A contract goes through multiple stages in its lifecycle, and it must adhere to industry standards and local laws. When handled manually, legal paperwork requires strict attention to detail, as even the smallest error compromises the contract's integrity. This leads to higher document turnaround times and ongoing manual intervention, along with increased concerns around trust, security, and compliance.
Here's where a digital signature platform like Zoho Sign comes in. Zoho Sign automates your workflows, eliminating the need for manual intervention. It complies with e-signature laws across the globe, making its signatures legally valid in a court of law.
What is legal contract lifecycle management?
Legal contract lifecycle management (CLM) refers to the efficient management of legal paperwork through every step of the process, including drafting, negotiating, approving, and executing.
Digital-first businesses need a comprehensive digital signature solution like Zoho Sign to digitize paperwork and automate workflows. With advanced features for secure signing and tracking, Zoho Sign provides a seamless legal contract management experience.
What does legal contract lifecycle management look like?
Here's what paperwork generally looks like in the legal vertical:
- The legal team drafts a contract.
- The involved parties negotiate the terms of the contract.
- The legal team sends the document out for signatures.
- All involved parties sign the document.
- The signed documents are securely stored.
Challenges in manual legal contract management
Legal paperwork often feels endless and inevitable. But with traditional methods, it's especially tedious, with increased risks of security and privacy issues and the need for constant manual intervention. Plus, there are the additional concerns of maintaining industry standards and compliance with related legislation. Some common issues with manual legal contract management are:
Increased security and storage issues
Storing confidential paperwork without digital safeguards compromises document security. When collaborating with multiple departments, these documents are at a higher risk for misplacement or mishandling. Automating paperwork with digital solutions like Zoho Sign allows you to save documents to the cloud, reducing potential risks and keeping them secure.
Stringent industry standards
Legal documents must adhere to specific industry standards. Any inconsistencies or inability to stick to these guidelines can lead to repetitive workflows during the legal contract lifecycle.
Cluttered documents and workflows
Traditional paperwork is prone to disorganization, causing document workflows to become fragmented. With a centralized system like Zoho Sign, the process becomes more linear and seamless.
Cumbersome work
Manual legal contract life-cycles often require redrafting the same document every time a new lifecycle starts, making the process repetitive and tiring. Without automation, workflows must be managed manually, consuming time that could otherwise be used for more pressing tasks.
Untraceable paperwork
Manual paperwork can be tricky to track, making document verification unreliable. Digitization enables real-time tracking for every stage in the workflow, providing auditable trails and activity history to verify authenticity.
Prone to tampering and fraud
Legal paperwork has sensitive information that requires strict signer authentication. However, manual methods remain vulnerable to tampering due to scattered paperwork and the inability to track progress clearly. Digitization assures easy tracking and reliable signer verification.
Unrestricted access to sensitive information
Confidential documents are only meant to be seen by specific people, but this access cannot be definitively controlled with manual workflows. Centralized digital solutions like Zoho Sign allow for restricted access with set permissions for data security and privacy, ensuring the data is only visible to the relevant parties.
Messy collaborative document workflows
Some legal paperwork demands collaboration with multiple departments. Doing so manually can have many risks, which ultimately contribute to a higher document turnaround time and increased employee hours.
Here's how Zoho Sign boosts your legal CLM
Compliance with e-sign laws
Zoho Sign is compliant with major regional and international electronic and digital signature regulations across the globe, such as the ITA-2000 in India, ESIGN Act in the USA, and the eIDAS in the European Union, making it legally valid in a court of law.
Integrations across apps
Zoho Sign enables seamless integrations with multiple apps across different departments. To customize an integration with an existing app, Zoho Sign provides APIs and SDKs for developers.
Tamper-proof signatures
Get assured transparency when managing document workflows and verifying signer identities. The digital signature certificate attached to every document executed in Zoho Sign provides detailed insights into the document workflow, including the date and time of signing and the identity of signers. This eliminates the chances of tampering and fraud.
Stay in control of your documents
With a centralized digital signature solution like Zoho Sign, automated workflows are linear and streamlined. Zoho Sign allows admins to enforce customizable permissions to restrict or allow access to specific information.
Auditable document trails
Zoho Sign provides a complete report of the document through its lifecycle, tracking progress and user activity. If any alteration is made to the document, it is detected in this report. This ensures adherence to industry standards and accountability, helping maintain a robust audit trail.
Increased data privacy and security
Keep confidential and sensitive information safe at all times. Zoho Sign is committed to the highest level of security and privacy, with local data centers in multiple countries and more on the way. Zoho Sign is also compliant with major data privacy and security regulations, keeping all contractual data confidential.
Automated, streamlined workflows
Go hands-free with Zoho Sign. Streamline your entire CLM workflow by quickly uploading documents, assigning recipient actions, adding signer fields, customizing settings for each signer, and enabling automatic reminders. Once the workflow is set, it requires almost no manual intervention to keep documents moving forward.
Commonly used legal contracts
- Confidentiality agreements
- Real estate agreements
- Partnership agreements
- Patent filings
- Notices
- Disclosures
- Non-disclosure agreements
- Sales contract
- Service agreements
- Banking documents
Zoho Sign integrates with popular legal apps to boost your productivity
Collect data and set document signing workflows using Zoho Sign's integration with Zoho Forms.
Draft legal contracts in Zoho Writer and use text tags in place of fields. Zia, our AI assistant, will detect and add the corresponding fields before sending the documents for signing.
Create signing workflows to send documents for signatures or sign documents yourself right from Zoho Mail's inbox with Zoho Sign's extension for Zoho Mail.
Upload documents from Zoho WorkDrive to start signing in Zoho Sign. Then, back up your signed documents to Zoho WorkDrive.
Hear from our customers and see how Zoho Sign can boost your legal CLM!
FAQs
Yes, sign up for Zoho Sign and get a 14-day free trial. After the trial, you can upgrade to the Standard, Professional, or Enterprise plan, or you can access the free plan. To get a better understanding of Zoho Sign's pricing and the features provided with each plan, refer to our pricing guide.
Zoho Sign is committed to the highest level of security and privacy, with local data centers across multiple countries. This is ‌supplemented by compliance with data privacy and security regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, FDA CFR Title 21 Part 11, and more. Data in Zoho Sign is always transmitted through a secure SSL/TLS connection and encrypted with AES 256-bit encryption while at rest. Learn more about Zoho Sign's security
Yes, Zoho Sign is legally valid in a court of law. Zoho Sign is compliant with multiple major, regional electronic and digital signature regulations such as the ESIGN Act in the USA, the eIDAS in the European Union, and ITA 2000 in India. For a better understanding of Zoho Sign's legality, feel free to explore our legality guide.
Send us an email at support@zohosign.com with any questions or for a demo, and our dedicated support team will quickly assist you.
Yes, Zoho Contracts is our contract lifecycle management software designed to support your business through every step of the contract process—from creation to execution and end-to-end management. Zoho Contracts also allows you to sign contracts using digital signatures powered by Zoho Sign.
Disclaimer
The information provided in this document is for general informational purposes only and shall not be construed as legal, regulatory, or any other form of professional advice. Zoho Sign disclaims any liability for any error in the information provided herein. We recommend that you consult your legal counsel for any questions that you may have in this regard.
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