Legal Contracts Use Case

Today, the typical contract creation process looks something like this:

Brent, the major accounts representative at a large manufacturing firm, needs to enter into a sales agreement with a customer. He begins the process by sending an e-mail to his company's corporate legal counsel with the proposed details of the contract. A few days later, the attorney sends a first draft of the contract back to Brent, who then sends it to his vice president for approval. The vice president makes a few changes, approves the contract and e-mails it back to both Brent and the corporate counsel. The attorney then replies to the vice-president's e-mail with one small change and gives her approval. Finally, with all of the necessary approvals in place, Brent sends the contract to Julie, his customer contact.

Julie reviews the contract, makes a couple of changes and sends it out to her review team, which includes her supervisor, the corporate legal counsel and the CFO. Each of them sends edits back to Julie by e-mail, copying the group. Now, Julie has her version plus three other versions in her e-mail. She goes through all of these different versions one by one and manually types or pastes the changes into her main file.

Next, she e-mails the edited version to the group again and receives even more comments for the final version. After making the final changes, she sends the approved contract back to Brent.

Brent reviews the document line by line to see what changes Julie has made to the contract and sends it back out to his group for final approval. They approve it, and the contract is finally signed.

With so many different parties involved, it's no wonder that this process is so chaotic, inefficient and error prone. With so many disconnected versions of the contract in circulation, it's far too easy to miss an edit, spend time working on the wrong version, or accidentally send out the wrong version to be signed.

With NextPage 2, the bid and proposal process looks very different:

As Brent and his colleagues edit the contract, they know exactly who has the latest version and how different versions of the document relate to each other. Each member of the team is alerted as soon as there is a newer version of the document available, and they receive notification if they accidentally open an older, outdated version of the contract. When the editing process is complete, Brent knows he is sending the right version to Julie, his customer contact.

As Julie reviews and edits the contract and sends it to other people for review, Brent always knows when Julie and her team are working on the document. However, because he isn't copied on Julie's e-mails as she reviews the contract with her team, he will not know who has seen the contract or reviewed it. In fact, he will not see what changes were made to the contract until Julie sends back her finalized copy of the document, preserving the privacy and confidentiality between both companies.

When Julie sends the contract to her supervisor, legal counsel and the CFO, she is fully aware of who has made changes to the document. And with the NextPage 2 Compare feature, she can see exactly which changes each person has made. This gives Julie complete control over the contract review process and helps her integrate all changes back into her master version of the contract.

As soon as Brent receives the approved version from Julie, he gets a notification that he has received the latest version of the document. He can see exactly what changes Julie has made by using NextPage's Compare feature. Because the changes are clearly marked, Brent simply reviews the changes and sends the document out for final review.

With NextPage 2, Brent gains the confidence of knowing he's sending a complete, final and approved version of the contract out to be signed. He knows the document includes all of the changes requested by both companies. And he saves hours of valuable time by using a more efficient, streamlined process.