Today the Federal Reserve announced another interest rate hike and the S&P 500 is down over 20% from its highs earlier this year. Inflation remains a persistent concern. Several companies have reported staffing reductions, and the general sentiment is that the US economy is either already in or heading for a recession. Enterprise organizations are using business intelligence and data analytics to make tough but informed decisions about how to prepare for a more challenging business environment.
But we frequently hear from corporate legal departments that they are at a data deficit compared to the rest of their organization. It is a challenge because so much of their valuable data remains siloed and difficult to use within executed contract PDFs. Within B2B organizations in particular, this challenge affects the entire business as success depends on the relationships they have with customers and those relationships are governed by contracts. Tough economic times inherently stress those relationships, forcing organizations to rely on their legal, customer retention, contracts, and deal desk teams as clients seek to renegotiate, alter, amend, or even cancel their relationships.
These teams can benefit from instant contract data visibility and insights into their contract terms, but it becomes even more essential when trying to save relationships and close new business. Termination clauses, price escalation caps, late payment penalties, autorenewal clauses, and acceptance criteria, among others, have a significant impact on the evolution of a client relationship and ultimately revenue and margins. In a recession, those insights can be the difference between remaining profitable and announcing layoffs.
Clearlaw is the industry leader in closing the data deficit for legal departments, providing automated data visibility and insights into contractual obligations throughout enterprise organizations. Our Natural Language Processing technology sifts through thousands of contracts and legal documents to extract the necessary information and pushes that to the appropriate end-user, whether it needs to be in CRMs, Customer Service tools, or Point of Sales systems. By automatically providing this data visibility throughout the business, leaders are better-informed to make the tough decisions and handle a difficult economic situation.