Precisely Wrapped: Our Best 2023 Features

December is a perfect time of the year to look back, reflect, and celebrate the work that our team has done. This year like all past years, our goal has been to build a CLM platform that enables teams to bring the true value of contracting for the business. With the arrival of generative AI into our everyday lives, we, too, have seized the opportunity to enable users to tap into the magic of time-saving tools – without compromising on integrity and compliance. Read on!

Precisely in a nutshell

As a CLM, our features are aligned with who we are and what we most aim to achieve. Our focus is centered on three pillars:

• Share the workload, stay in control

In-house legal should have control who drafts contracts and how, while allowing other team members and stakeholders to be full owners of the contract lifecycle. Our features are built to enable teams to achieve exactly that.

• Data privacy & compliance first

Contracts and employee information are some of the most sensitive data a company can hold. Our aim is to remove the legal team’s mental load when it comes to ensuring compliance and meeting GDPR standards and beyond – automatically.

• A CLM partner and advisor, not just a tool

77% of legal tech projects fail. That is because implementing a new tool requires more than a desire to change the status quo within your organization. Contract lifecycle management involves so many stakeholders, and disrupts processes to such a level that the change management element of it is key. Our team has continued to work collaboratively with our users in various ways to ensure they are part of the 33% that succeeds – and to help reverse that number.

Pre-signing 

When it comes the pre-signing stage of the contract lifecycle, we have developed 3 new main features:

1. We have made it easier to convert Word contract templates into automated contract templates, meaning that a significant amount of time is saved when both starting to use our CLM and adding new ones to the automated portfolio. Precisely AI, as you’ll read below, has taken that a step further and almost completely removes the manual work involved in setting up template automation.

2. You can automate appendices, meaning that in some cases, all the manual work involved with drafting is entirely removed, even when appendices contain unique information, like contact information or a mix of several documents. This further removes the chance for human-made errors and automates time-consuming, repetitive tasks for everyone involved in contract drafting.

3. One of our most requested features: you can assign questions to external parties or internal stakeholders who do not have an account in Precisely. Contract drafters can directly ask contract parties or stakeholders (like a future employee or a colleague involved in a sale) fill in unique information that the drafter would have to ask in a time-consuming email back-and-forth.

Viewers can only view contracts – and their metadata – shared with them. They are ypically Finance professionals or any other employee who needs to monitor but not be involved in the pre-signing stage of contracting.

Compliance improvements

At Precisely, we are constantly improving the flexibility that Admins can have to define the level of control or freedom they want to give other team members.

This year we made improvements to how much Members can do: for example, they cannot remove default signees even on external documents imported into the platform. Admins can now decide whether Members work with appendices and how, and Admins can now also see when external users download documents to make it easier to track changes made.

Post-signing

Legal teams will know that, once the contract is signed, that is not when its lifecycle ends. This year, we’ve improved how much you can do with your contracts once it’s signed.

For example, we’ve made it possible to add conditions to archiving: Admins can decide if a document should be saved in a folder or another based on a unique datapoint in the contract, entered either during drafting or detected by the platform (e.g. who drafted the contract).

Since folders in Precisely work to restrict and give access to specific contracts to specific teams, this feature is handy when several teams need to use a contract template, but should not access all contracts drafted from it. It can also be relevant when drafting particularly confidential documents that only few people in the organization should have access to, for example, with a specific subject of disclosure or higher fees.

Besides automating reminders (and adding them to your calendar), it is possible to automate reminders on uploaded files (i.e. documents created outside Precisely), and you can even add formulas in reminders, like to receive a reminder prior to a contract end date based on terms.

Integrations

This year, we’ve worked on making it easier to access Precisely from where you spend your work time, and for many, that is in Microsoft tools like Teams or Outlook. You can now receive notifications in Teams (no need to check your emails to see if you need to approve, sign, or review documents). 

It is now also possible to create a draft from information contained in an email – perfect for those who work with external documents they want to save in the same contract repository to benefit from pre-signing and post-signing automation setups, like reminders or conditional archiving.

Precisely also integrates with tools like HubSpot and other tools thanks to our API, all with the aim to further save your team time, reduce the risk of errors, and make user management and experience smoother.

Precisely AI

This year, with the arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, it has become easier than ever to tap into the magic of generative AI. At Precisely, we have seized the opportunity, too. But first things first: before using our Precisely AI, users get to choose whether they want their data to be processed in the EU or in the US.

Precisely AI allows users to upload and tag external documents within seconds thanks to the magic of AI-powered metadata extraction. All you have to do is upload a document, let AI do the work, and review metadata tags that you will use later on for reporting or to find contracts within seconds.

This feature is both available when you upload signed documents to archive, or when you need to work with them with approval flows, review, and signature. Admin users can also have control over where and how users use Precisely AI, with settings for each specific feature. Share the workload, but without compromising on control!

And finally, as mentioned earlier, template automation has never been faster. You can simply upload a Word template and Precisely AI will detect unique data points like counterparty name or vacation days, and it will create references automatically (a question that drafters will then answer to automatically populate the draft). This reduces the time to automate contract templates, often one of the bottlenecks that make CLM implementation, even with stellar pre-implementation preparation, much harder and lengthier, and ultimately puts the entire contract digitization project more at risk of failing.

Precisely in numbers

We look forward to seeing where 2024 takes us – and how we continue to enable our users to focus on the work that truly matters.

Happy contracting and happy new year from the Precisely team!