Interview: Robin Snasdell of Consilio talks about the value of contract management

Robin Snasdell is Managing Director at Consilio.  Chris Dale, of the eDisclosure Information Project, interviewed him recently, and asked him to explain what contract management is and why companies would go to Consilio for help with it.

Robin Snasdell says that companies engaged in some kind of contract management technology implementation look for opportunities to do more with the technology and get more value from its use.

There are big opportunities to take legacy contracts and move them into the technology, to extract data and metadata from them and use the resulting information to enhance the business.

An example might be an M&A transaction where a company, whether buyer or seller, is trying to understand what data exists within the company’s contracts, perhaps as part of due diligence exercise.

This is most obviously a search for risk buried within the contracts, but it is also an opportunity to seek out hidden value and opportunities which are being missed. One part of the business might not know, for example, that beneficial terms may have been negotiated by another department.

As a result, the company may be able to develop new templates and new clause libraries while perhaps finding others which they would rather not use and would like to be rid of across all their contracts. There is a continuing value in this after the initial exercise as the company is enabled to monitor and audit the use of particular contract terms.

Consilio uses a mixture of technology and human review. The technology may, for example, be set to look for certain clauses but it may be necessary to use human eyes and skills to decide what to do about them.

Why do companies go to Consilio for this? Robin Snasdell emphasises that Consilio has an existing eDiscovery infrastructure with technical locations around the world and a significant review capacity which can be applied as necessary. In addition, Consilio is well known for its ability to handle a very wide range of languages.