Why Docue is the contract management tool in-house legal teams REALLY need

As an in-house lawyer you often carry out a much higher volume of contract and document drafting than private practice lawyers at law firms. We get it. You are simply carrying out all legal work for your employer's business in return for a fixed salary - whereas law firm lawyers are charging by the hour, or fixed fees to carry out work for multiple clients on a matter by matter basis.

Not only is this time consuming for in-house lawyers, it is not as cost effective as it could be.

Docue exists to do something about that.

A library of lawyer made, lawyer maintained templates

Docue can help speed up the contract drafting and legal document drafting carried out by in-house lawyers to make the workload considerably more manageable. How? Ok, for instance, let’s say an in-house lawyer needs to draft a suite of internal and external data protection policies and notices to ensure their employer's business is compliant with data protection law - well the Docue platform can help them do that very quickly with ready-made and easily customisable data protection templates. We’re talking up to 90% faster yet with no loss of legal quality -- as all our documents are made and maintained by a team of qualified lawyers. Pretty incredible? We think so.

Or, another example: as an in-house lawyer you are tasked with drafting a whole host of supplier contracts or sales contracts. Once again the Docue platform has plenty of ready-made goods, services, software and technology templates which can be quickly tailored to the relevant situation. You no longer have to start from scratch or look for a previous document to recycle. Instead at the speed of a couple of clicks you can automate and customise a document to exactly fit your needs.

It doesn’t end there. In fact, it gets better! Not only are our templates lawyer-made and maintained, they are also highly customisable and user-friendly. Every template includes clause-by-clause guidance hand-crafted by lawyers to ensure you are steered correctly throughout every stage of the drafting process. However if you are set on using your own templates then that’s ok too! We can import your own templates into the Docue platform so that you can create, customise, e-sign, store and manage documents based on your own templates.

Better yet, you can also e-sign unlimited contracts and legal documents at the touch of a button and ensure you stay effortlessly organised with the automatic and unlimited archiving of documentation into intelligently named folders. To top it off, you can also use next-gen search tools to navigate through your records to retrieve and analyse all the key data you need from your contracts and legal documents. This signature, storage and search capability of the platform applies regardless of whether the document was created on Docue or not. So you can cover all your contract and legal document needs with Docue, the all-in-one contract management solution that helps in-house legal teams to be substantially more efficient.

In summary, in-house legal teams can forget the outdated times where the vast majority of lawyers used Practical Law for their contract and legal document needs. Docue is here to change the game - more cost effective, more user-friendly, and much more feature rich!

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Stop wasting time on manual drafts

As a team of lawyers ourselves, we know what it is like. As an in-house lawyer you’ll likely be tasked with drafting lots of employment documentation: employment contracts, disciplinary policy, grievance policy, anti-bribery policy, health and safety policy, equal opportunity policy, settlement agreements to name a few. Well, the Docue platform offers a complete library of employment and HR templates made up of premeditated clauses which you can instantly customise with user-friendly tick box options and text box answers, allowing you to complete the drafting of even large documentation projects (like a suite of new employment contracts and handbook policies) far quicker and easier than ever before.

Moreover we keep our templates constantly updated, so whenever applicable laws or regulations are updated, so are our templates—automatically.

Practical Law by Thomson Reuters reimagined

Docue is innovative in many ways. But in its essence we like to think of Docue as a smarter version of what most lawyers use for drafting purposes: Practical Law by Thomson Reuters. Practical Law for the digital age, if you like.

Unlike our predecessor’s very static and long winded templates which are difficult to customise without doing so manually in a Word doc you’ll find dynamic, simple to adapt templates on Docue. And yes, we are considerably more affordable than Practical Law. Although Practical Law does have a “Fast Draft” tool, the feedback we have received so far from lawyers who have seen both in action is that Docue is much more user-friendly, customisable and dynamic - meaning the drafts can be created more quickly and in a more bespoke manner.

Reduce your external lawyer spend & empower your junior lawyers

So, as an in-house lawyer one of the biggest challenges is deciding what work should be dealt with internally (where you have the capacity and specialist legal knowledge to handle it) and what work needs to be sent to external lawyers to assist with (when you don't have the capacity or more often the specialist legal knowledge to deal with it).

The particular difficulty here is often the limited budgets that in-house lawyers are usually afforded by their employer to outsource work to external lawyers.

Here, Docue can help in-house lawyers on two fronts:

1. All of our templates are written by lawyers with specialist experience in the relevant area covering a wide range of business law areas (commercial, technology, corporate, employment, intellectual property, finance, and data protection). This means you can use these templates to draft documents in the more niche areas where perhaps you have limited or no experience (meaning you don't have to outsource the work to external lawyers as often, as you can cover off more yourself internally). This can be particularly helpful when it comes to finance, corporate and data protection templates.

2. The increased efficiency and speed with which draft contracts and documents can be created in Docue compared to a manual approach means that more of your capacity and time can become available to focus on strategic work, such as initiatives which have a direct contribution towards helping the business grow its revenue and profits.

In addition to the above, Docue also helps senior in-house lawyers to delegate to junior lawyers more freely and with more confidence. The Docue templates (and the guidelines within Docue templates) are written and maintained by experienced lawyers with the relevant specialist knowledge, so junior lawyers can work through complex drafting processes step-by-step to create a final document which is expert level and high quality.

Unlimited document storage

Docue’s contract management and storage solution is hugely beneficial for in-house lawyers. Instead of manually saving and searching for documents across emails and shared drive folders etc., you can automatically archive all your contracts and legal documents and use our intelligent search features to quickly retrieve and assess the status of contracts and documents when needed.

Our archive solution will save you hours of time when requests for documents or status updates from others in the business come in, or when going through a corporate deal due diligence process where contracts and corporate documents need to be checked by an external party (e.g. employer's business being acquired or invested in).

Trust us, you are going to look so well organised and professional to both your employer and external parties.

eSign with ease

The e-signature is of course an amazing tool that many in-house lawyers already use. With the Docue eSignature solution you can efficiently request and add signatures to documents, including documents created outside of Docue. Getting a document across the line and signed can often be the most frustrating final hurdle when wet ink or scanned signatures are being used, but not so with Docue. Simply e-sign a document in seconds via Docue and invite any external recipients, with or without Docue access, to do the same. You will then receive an automated notification when all parties have signed the document, at which point the Docue platform will automatically archive that signed document to the relevant folder.

And as always with Docue, we’ve made it very affordable. Think of Docue as being like DocuSign for signing only far more cost effective—given that we include unlimited e-signatures on all paid subscriptions, as well as an array of unique features in our subscriptions— whereas DocuSign charge usage dependent fees on a per signed document basis (or subscription fees based on a maximum number of signed documents per year) and offer, in our view, a much less comprehensive and less useful set of features for in-house lawyer purposes.

Still not convinced? Try Docue for free today!