Compliance – the process of making sure an organization is compliant with relevant laws and regulations wherever it does business, is an important part of any organization, because it helps to mitigate risk from non-compliant practices or documents within the organization itself. It is essential for anyone doing anything but the most basic of commerce. 

Compliance teams – which are often disproportionately responsible for a wide range of areas relative to their size and funding – face a daunting task in their day-to-day operations, and the presence or absence of an effective compliance team can have real-world effects on the business. The challenge of maintaining compliance is not just about making sure everyone knows not to violate relevant laws when, for example – interacting with subordinates, trading commodities or interest rate options, buying supplies, hiring staff, etc. But also in making sure each deal that is done, and each contract that is signed complies with relevant regulatory demands.

Compliance departments simply don’t have the human capital to scrutinize every contract that goes out the door, and no business would allow a bottleneck of this nature to appear in their contracting workflow. Conversely, compliance teams need to be free to do “real” work – analyzing and applying new legislative and regulatory measures, investigating complaints (should they arise), or dealing with compliance violations. It’s not an offhand question to wonder how to accomplish implementation of a compliance-first approach while maintaining the flow of the organization’s business without  interruption. So; how can it be done?

A simple, but elegant answer can be found in Document Automation and Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM). Automation and CLM  tools allow for the creation of templated documents, which contain language approved by the legal and compliance departments. These templates are then made available to the relevant contracting parties (for example sales, HR, procurement, trading, etc.) Because only a specific set of documents can be used for contracting, Compliance can be assured that the document begins its “life” with language that conforms to the demands of current legislation and regulation. While this may not seem like a major issue, remember that a company large enough to have more than one compliance team member is likely producing multiples of each document per day. If we start with only three documents, and there are at least three of those per day (at the absolute bare minimum), that’s 45 documents which need a fine-toothed review for compliance per week, the team is overwhelmed nearly immediately. Automating documents with approved language from the start saves this problem.

But the need for automation/CLM doesn’t end there. What does an organization do with its documents when a law changes or a new regulation appears? There are a set of automated, compliant templates that meet previous laws. Is it efficient to update each with new language by hand? Instead of doing find/replace with each text for each document, Automated documents can be updated as batches – and new, approved language can be entered ad pushed to each template from one location – a clause library  for example, saving vast amounts of time, and eliminating the risk of a non-compliant document – globally – with a few keystrokes.

Compliance and Document Automation/CLM are a match made in heaven. To find out more about how your compliance team can benefit from these tools, contact us for a demonstration.

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