How digital contracts are helping us see the big picture

With a legal team of more than 2,800 professionals in 46 countries, Accenture is always looking for new ways to provide valued guidance and better service to our people and clients.

We negotiate and execute thousands of highly customized, multi-lingual legal documents every month. Fundamental to the job is making sure that we work closely with our account teams to reach shared deal goals—and be sure we are all on the same page.

To improve how we work, we decided not only to digitize our contracts but also help our people get the full value from our contract data. Ultimately, we wanted to empower Accenture Legal and Sales teams to work more effectively and reach shared deal goals.

Tech + human ingenuity

For some time, Accenture has applied a cloud-first, platform-powered strategy in its business—it drives innovation across the entire enterprise, not least in our legal function where we’ve selected the Icertis Contract Intelligence platform, a cloud-based software-as-a-service contract management solution.

Aside from the basics, such as automated routing, search and reporting, the new platform, Manage my Deal, gives us other critical features, such as an automated electronic signature, a clause library and guided contracting, the ability to create contract families and integration with other key sales and contract systems. It means we can run all contract management, digitization and approvals live online.

With this kind of digitization and centralization, we can promote far greater transparency across our business. Data is captured once and shared across more than four different legal and sales systems. More than 90,000 contracts and 1,500 client-specific templates have been onboarded in the system within the first nine months of rollout. And we can support hundreds of thousands of contracts in one system.

Manage myDeal is also part of a larger portfolio of solutions that includes Accenture customer relationship management tool Manage mySales, legal contract delivery solution Manage myContracts, and our award-winning Accenture Legal Intelligent Contract Exploration (ALICE) which uses natural language processing and machine learning to search more than a million contracts in 12 languages. Together, these make up the Accenture contracting digital backbone that marries AI and user experience to provide ultimate value.

Providing 360° value

Here are some of the platform’s benefits that provide remarkable valuable to both internal teams and clients:

1. Consolidated account viewing. The platform provides a single view of information across clients and contracts, with clear hand-offs and status updates between Sales and Legal teams. Sales leaders can view entire contract families—including master service agreements, statements of work, change orders and more—so the context of every contract is fully understood.
2. Advanced, predictive analytics. Built-in analytics yield powerful insights about the performance of an entire contract portfolio, which allow teams to make adjustments. For example, Accenture can identify how many contracts have exclusivity language that can affect business competition. Plus, these analytics can provide even deeper insights, such as flagging regulatory issues before a contract is signed or identifying ways to improve contract revisions to be more competitive at winning deals.
3. Efficient, client-focused delivery. Our clients want to close contracts with us as swiftly as possible so they can embark on their journeys of transformation and problem-solving with Accenture. MMD helps us see how quickly we’re closing contracts by market and surfaces outliers where interventions may be needed to address issues standing in the way of signing contracts. Getting to the heart of these issues quickly ultimately drives a better experience for the clients we serve.

We’re excited by how much more we can achieve as more Accenture teams engage with this transformational tool. It’s one of the many ways we’re delivering on the promise of technology and human ingenuity.