Legal teams need to review contracts to limit exposure to risk, check for compliance with new regulations, and manage data protection, pricing, and changes in tariffs.
How can technology help organisations renegotiate contracts faster?
- Rapidly search existing contracts with analytics software
AI-driven contract analytics can help legal teams rapidly search extensive collections of contract agreements by legal concepts and by keyword. Legal teams can automatically extract and compare critical clauses and terms side by side and identify Brexit risks and opportunities.
- Use a contract lifecycle management software to automate workflows
Streamline Brexit contract changes and clause reviews by using a contract lifecycle management solution to automate workflows. DocuSign CLM is easy to use and implement within the legal department and across an entire organisation. Using DocuSign CLM makes it painless for organisations to streamline the entire contract lifecycle and accelerate the reviewing process. Businesses using CLM can create an easily accessible library of pre-approved clauses that can be preconfigured to auto-populate contracts.
DocuSign Negotiate for Salesforce can also help to accelerate the contract renegotiation and approval process. It seamlessly integrates with Salesforce and pricing data and helps automate the agreement process. Negotiate is a great choice of solution for small and medium businesses requiring very little resources to get up and running.
- Manage consent easily with clickwrap agreements
A clickwrap agreement allows an organisation to manage and collect consent to the contract changes with ease. DocuSign Click is an easy-to-use, simple-to-deploy clickwrap solution that lets you capture customer consent to standard terms with a single click, lowering costs and risk, while improving the customer experience. Using Click to collect consumer consent for policies and clauses that are updated because of Brexit provides a simple solution to eliminate unnecessary risk, and it also provides a complete audit trail.
- Use eSignature software to update contracts
Using DocuSign eSignature allows you to send agreements that have been updated as part of a Brexit contract review quickly from any device. You can easily upload new contracts for customers and vendors to sign and return and complete document reviews in hours, not days.
Following Brexit, legal and procurement teams need to prepare for changing trade relationships. Companies that embrace technology will find it easier to find out what is in their existing agreements and to automate their workflow agreements to update them more quickly. Data privacy will continue to be necessary, and clauses will need to be continuously updated.
Legal and procurement teams that use technology to assist them through the updates will find they can do business faster with fewer risks and lower costs.