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At FirstDocs, our design philosophy centers around the rapid deployment of flexible, extensible, complete services that you can start quickly and use easily. Unlike systems that take months to install and more months to learn to use, FirstDocs designed Secure GC™ to work the way you work – your contracts, your workflows, your rules….our technology-leveraged services and people.
The result? Fast implementations and smooth transitions to the next generation of on-demand contracts.
From contract creation to contract lifecycle management to technology-leveraged outsourcing services to seamless integration capabilities, FirstDocs can automate and accelerate your business contracts -- and your business – more quickly than you might think. |
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| Today, businesses require their legal departments to handle more contracts more quickly than ever before. Designed by lawyers for lawyers, Secure GC’s On-Demand Contracts helps these departments better leverage their judgment and better allocate their resources. |
| “In order to capture the value and manage the risks and compliance issues inherent in their business opportunities, companies today increasingly need to integrate their legal processes with the activities of other departments.” |
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Business models today are increasingly complex, featuring more vendors, suppliers, channel partners, independent contractors, and outsourcing entities than ever before. Each year, more enterprises are executing more contracts of greater complexity.
According to a recent Association of Corporate Counsel survey, transactional work now occupies the majority of legal department time and resources.
At the same time, shifting markets and rising financial pressures are forcing enterprises to intensify their revenue and cost management efforts while skyrocketing regulatory burdens are straining their compliance and risk management efforts.
Together, these trends require today’s legal departments to create more contracts more quickly than ever before, all while exercising greater control over, and maintaining greater visibility into, each of those contracts.
That’s where FirstDocs comes in. Our Secure GC™ services combine our powerful, proprietary document and workflow technologies with our extensive business law and business process experience to provide next-generation enterprise service to busy in-house legal departments.
Basically, we do for your company’s legal department what Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Salesforce Automation solutions do for your sales department: we reduce the repetitive, reiterative tasks that keep high-value staff from focusing on high value-add work.
With Secure GC™ services, your legal department will collaborate better and faster with the rest of the company, accelerating revenues, driving compliance, and reducing risk.
(1) collaborate more efficiently with the other departments and lines of business;
(2) integrate legal processes more closely with business and financial processes and controls; and,
(3) automate repetitive and reiterative tasks that get in the way of higher value-add work. |
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By accelerating drafting, automating approval, and enforcing compliance with internal rules, Contract Automation solutions can help move deals forward while holding risks and costs down.
Most corporate counsel are experienced and highly skilled; they possess the specific industry and jurisdictional expertise necessary for providing sharp legal judgment on behalf of their enterprise clients.
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| But too often, their enterprise’s contract processes – manual, repetitive, reiterative, lacking visibility – frustrate the efficient exercise of this legal judgment. Painstakingly, schedules and statements of work and supporting agreements are revised, reviewed, and attached. Labor-intensive processes slow business opportunities and distract high-value employees from high value-add work. Cascading emails carry multiple iterations of multiple redlined document versions to multiple constituencies within the enterprise, clogging servers and schedules. Non-standard clauses proliferate. Risks multiply. By accelerating drafting, automating approval, and enforcing compliance with internal rules, Contract Automation solutions |
| Contract Automation is the efficient use of technology-assisted services to accelerate the opportunity-to-execution phases of business transactions: it includes the collection of transaction information from multiple people or systems within the enterprise, the systematic use of that information to drive assembly of appropriate enterprise transaction documents (or to assist the intake and editing of counterparty transaction documents), the simultaneous capture of key transaction data for export to contract and enterprise management functions, and the systematic routing, approval, and execution of documents, all according to prescribed dynamic rules. |
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can help move deals forward while holding risks and costs down.
- Fast to start; easy to use
- Guided self-service modules assist frontline personnel in following legal department rules to create their own compliant contracts instantly
- Supports standalone documents or complex, multi-document packages to help Legal more quickly create their most common deal documents
- Dynamic workflow uses transaction data to route and re-route documents through approval layers
- Instantly generates contracts and supporting sales and marketing material (proposals, quotes, statements of work, work orders, supporting agreements)
- Integrates with front-end CRM tools to extract deal data and drive efficient, accurate document assembly
- Integrates with Microsoft Word®
- Extracts deal data from upstream documents like proposals and quotes to speed creation of downstream documents like contracts and statements of work
- Enforces corporate and regulatory compliance efforts (for instance, preventing issuance of sales documents until an appropriate non-disclosure agreement is in place)
- Captures deal terms and clause decisions at creation for export to contract management and financial reporting platforms
Can Contract Automation replace legal judgment? No, certainly not…no more than Salesforce Automation replaces salesmanship. But Contract Automation can leverage that legal judgment to accelerate enterprise transactions, reduce risks, and improve compliance, all while helping Legal better allocate resources and better respond to highest-value work. |
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If Contract Automation accelerates enterprise transactions from opportunity to execution, what happens then? How can the decisions made during drafting and negotiation be used to best manage these transactions post-execution all the way through to expiration?
