Why organisations in regulated industries need digital agreement solutions

Ask any leader of a financial services, healthcare or public sector organisation what keeps them awake at night, and the answer may well involve one word: compliance. Regulated industries face unique and significant challenges when it comes to complying with complex regulations, particularly in the area of contracts and agreements. The stakes are high.

What’s more, many of these organisations also face pressure from within to support the needs of different stakeholders and departments. Teams across the business want faster, easier and more secure ways to get contractual work done. For example, your legal team may be wanting more assurance that agreements address indemnification, IP rights and damages calculations. Or your sales team may need a better way to accelerate sales cycles and maximise the size of individual deals.

The good news? It’s possible to solve for the demands of both the regulators and your internal teams at the same time. First though, let’s take a look at what’s wrong with manual and decentralised agreement systems. 

Why manual contract management doesn’t cut it

When you’re dealing with ever-changing rules and regulations for contracts and agreements, it can be hard to keep pace. Yet you can’t afford to get it wrong. Doing so can expose your organisation to crippling fines, legal action and reputational damage. 

Without a centralised, standardised system for generating and managing contracts, your employees may use outdated or non-approved templates, leading to inconsistent contract language and clauses that are either non-compliant or unnecessarily expose the company to risk. 

It’s also time-consuming and difficult to check every clause in every contract to make sure it aligns with the latest rules across different jurisdictions. Manual checking is a huge task and extremely prone to error. It’s easy to miss critical contractual obligations, service level agreements (SLAs), and regulatory reporting deadlines – which could trigger unfavourable terms or severe financial penalties.

Then there’s the issue of proof. Regulators require clear, defensible evidence that every contract follows proper processes. In a manual system of emails and paper files, proving who approved which version, and when, is a tricky, time-consuming task.

To stay compliant, you need a central agreement system 

When your contracts and agreements are scattered across physical filing cabinets, personal hard drives, shared folders and email inboxes, it’s hard to govern, control and protect your contractual data. Instead, it’s much safer and more effective to bring it all under one secure, central umbrella.

Docusign Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) delivers here, addressing the key challenges faced by regulated industries. For starters, all your agreement data is housed in Docusign’s Australian data centre, giving you the ability to keep all your critical agreement data onshore. Then, to ensure ongoing compliance, you can use features such as:

• Pre-approved templates and clause libraries: Legal teams can define and control standard contract language, ensuring all agreements meet regulatory and internal compliance standards. This reduces the risk of human errors and non-compliant terms.

• AI-assisted reviews: In-built AI-powered tools can flag non-compliant or high-risk clauses during the negotiation phase. By bringing them to the legal team’s attention early on, it’s quicker and easier to progress to approvals. 

• Automated workflows: You can set up rules for automatically routing contracts for review and approval based on predefined rules (e.g. contract value, type or specific terms). 

• Detailed audit trails: Every agreement comes with a non-repudiable record of actions at every stage of the contract lifecycle, which is crucial for regulatory audits and compliance.

• Tracking key dates and obligations: Docusign CLM can track and manage commitments like renewal dates, termination clauses, and counterparty obligations, sending automated alerts and reminders to prevent missed deadlines or non-compliance.

Importantly, all contracts are stored in one secure, searchable location – giving your organisation a single source of truth for agreements. Employees can quickly locate specific agreements, track key dates and report on contractual obligations, while role-based permissions ensure that sensitive contractual data is only accessible to the right people. 

There’s no room for error in regulated industries like financial services, the public sector and healthcare. With Docusign CLM, you can transform what was a complex, manual and error-prone contracting process into one that’s automated, controlled and fully auditable – key ingredients for reducing risk and maintaining compliance.