The contract creation process is riddled with inefficiencies, right from when a contract request is initiated to all the internal back-and-forth for finalizing the terms.

But in the modern business world, no legal team has the time or resources to spend on inefficient operations. Luckily, you can automate and speed up this process to generate contracts quickly and efficiently — without having to create them from scratch or duplicate old contract versions.

Here’s how to nail your contract generation process.

What is contract generation?

Contract generation is an automated, streamlined process for drafting and customizing legal agreements. It’s the first stage of the contract lifecycle, and includes the use of tools and tech to enable faster contract creation.

What does the contract generation process typically look like?

The contract generation process typically involves three stages:

#1 Creating contract templates and playbooks

The very first step to efficient contract generation is to standardize your high-volume contracts and create contract templates within your contract management system. This ensures that you have all your important clauses in one place without having to dig around in past contracts or continuously refer to your playbook.

This step also involves creation of playbooks that will govern your templates and boilerplate contracts, detailing different fallback versions of clauses, key terms, and more.

#2 Generating contracts on your contract management platform

Once you have your templates in place, business teams like Sales can generate these contracts independently without having to send a request to Legal to do it for them. All they would need to do is fill in the questionnaire form with the party and deal details, which will populate the contract with the necessary information.

#3 Sending generated contracts out for internal review and approval

Once the contract has been generated, it will then get routed for internal review and approval according to the workflow settings you selected during the first step. This may involve legal review, finance approval, conditional approvals based on deal terms, etc.

5 ways to efficiently generate contracts (with SpotDraft)

The contracting process can be complicated and time-consuming. If you’re trying to streamline your contract generation process, we’ve outlined 6 efficient ways to generate contracts, depending on what type of contract it may be and who’s on the other side of the deal.

#1 Use pre-approved contract templates to automate high-volume contracts

Contracts like NDAs, MSAs, and purchase order forms, which have a fairly high volume during the normal course of business, can be standardized as contract templates.

These pre-approved templates will enable business teams to send out fully compliant contracts independently within minutes, without having to route everything through the legal team. This, in turn, will allow legal teams to focus on strategic legal work, complex contract and compliance issues, and negotiations.

#2 Send personalized contracts to multiple counterparties in one go

There are some contracts and agreements, such as invoices and employee agreements, that are often sent out in bulk to vendors and employees. This often becomes an extremely tedious process that takes up a lot of time and manual effort.

Instead, you can automate this process with contract management platforms like SpotDraft, which allow you to create campaigns and send out personalized contracts to multiple parties at the same time. This way, you’re able to save hours on manual work and track the status of all your contracts in one place.

#3 Share ready-to-sign links for non-negotiable contracts in seconds

SpotDraft allows you to create pre-approved, boilerplate contract templates, such as NDAs or user consent forms, that can be sent out to counterparties immediately. You can share these as a unique link (some of our customers even turn them into QR codes!), where the counterparty can then fill in their details and sign.

#4 Embed contracts within your website or app to quickly onboard users and vendors

You don’t need to ask counterparties to sign contracts through your CLM’s interface or, worse, manually after you send them an email. With SpotDraft, you can easily embed your boilerplate contracts to your website, allowing users and vendors with access to quickly execute contracts with you.

SpotDraft user, Pepper Content, uses this feature to bring educators onto their platform, making the onboarding process 94% faster for them!

We partnered with SpotDraft to embed the entire signature collection flow as a part of the onboarding. It converted a time-consuming process that required constant follow-up into a frictionless experience for our end users. The SpotDraft team has been a true partner to us.
‍
— Anirudh Singla,
Founder & CEO, Pepper Content

#5 Execute Clickthrough agreements in seconds

Use Clickthrough agreements (also known as clickwrap or click-to-accept agreements) to allow users, vendors, and counterparties to quickly accept contracts such as terms of service, privacy policy, subscription agreements, consent and authorization agreements, and more.

You can embed these agreements within your sign-up or onboarding flows, and track status of different versions accepted by different users.

Bonus: Streamline contract authoring with our MS Word contract editor

If you deal in a lot of complex, highly-negotiated contracts for which you can’t create templates, worry not. You can make that process as seamless as possible through SpotDraft’s integration with MS Word, so you can host your workflow and processes on your CLM without having to ditch the familiar MS Word environment.

This will allow you quick access to your playbook within your CLM, segregate comments for your team and for external parties, assign tasks, and so much more.

See it in action here: Announcing: Microsoft Word on SpotDraft

Benefits of using contract generation software

Establish robust contract standardization

CLMs help you build a library of pre-approved contracts through contract standardization. You can turn high-volume, low-risk contracts such as NDAs and terms of services into a standard template with customizable parameters.

“First, I worked on setting up contract templates and contracting guidelines that every lawyer in the team dealing with contracts must use and follow. Doing so, we were able to bring in a lot of order to the system.”
~ Bhavna Singh, General Counsel and Data Protection Officer at Subex Limited

By leveraging CLM solutions to build and maintain a standard template repository, you can:

• Empower other departments to customize contracts within controlled parameters
• Reduce legal team workload by up to 60%
• Accelerate the contract lifecycle from creation to execution
• Ensure greater consistency across all agreements

Enhance contract organization and accessibility

A cloud-based CLM solution addresses the perennial challenges of sifting through contracts with a centralized platform for storage and retrieval. These software offer advanced search capabilities, custom views based on key metrics (e.g., expiry date, jurisdiction, contract value), and real-time approval processes.

Such centralization not only saves time but also reduces the risk of overlooking critical contract elements or deadlines.

