Contract Critical Dates

Business agreements are the blueprints of the relationship between two parties which outlines the deliverables and obligations of the clients and vendors.  These responsibilities are structured with due date, definition of the services to be received or offered, duration of the contract, and financial terms to be fulfilled when milestones are reached.  Indemnity and penalty for non-fulfillment within agreed time, contract renewals, and renewal options must be tracked and notified to contract owners to meet business and regulatory compliance.

Managing Critical Dates Efficiently
General counsel and business users must track the critical dates pertaining to the contract or operations.  Best practice must be incorporated as part of training.  Change management must be documented, customized, and designed for different contract types, to identify key dates.  AI powered contract management software can extract dates from the contract or can be manually entered by business users.  Notifications must be setup to responsible parties till action is taken.  Task dashboard will provide a consolidated view of all the ongoing tasks and associated risk scores.

Types of Contract Critical Dates
Templates must be developed based on contract types.  List of critical dates, actions to be taken when milestone is reached, predecessor, business applications to be validated and responsible parties must be documented, and contract users trained.  Contract metadata can feed these critical dates through contract workflow software.  Interconnected contract software can use CRM or ERP to validate that deliverables are fulfilled.  Escalations for risk scores over the threshold values and suggested clause changes are part of the contract critical date management.  Users can create custom critical dates manually with option to be added to the critical date templates.

Examples of Contract Critical Dates
Milestones are unique to organization, contract types and metadata of the contracts. Following are some of the common critical dates to be tracked.

Legal Technology Software

PageLightPrime contract lifecycle management software with no code workflow solution allows legal department to handle contract critical dates and contract renewals to be managed efficiently.  When contracts are executed and stored in contract repository, AI enabled validation engine extracts the critical dates and keywords, which can be tracked individually or as a group.  Contract owners can create bespoke critical dates manually.  Notifications can be sent to Outlook, Microsoft Teams, or mobile device so no alerts are missed.  Tasks are assigned based on roles.  Smart tasks guide users on the steps that needs to be performed for every milestone, with available reference to legal library, which has department specific curated contents. Group calendar has all the critical dates listed which can be filtered by practice area, work division or counter parties.  Business users can create legal requests for inhouse counsel or compliance officers to seek advice.  Clients can get started with the critical date check list for conveyancing, family, and estate management or create custom list managed by legal department.  Tasks can be assigned to external users or vendors through client portal for business manage end to end contract transactions from a single platform.