Executive Summary for general counsel and legal department managers
The Weagree Wizard vigorously accelerates contract drafting. It has many advantages:
1. Time saving and improved productivity. In most contexts, the time required to create a first draft contract can be reduced by up to 70 to 90 (!) percent. Accordingly, the productivity of legal counsel improves significantly. Saved time can be allocated to high value business interests. Time saving also means that external support can be minimised (e.g., interim lawyers, local counsel).
2. Minimising a legal department's response time. Because drafting routine contracts and more complex contracts requires much less time, the response time of the legal department minimises. (Business performance improves.) Providing a simple first draft business contract does not take weeks.
3. Improved quality of contracts. With the Weagree Wizard, model contracts and contract building blocks are managed from one central location. The central availability of model contracts and individual model clauses in the Wizard contributes to a higher quality of all contracts created by a legal department. Also, continuously improving model contracts does not look like an elephant: best practice contracts are not widely spread across the business. Improving best practice contracts takes place centrally: in the Weagree Wizard. The Wizard is equipped with a set of high quality model contracts and contract clauses (for rarely used cases).
4. Reducing the transaction cycle. Because (1) the productivity of legal counsel improves, (2) the response time of the legal department minimises, and (3) the quality of a first draft contract improves, the finalisation of a transaction requires less drafting time and less drafting cycles to repair sloppy drafting. Negotiation issues are clear from the outset. A shortened transaction cycle is the result.
5. Compliance and risk management. Because the Weagree Wizard is much faster than the copy-paste and search-replace drafting on scattered sub-optimal (old) model contracts, business people are inclined to create contracts via the Wizard. Moreover, if the legal department needs to be involved and its response time and performance are excellent, business managers will be inclined to adhere to contracting requirements. In other words, if legal counsel performs professionally, business managers would less often seek to avoid the legal department.
Furthermore, routine contract drafting work can be delegated to the business (if desired, subject to prior legal approval before release of the contract-document): the Weagree Wizard allows inserting default answers, as well as distinguishing between legal and non-legal (or junior) users, enabling the legal department to differentiate between the various parts of a Q&A.
6. Control over your own work. The Weagree Wizard contains a workflow. A workflow (i) gives an in-house counsel realtime insight into his or her contracting work-in-progress, (ii) allows a legal department to structure standard processes in a standardised manner, and (iii) keeps track of contract approval statuses. A workflow decreases the need to be hands-on involved in each step of the process.
7. Realtime monitoring of internal activities. The workflow shows the actual status of all contracting work-in-progress. General counsel has realtime insight into all transactions and other contracting activities by their legal counsel. The insight is 'realtime insight': separate reporting by legal counsel is not required.
8. User-friendly: happier staff. The Weagree Wizard is simple and very easy to use. The Wizard requires no process redesign or change management and is easy to integrate in any existing office environment. The Weagree Wizard contributes to the pleasure in everyone's work.
9. Flexibility. Just one example of flexibility is the Q&A-function in the Weagree Wizard. It has an intuitive user interface and provides explanatory notes and default answers to each Q&A-question. After completing the questionnaire, the Wizard automatically converts the results of the Q&A into a fully fledged, crisp contract in Word-format. Each template questionnaire can be fine-tuned by inserting default answers or optional answers to questions and by giving explanatory guidance notes.
Users can insert additional building blocks from the model contract database or even their own contract language. This database can easily be modified and expanded with your own best practice documents and contract building blocks.
The Weagree Wizard permits full customization of the contract format: in a few mouse-clicks, the user can change a European look & feel into a US-style contract presentation.
10. Your IT-environment. The Wizard is a state-of-the-art, web-based (asp.NET based) software application in a powerful (Microsoft SQL Server) database environment. The Weagree Wizard contains a basic document management system. Nevertheless, as a separate feature, an interface can be built between the Wizard and external contract management systems. (The metadata from the questionnaire can be transferred automatically into the contract management system together with the generated document). Also, the data of all your company's legal entities can be transferred into the Weagree Wizard, so that basic details on address, registration number and contact persons are inserted into the contracts by one click of a button.
For more information see the frequently asked questions (FAQ) section (click here).