Contracts are often the backbone of an in-house legal department - whether it is procurement, sales, employment or any other myriad types of contracts, they must be requested, drafted, reviewed, negotiated, executed and managed. At least a portion of this lifecycle sits with the legal department, but increasingly over the past decade the entire contract lifecycle management has become the responsibility of the corporate legal department.

However, contract management tools (depending on your software of choice) can be expensive, and involve months-long implementation projects. This time and money hurdle might suggest that small in-house legal teams have been at risk of being locked out of this productivity tool.

In the recent survey "LegalTech for Teams under Ten", Xakia surveyed smaller in-house legal teams to understand their use of technologies, including contract management.

With a further 18% of smaller in-house teams intending to procure contract management in the near future, nearly two thirds of smaller in-house teams will be using contract management to streamline their processes from contract request through to execution and lifecycle management.

Does size of in-house legal team impact the adoption of contract management? In short, not much.

Whilst there is some size disparity between solo in-house legal team members and teams of 2 to 5 and 6 to 10, particularly in terms of their interest in the procurement a system, there was solid consistency amongst all teams of 2 through to 10 people.

Similarly, amongst those who are already using the software, both teams of 2 to 5 and teams of 6 to 10 show the levels of maturity are split broadly into equal thirds of:

• mature users
• immature users
• currently implementing a solution

The urgent need for productivity improvements suggest that time savings now need to be delivered to in-house legal teams in the form of hours per day, rather than hours per week. As the largest component of legal industry workload, the opportunity to improve productivity through contract creation, negotiation, execution and lifecycle management should be close to the front of all Legal Department legal technology roadmaps.

That 22% of the market consider this a ‘longer term’ consideration and a further 14% are not interested at all begs the question: where will near term productivity improvements come from for more than a third of Legal Departments?

Happily, the costly and time-consuming implementations of contract management are now a thing of the past, suggesting that all teams now have access to productivity improvements through contract management.

If you would like to read more about what smaller in-house legal teams are using, what they expect to adopt next, and what they have little interest in implementing in the future, continue reading here.