You just approved a new privacy policy as per the latest government regulations. 

Now, the real work begins!

Coordinating with product and engineering teams to ensure the policy is updated on the website. 

Setting up a system to get customer consent again for the revised policy. 

There is considerable back-and-forth required, and you may still face issues. Either the engineering team uploaded the wrong agreement or did not set up the right system to record the consent. 

The entire process is really cumbersome for the legal team and makes you heavily dependent on others. In this post, we will discuss the problem with the standard website agreement management process in detail and suggest a solution.

The current problem with standard agreement management

All common website agreements, such as terms of service, privacy policies, copyright notices, end-user license agreements, and more, are currently managed by the legal team first. However, the legal team needs to approach the product or engineering teams to get these agreements live on the website. After being approached by the legal team, the engineering team manually uploads these agreements to web content management systems (CMS) to get them live. They may design the webpage for the agreement and set up the systems to get customer consent. It’s a big process, and here are the problems with it:

#1 Scattered data

According to a World Commerce & Contracting study, companies have contract data stored in an average of 24 systems. Legal, product, and engineering teams need help managing standard website agreements as they do not have a single source of truth or centralized system with which they can collaborate. 

#2 Manual process

The current process is heavily manual. The legal team has to approach the engineering team first. The engineering team manually uploads files to CMS. This process is prone to errors as both teams are manually tracking agreement versions. As a result, the engineering team may mistakenly take the wrong version of the agreements and upload it on the website. 

#3 Lack of systems 

Companies are still using regular CMS to manage website agreements. These CMS are not particularly designed to handle contract functionalities and do not provide required contracting features such as:

• Version control - A system to manage different versions of the contract.
• eSignature - An automated feature to get customer consent on agreements.
• Audit trail - A digital fingerprint to track all signatures. 

#4 Heavy reliance on website/engineering teams

As a legal team member, you are not able to manage these agreements independently. Every change (even if it is minor) requires considerable back and forth across multiple teams leading to delays or miscommunication. 

Our solution: SpotDraft LegalHub

SpotDraft LegalHub provides legal teams with an easy-to-use solution to set up and manage website agreements. It is a one-stop solution using which you can:

• Create and edit website agreements
• Store all website agreements (with history of all versions) in one place
• Publish agreements directly on the website.

It gives legal teams complete control over website agreements. 

Why use SpotDraft LegalHub over regular CMS for website agreements

Here are the top reasons to move to SpotDraft LegalHub for managing website agreements:

#1 Create centralized hub for agreements

You can store all standard agreements in one place, eliminating the risk of outdated agreements or unreflected edits. With SpotDraft LegalHub, you can also check all previously published agreement versions for reference.

#2 Manage multiple legal hubs

SpotDraft LegalHub allows you to create separate legal hubs for different entities, product lines, or geographies to ensure customers only see what is relevant to them. For instance, your customers in Canada will see a privacy policy relevant to their location. 

#3 Publish agreements directly on website with custom branding

With SpotDraft LegalHub you can make real-time changes to agreements on the website without relying on engineering or marketing teams to update them for you. You can easily incorporate these standard agreements into various locations, such as sign-up pages, website footers, etc. By using SpotDraft LegalHub, you can eliminate the risk of potentially updating agreements incorrectly, or not updating them at all due to dependencies on other teams and complex processes

SpotDraft LegalHub also provides control over appearance and branding. For instance, you can include logos or choose fonts and colors as per your brand. As a result, you can publish agreements under your branding without any heavy designing required. 

#4 Set up customer consent process in a click

SpotDraft also gives you the added benefit of easily setting up systems to get customer consent by SpotDraft Clickthrough. You can embed a small code snippet on pages where you need customer consent. Customers get a checkbox that they can click to give consent to the policies (terms of use, acceptable use policy, privacy policy, etc). No need for any extensive coding to set up this system. 

Example of SpotDraft Clickthrough

How does SpotDraft LegalHub work?

Here is a detailed walkthrough of how you can manage website agreements by SpotDraft  LegalHub: 

Step 1: Go to the LegalHub Manager

Step 2: Create a new agreement or select the agreement you want to edit. 

Step 3: Add the agreement terms or edit the existing terms.

Step 4: Click ‘Publish’ to get the agreement live on the website. 

Step 5: While publishing, you can also check the version that will go live on the website and click the checkbox if you need customer consent on the agreement through Spotdraft Clickthrough.

Get complete control over website agreements with SpotDraft LegalHub

Managing website agreements is essential for ensuring compliance and reducing risks. Spotdraft LegalHub not only helps you manage the agreements effectively but also supports your compliance efforts. Get a quick demo to see things in action.