5 Ways Docusign’s Legal Team Boosts Efficiency and Decision-Making with IAM

Legal runs on details: payment obligations, insurance requirements, renewal dates, governing law, and indemnity language. But too often, the agreements that define these details just end up burying them. Legal teams have to manually search through spreadsheets, storage platforms, or desk drawers; pore over terms for insights; and chase down input from stakeholders.

The result? Steps add up. Legal gets stretched thin. Decisions slow down. Opportunities slide by.

That’s where Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) comes in. This centralized, digital, AI-enhanced approach simplifies the process of creating, committing to, and managing agreements. So legal can stop hunting and chasing and get back to focusing on the work only they can do.

The Docusign IAM platform is changing how legal works internally, collaborates across departments, and negotiates with business partners. The legal team at Docusign is already using it to move faster, prepare earlier, and give better guidance.

How is IAM changing the way legal works at Docusign?

From new customer agreements to vendor renewals, the IAM platform has improved the way Docusign’s legal team organizes and analyzes agreements. Here are some of the most impactful examples:

1. A centralized, intuitive repository for procurement

What started as a small legal team quickly grew as Docusign expanded capabilities, clients, and geographies. As with every growing business, it became a struggle to keep track of vendor agreements. One of the most common pain points we hear from customers is how hard it is to locate completed agreements. Docusign Navigator solves that problem.

Adding thousands of agreements to this smart repository took our legal team just a few days and brought immediate gains. Legal cut the time to locate agreements from over eight minutes to under a minute. (Yes, they actually timed it!) Instead of reaching out to the business stakeholder, scanning emails, or even, in a most uncomfortable case, having to ask the vendor for a copy of their own agreement, they can use natural language search or filters to bring up all active supplier agreements. And moving forward, Navigator captures every new supplier agreement created with eSignature.

2. Custom agreement searches of non-standard terms

Legal often has to reference past agreements to manage renewals, ensure compliance, address disputes, and support audit inquiries. Stakeholders may bring questions to the legal department, including:

1. Is the supplier meeting their promises?

2. When is our next invoice due?

3. When does our agreement renew?

4. How can we get out of this agreement?

What was once a tedious process of manually searching each agreement for specific language is now just a few clicks: The legal team uses AI data extractions and natural language search to surface non-standard terms. 

Navigator empowers the team with custom searches for specific terms: payment obligations, termination rights, service-level expectations, and more. Quicker access to data means legal can answer time-sensitive questions faster and with less effort. Stakeholders across the business can even run their own searches without legal assistance. 

3. Proactive oversight of upcoming vendor renewals

Procurement agreements predominantly revolve around cost control, supplier performance, renewals, and autorenewals. But, as with many organizations, some of Docusign’s supplier renewals used to go through unnoticed. The manual process used to look like this: Legal would hear about renewals from stakeholders or procurement, triggering debates over ownership while negotiation windows closed, locking the company into unfavorable terms.

With Navigator, no renewal happens under the radar. Legal taps into Navigator’s renewal dashboard, so there’s clear visibility into all upcoming expirations and renewal windows each quarter. And business stakeholders in legal, finance, sales, and beyond receive automated reminders, so they can be proactive about reviewing payment obligations or other terms to decide whether renewing, terminating, or renegotiating the agreement for more favorable terms is the right strategy. Action steps are clear and timely, and everyone moves forward with confidence.

4. AI analysis to speed up negotiations

For the legal team working on commercial agreements, Docusign Iris, the AI engine that powers IAM, creates consistency and saves time in negotiations. To guide the sales team’s negotiations of NDAs, MSAs, and other binding agreements, legal relies on agreement-specific playbooks with preferred positions and fallbacks. The problem is, when these playbooks live in personal documents and spreadsheets or, worse, in someone’s head, tracking them as needs change can delay the agreement cycle. And referencing and applying these standards evenly through rounds of negotiation is a hefty task, forcing legal to toggle between documents and search for the right fallbacks.

Having IAM built into negotiation workflows within Microsoft Word makes these playbooks easy to implement. Legal only has to give core negotiation rules to the Docusign AI-Assisted Review tool within IAM. The tool analyzes the agreement under negotiation against a specific playbook and offers suggestions to bring the agreement into compliance with company standards.

