How to Create Contracts and Streamline Clause Repetition

Contracts are the cornerstone of successful business relationships. By outlining roles, responsibilities, and potential recompenses for all participating parties, contracts create legally-binding frameworks that help streamline operations and specify key outcomes.

But creating great contracts isn’t easy. Security is paramount, since compromised contracts can undermine their critical purpose – trust. Speed is a priority, since clients and partners don’t want to wait weeks or months for documents that describe agreed-upon contract conditions. And as noted by the Harvard Business Review (HBR), simplicity is gaining popularity as organizations look to create plain-language contracts that remove complexity without losing consistency.

For many companies, manual contract creation can’t match the ever expanding market expectation. Organizations now need document assembly solutions that deliver the ability to create similar contracts quickly, without compromising security.

Contract Creation: Speed & Security

Speed or security? At times, it can seem like a lose-lose situation for many companies looking to improve their contract creation process. While reducing creation and completion time increases customer satisfaction, enhanced assembly speed could increase the risk of compromise. Shoring up security boosts client confidence, but comes with potential performance trade-offs.

For Accusoft, the path to solving this contract conundrum started with a particular pain point – recurring customer renewals. According to Steve Wilson, VP of Product at Accusoft, “Each one of our customer contract documents went through a strenuous process of email, redlining, and comparison. We would essentially create the contract in a word processor, email it to the client, go through the negotiation process, and hope that the version we downloaded from our last email thread is the correct one.”

Not surprisingly, this took significant time and effort — and introduced the potential for contract errors. Open source solutions were the first potential fix, but simply weren’t scalable enough to meet the emerging demands. Accusoft engineers took a different approach, building an entirely new solution from the ground up, now known as PrizmDoc Editor. Originally designed for use in-house, PrizmDoc Editor has evolved into a secure document assembly and editing solution for integrators to deliver in-browser document creation and editing functionality to their users. It’s easily customizable with a flexible set of APIs and ensures security by integrating into existing applications for a seamless contract experience.

Editing vs. Assembly

Misunderstanding remains over the role of contract creators and managers in many organizations. In part, this stems from the sheer scale and complexity of the job, but confusion also plays a role around the concept of contract assembly. For many front-line users, assembly and editing are effectively synonymous. Since they describe similar functions, editing and assembly are often lumped together under the auspices of familiar document editing programs such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs.

However, they are fundamentally different. While editing describes the act of making small changes to individual documents, document assembly allows users to arrange specific pieces of content in a structured way. By automatically generating content — such as form fields and specific clause inserts — and intelligently applying it to contract templates at scale, it’s possible to custom-build binding agreements at speed without compromising security. Document assembly is the foundation of contract creation. Automated assembly processes combine common contract parts into usable templates which can then be modified to suit specific use cases.

Streamlining Secure Contract Collaboration

No business operates without contracts and common practices for negotiation can often lead to unintended consequences. While email is often used to collaborate, this means original files are being altered, and sometimes without authorization. Further complicating the issue, subscription-based programs like Microsoft Word can become cost-prohibitive as companies grow. 

Those looking to ditch common word processing programs tend to turn to open source solutions and are often disappointed by fragmented functionality and lack of security controls. Luckily, there is a better way. PrizmDoc Editor makes it easy for users to create contracts online while providing  integrators the ability to keep customer data protected on their own servers. 

PrizmDoc Editor does the heavy lifting on the backend, allowing users to easily and securely create and modify contracts, all under the auspices of an integrator’s solution thanks to white-label options. While specific scenarios vary across industry and market verticals, common PrizmDoc Editor use cases include:

• Assembly — Give your users the ability to quickly assemble documents with functionality to easily import text, then add common snippets and stipulations with a single click. Plus, give them the benefits of familiar word processors such as text modification, formatting, and spell checking.
• Drafting and Redlining — Efficiently address security needs by providing the ability to redline key items with restricted user permissions that allow suggestions but require owner approval for final editing. No more keeping track of email chains and hoping the last version is the “right” one. With PrizmDoc Editor, changes are always consistent.
• Viewing and Commenting — Easily allow users to view and add contract comments and make suggestions with an added commenting API. This is ideal for late-stage contract creation where final oversight is required but editing control must remain with contract managers.

From creating legal contracts online to intelligently adding form fields and collaborating on contract specifics, PrizmDoc Editor can help solve for contract creation and security within your application. With powerful, server-side APIs, smooth application integration, and customizable document assembly tools, PrizmDoc Editor empowers your team to deliver streamlined contract creation without compromising security. See what you can do with PrizmDoc Editor. Try the demo and start your free trial today.