Start Smart When It Comes to Your CLM Implementation

Executing your CLM implementation smart is the topic of this lively podcast.  Listen in and hear how the CLM market has changed the world of corporate contracting.  Join two of the industry’s most knowledgeable resources, Bernadette Bulacan, Chief Evangelist at Icertis and Kami Paulsen, Managing Director at Elevate, for this conversation.

01:25 Meet Bernadette and Kami.

02:25 Legal ops teams cut their teeth on technology.  Today those learnings are being applied to CLM implementaitons.

04:56 CLM presents a great opportunity to introduce legal technology across the enterprise.

06:03 Big bang or a phased an enterprise CLM implementation,what's the best approach? 

07:12 Best practice includes stage gates, iterating, starting with a smaller universe of agreements and creating a team of champions.

08:50 Readiness includes ensuring your contract templates in order - and knowing where they are. 

09:50 Starting with a process like NDAs provides the experience to be applied to more complex processes.

11:20 The SOW process forces customers to look at Big Bang while starting small has the benefit of establishing and testing processes for a larger rollout.

13:42 The Elevate and Icertis SmartStart offering is front end loaded with harmonization for customers that don't have time for harmonization.

15:35 Once you harmonize the content developing workflows and KPIs are less daunting.

17:02 Capturing information in an organized way pays dividends.

21:12 Prioritization and understanding organizational drivers including consolidation, and turnaround can direct the implementation.

24:47 CLMs fail when the clients say, “This is our process, we have to do it this way” - and we give them a faster way to implement their bad process

26:31 Challenging process is imperative, you have to be ready to take a look at contracts, actual physical documents and the process and the people that are working. 

27:03 Technology is not a magic bullet, build a team of champions, have playbooks, be okay with iteration.

30:56 Programs like StartSmart and overall industry maturity have slowed the 3-year cycle of rip and replace.

31:39 Was it a training issue, or was it a change in management? what we've seen in development in the last few years is incredible, and companies that may have 10 years ago, now with everything being in the Cloud, it's opened up this entire new world of integrations

33:25 We are all moving very fast, if we take time in the beginning to slow down and look at the processes, where they're broken - before we take that leap of faith into CLM we'll benefit by having the ability to move much faster with information and data that's reliable.