Consistent analysis and adjustable rules cut down the deal review time and help legal teams create more relevant templates that reflect updated playbooks. Understanding that with agreements, one size doesn’t always fit all, custom comments make it simple to tweak rules and adjust, given the context of the negotiation. The applications for AI-Assisted Review are wide-ranging and commonly include: 

• Liability terms: Carve-outs to limitation-of-liability clauses and liability caps are straightforward. Tracking historical changes to these clauses allows the legal team to reassess and adapt templates in a constant loop. 

• Insurance certificates: Time-consuming reviews of insurance requirements to ensure that they align with the details in Docusign’s Certificate of Insurance turn into a quick search for relevant documents and AI analysis to bring up any discrepancies.

5. Workflow automation for partnership agreements

The partner ecosystem is an integral part of Docusign’s go-to-market strategy, so partner relationships number in the thousands. That means a huge number of agreements for legal to review and redline. Previously, the manual process took anywhere from hours to days, was hard to scale as new partnerships came on, and didn’t allow for easy input from other stakeholders. 

That’s why the partner legal team started using Maestro, a no-code workflow automation tool, and Agreement Desk, a central hub for agreement intake and requests. Today, managing a high volume of partnership agreements is less manual and more collaborative than ever.

With Docusign IAM, the partner legal team has set up a workflow for Master Partner Agreements (MPAs) that begins with Agreement Desk tickets and then moves into Maestro automations that establish an owner, due date, and followers. Finally, it automatically attaches relevant documentation to the potential partner agreement. From there, legal can send the MPA out for e-signature with just a few clicks, right within Agreement Desk. 

On the horizon: What does the future hold for Intelligent Agreement Management in legal?

So far, Docusign’s legal teams have used the IAM suite to improve visibility, collaboration, scalability, and time to value. But that isn’t all they plan to do. As features evolve, legal continually proposes new applications of IAM capabilities. Here are just a few of those plans:

Bringing together commercial agreements

The commercial legal team has gotten their feet wet with IAM for negotiations, but they see more opportunities to streamline and automate in the future. Following the progress of the supplier agreements, they want to centralize their huge stock of commercial agreements in Navigator. This will bolster security and organization, help them track customer obligations, keep renewals and revenue flowing, and get everyone on the same page.

Reducing compliance risks across the globe 

Docusign’s global business integrity team also has plans for how IAM can improve its processes. This legal team monitors global regulations to help drive international expansion. In an era of evolving regulations, it’s a major challenge.

The business integrity team has their sights set on using Navigator to zero in on and visualize risk by geography or sector within their agreements. Vendor agreements active in highly regulated regions like Europe or highly regulated industries like healthcare or financial services would easily surface. The team could even search for specific regulations called out in terms, such as the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) or General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Consider this hypothetical scenario: By bringing in Navigator, the team finds a high compliance risk in the EU because 80% of a certain agreement type is with companies in France. With this information, legal staff could focus on specific countries’ laws, see where new team members need to be hired to cover specialties, close any compliance gaps, and avoid significant penalties.

Like the partner legal team, the business integrity team is also exploring a new use of Agreement Desk. But instead of using it for a new agreement, the business integrity team sees it as a tool for fielding compliance concerns. When someone flags a potential compliance issue within a particular document, they could open an Agreement Desk ticket, centralizing the concern for the business integrity team to address.

Less searching, more strategizing: the power of agreement intelligence in legal

Legal’s role is too important to lag behind the rest of the business. It’s why intelligent agreement tools are giving our legal teams the insights and bandwidth to go beyond task administration and to lead agreement management strategically. 

Features like Navigator, AI-Assisted Review, Maestro, and Agreement Desk are empowering corporate legal teams to go from reactive agreement chasing to proactively shaping agreements. With centralized oversight, AI analysis, and automation, Docusign IAM helps legal move faster and focus on making better decisions and crafting better agreements.

Cut out time-consuming tasks and get back to your most strategic work. See how Docusign IAM can simplify your legal teams’ workflows.