Improve compliance and risk management

“If you try to read a complex contract carefully, from front to back, and expect to understand it on just the first read-through, that’s wishful thinking and potentially very messy.”
~Sterling Miller, CEO and Senior Counsel, Hilgers Graben PLLC
Ten Things: How to Read a Contract

CLM software addresses this challenge with AI-powered editors that can rapidly review huge volumes of contracts, identify potential risk factors such as unfavorable clauses or non-standard terms, and flag outdated language or inconsistencies. Such a quick and proactive approach to contract review helps maintain compliance and reduce risk exposure with minimal manual intervention.

Get better visibility and analysis of your contracts

Traditional legal processes often lack clear, tangible outputs, making performance tracking and reporting a time-consuming endeavor. Modern CLMs take away that pain point by giving you a 360-degree view of your contract processes, KPIs such as time-to-approval and average turnaround time, and custom reporting dashboards. With such in-depth insights, you can make data-driven decisions and showcase your work’s impact to the right stakeholders.

Why you need a contract generation software?

Skeptical about whether you really need a tool to do all of this for you? Here’s why a contract generation software or an all-in-one CLM platform like SpotDraft can be so valuable for you:

#1 You’ll save hours and days in time

If you’re creating contracts manually every time the legal team gets a new request, you’re losing time that can be spent on more strategic work that will drive impact for the business. In such cases, the legal function usually gets stuck in a vicious cycle of trying to keep up with day-to-day requests and putting out fires as they come in.

#2 Version control is easier

Creating contract templates and playbooks, and hosting them on your contract generation software, will save you from the nightmare that is version control. You will be better positioned to negotiate and close contracts faster by having your best language, fallback clauses, and latest versions of contract templates right where you need them.

#3 Enhanced user and customer experience

Most non-lawyers generally think of contracts as a hassle. By automating and streamlining this process for them, you’ll make collecting signatures and consent easier for both parties, improving both their experience as well as your contract closure metrics.

The best contract generation software list

To help you streamline your contract generation, we’ve researched and shortline 7 best contract generation software. These platforms stand out with their array of features, cost-effective pricing, and strong client portfolio:

1. Spotdraft
2. Ironclad
3. PandaDoc
4. DocuSign
5. Concord
6. Contractworks
7. Coupa

1. SpotDraft

SpotDraft is a complete contract lifecycle management software that helps you simplify, automate, and accelerate your legal processes.

SportDraft’s key features:

• Contract repository: Store and organize your contracts in a secure location and pull in the required contract with advanced semantic search.
• VerifAI: Review documents and get improvement suggestions with VerifiAI, an MSWord add-on, powered by generative AI.
• Native e-signature: Collect legally binding and secure signatures in compliance with ESIGN (USA), eIDAS (Europe), and ECA (UK).
• Contract analytics: Unveil hidden insights, improve your contracting processes, and make data-driven decisions.
• Contract automation: Build workflows to out contract management on autopilot. Reduce approval delays, minimize risk, and auto-assign tasks with workflows.

Also read: Tools & Tips to Automate the Contract Creation Process

2. Ironclad

Ironclad is an AI-powered contract management software that helps legal teams create, review, and manage contracts.

Ironcald’’s key features:

• Ironclad AI: Analyze contract data with over 190 automatically detected contract properties.
• Automate contract creation: Drag and drop workflow designer to build automated processes.
• Customizable reports: Track contract performance by stage, volume, type, and workflow.

3. PandaDoc

PandaDoc is a contract management software focused on document creation, management, and signatures.

PandaDoc’s key features:

• Built-in e-signature: Collect signatures without relying on third-party apps.
• Vast template library: 1000+ templates spanning various contract types along with features to create and save custom templates.
• Real-time alerts: Expedite the contract approval process.

4. DocuSign

DocuSign is one the oldest and most widely used solutions to automate the e-signature process. Over the years, the tool has transformed into a complete CLM solution, letting you create, manage, organize, and track contracts.

DocuSign's key features:

• Real-time collaboration: Ask for feedback, get approval fast, and keep your team in the loop.
• Central contract management: Store and organize contracts in a central location to access them promptly.
• AI-assisted editing and reporting: Identify risk elements and bottlenecks with AI-powered contract reviews.

5. Concord

Concord helps you enhance collaboration and automate contract processes with its comprehensive contract management tools. It is designed to streamline the entire lifecycle of a contract, from creation to execution.

Concord’s key features:

• Real-time collaboration: Draft, edit, and approve documents quickly while communicating changes with internal and external stakeholders.
• Automated workflows: Automate approvals and reminders process to move contracts through different stages efficiently.
• Unlimited e-signatures: Collect as many signatures as you need no matter the pricing plans.

6. Contractworks

ContractWorks is a cloud-based contract management software designed to simplify the management of contracts from drafting to execution.

Contractworks key features:

• Reporting and alerts: Track important data through custom tags and get real-time alerts.
• Contract repository: Keep your data secure and organize them in easy-to-access intuitive folders.
• Approval workflows: Automate contract approvals and speed contract closing by setting up pre-defined conditions and logic.

7. Juro

Juro is an AI-enabled contract automation platform designed to streamline the contract management process for legal and business teams.

Juro’s key features:

• Approval workflows: Build customizable approval workflows for selective contracts and send trigger approval reminders.
• Alerts and reminders: Track contracts and manage upcoming deadlines by setting up automated contract reminders.‍
• Dynamic contract repository: Store and organize contracts and access them quickly with powerful search capabilities and data analytics.

Choose SpotDraft to automate contract generation for you

Ready to simplify contract generation for you and your team? Get a demo of what we have to offer today.