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| Contract Lifecycle Management, according to The Aberdeen Group, is the efficient management of contract creation, execution and analysis as a systematic and connected process for the purpose of maximizing financial and operational performance and minimizing risk. |
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Historically, enterprises had two options for their completed deal documents: throw them into a metal or electronic file cabinet and set a calendar reminder to revisit them next year…or pay someone to re-read the deal documents and re-type their contents into a back-end contract management platform and/or a finance reporting system.
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| Complete Contract Lifecycle Management offers a surer, more efficient and more powerful way to manage any or all phases of executed transactions. From automating document assembly to routing and approval to full-featured contract management to assimilation of legacy documents and integration with legacy systems, Complete Contract Lifecycle Management can transform the way your enterprise “does” documents. And, with on-demand delivery systems, clients can mix-and-match functions depending on their needs and their existing installed systems. |
Risks of Incomplete Contract Lifecyle Management
- Missed sales opportunities
- Prolonged contracting cycles
- Inefficient application of resources
- Poor compliance with deal terms
- Proliferation of non-standard clause language
- Revenue “leakage” and delays
- Poor integration between Legal and other departments
- Missed evergreen clauses and renegotiation windows
- Poor visibility into deal and regulatory compliance
- Inability to track contract process efficiencies
- Customer/supplier dissatisfaction
- Risk of financial reporting violations
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- Available as on-demand, web-based solution
- Calendars, alerts, emails
- One-click document retrieval
- One-click print or email
- Full-text search
- Embedded OCR and text-parsing engines
- State-of-the-art data protection and security measures
- Legal services team available to help transition legacy documents
- Robust integration with existing front-end and back-end systems
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
- Salesforce Automation
- Enterprise Resource Management (ERP)
- Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
- Legacy Contract Management systems
- Financial Reporting platforms
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Traditional contract systems help move an enterprise’s own transaction documents from opportunity to execution. But what can they do when the counterparty insists that their own documents be used?
Contract management systems struggle with counterparty documents. Non-standard terms often don’t fit your management parameters, and require manual labor to read, review and input key terms and elements.
State-of-the-art, patented technologies can greatly assist intake of counterparty or other inbound documents. Embedded OCR and text-analysis tools assist review while click-insert clause libraries speed mark-up and ensure approved-clause usage. |
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Document Assembly and Analysis Technology
Business Process Automation Expertise
Text Parsing & Indexing Engines
Robust Systems Integration Layer
State-of-the-art System and Data Security
Flexibility
Modularity
Extensibility
Security |
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On-demand solutions can save significant time and money; they do not require costly hardware or software to be installed on premises and they eliminate maintenance, support and upgrade costs.
Web-based delivery adds flexibility and extensibility, letting customers add services and users as demand grows. On-demand solutions are implemented more quickly than traditional software, so users realize the benefits of using them much sooner, sometimes within just a few days. Compared to traditional on-premise platforms, on-demand’s lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and faster implementations mean earlier return-on-investment (ROI).
Additionally, the distributed delivery model of on-demand solutions enables greater collaboration between enterprise functions.
A recent report by The Aberdeen Group business technology consultants noted that "On-demand technology platforms are playing an increasingly important role in enabling electronic communication and process collaboration. Companies seeking to improve their collaboration capabilities should take a strong look at on-demand solutions."
- Enterprise-class infrastructure
- Faster implementation
- Faster ramp-up time to productive use of applications
- Lower upfront and ongoing costs
- Better access to upgrades
- Doesnt require additional IT infrastructure or personnel
- Service-level agreements (SLAs)
- Robust security
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Our team has deep experience in enterprise systems integration for clients of all sizes. Our Secure GC™ services are designed to plug easily into existing platforms.
Salesforce Automation
Customer Relationship Management
Contract Management/Document Management
Enterprise Resource Planning
Enterprise Content Management
Financial Reporting Packages
Microsoft Office®
Microsoft Word® |
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FirstDocs not only delivers tremendous value to the legal department, but by automating the interactions with other departments, significant time, cost savings and reduced risk can provide substantial value throughout the entire company.
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| Accelerated revenue recognition |
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| Sales expense reduction |
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| 50%-80% reduction in contract management costs |
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| Improved contract accessibility |
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| Extensive document control |
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| Internal policy compliance |
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| External regulatory compliance |
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| Improved risk management |
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| Improved customer relationships |
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| Quick return-on-investment |
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| In-depth reporting on entire contract repository |
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| Reduce non-standard language use |
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| Better allocate Legal resources |
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| Reduced outside counsel spend |
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| IT infrastructure savings |
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| High-level document security |
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| Rapid solution roll-out |
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