Solution
Saving 3-4 Hours Monthly with Powerful Search & Reporting Functionality
Elemica's legal team initially used IntelAgree to read and track attributes within MSAs. But what started as trying to understand MSAs quickly expanded to tracking attributes in every single contract template — including software license and maintenance agreements, product orders, and DPAs.
"One of the things that surprised me the most is how well the custom attributes work," Brad said. "Going into it, I figured it would require a lot more work compared to out-of-the-box attributes. But I'm amazed at how well the system understands what we're looking for."
Now, with custom attributes tracking data that matters most to Elemica, Brad and Sara Zang, Elemica's legal intern, can find answers to contract-related questions almost instantly.
"Last year the finance department asked us which contracts allow us to increase prices, and we had an answer for them within 15 minutes," Brad said. "We never would have been able to do that before.”
Brad and his team now save three-to-four hours per month in productivity by using IntelAgree's powerful search functionality and its native Salesforce integration.
"Before, if someone asked us how many contracts contained a specific clause, I'd have to sift through over 160 contracts," Brad said. "Now we can have an answer in minutes, and I have more time freed up for contract negotiation."
Eliminating Information Silos with Salesforce Integration
IntelAgree makes it easy to find and store contracts — and that's one of the reasons why Brad stopped using Salesforce as a repository.
"Salesforce is great as a CRM, but it has a lot of limitations when it comes to storing contracts," Brad said. "IntelAgree is designed specifically for legal teams, so it provides a lot of flexibility that Salesforce didn't have."
Plus, inconsistent naming conventions and vague hierarchy made it difficult to find contracts in Salesforce.
"Over the last 16 years, we've changed how we use Salesforce probably three or four times," said Brad. "There was no clear hierarchy or naming convention. If a contract wasn't named — for example, DOW or MSA — you would never find it because the system wasn't reading the contracts."
Now, IntelAgree's native Salesforce integration syncs data between both platforms, giving users complete visibility and direct access to contracts within Salesforce.
"With our tools connected, I'm not getting as many questions about where to find contracts," Brad said. "IntelAgree's implementation team made sure that contracts were linked and named correctly, so there aren't any mismatches between the systems.”
“Our sales team can find contracts directly in Salesforce, the tool they use daily. That's one of the ways IntelAgree has impacted the organization as opposed to just legal — the self-service aspect."
Enhancing Business Decisions with Contract Intelligence
When Elemica's CEO, David Muse, asked Brad to vet potential CLM software, he had one request: Find a solution that automatically reads and interprets contract terms.
Muse wanted to understand, in a quantitative way, how healthy Elemica's contracts are — especially as the company seeks more acquisitions.
One way Muse wanted to measure the health of contracts was to determine which contracts were unfavorable. So, Brad and his team narrowed down ten attributes that would deem a contract favorable or unfavorable. Then, they established parameters for these attributes, generated a report, and scored each contract according to whether they had optimal or suboptimal terms for each of these attributes.
"One attribute we looked at was whether or not a contract was on our paper," Brad said. "If the answer was yes, it got a higher score. If the answer was no, it got a lower score.”
“After we analyzed these ten attributes across all of our contracts, we could easily pinpoint our lowest-scoring — or most unfavorable — agreements. Then, we advised the sales team to cancel those contracts and get it on our paper."
And for Brad, using IntelAgree for "contract triage" is just the start; moving forward, he wants to track quarterly KPIs related to payment term variances, conversion rate of unfavorable to favorable contracts, etc.
"We're leaps and bounds over where we were three years ago," Brad said. "When it comes to acquisitions and the contracts we receive, I'm confident IntelAgree will provide the intelligence we need from those documents."
"We have a platform for growth. We have a process that will scale with us as we grow. And I think we're following our own advice to our clients, which is to automate more of what you do. We modernized our business by digitizing our contracts."
