All important things evolve. Contract Lifecycle Management should be no exception. Nonetheless it happens to be one of the most undervalued matters by management in companies of all sizes.

If the question is: “do you realize that contracts are actually the backbone of your business?” we imagine that your answer is -“yes, of course!”; then why don’t you treat them with the necessary importance and relevance!?

IT-Legal solutions such as Nova CLM not only help you managing long-term and short-term activities in your Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) but it also helps you leverage that huge value that is inside every detail of your contracts. This is done in a simple, secure and customized way in the Cloud.

What is your Contracts Geological Period?

Just for fun, but not only, please check in which “Geological Period” of CLM your company is now and contact me for a quote. Jump with our “time machine” into the latest and simplest way of doing it right.

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The need to transfer words in a standard media and preserve them from time deterioration leads Mesopotamian cultures to the adoption of Clay: clay tablets were the primary media for everyday written communication and were used extensively in schools and courts. Tablets were routinely recycled and only if permanence was called for, they could be baked hard in a kiln (as a certificate) similarly to the modern use of paper. An interesting example is available at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it’s a Babilon house rental contract dating 522-486 BC, see at http://metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/321709

A thousand year old tradition of printing Britain’s laws on vellum has recently been scrapped to save £80,000 yearly (http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35569281). Vellum is derived from the Latin word “vitulinum” meaning “made from calf”. As an example of its features consider that original copies of the Magna Carta, signed more than 800 years ago on vellum, still exist.

The need for long-time preservation of codes has changed -as demonstrated by the British Government- and in today’s Information Technology Era codes and contracts need to upgrade from a mere phisical preservation towards central repositories of legal contents and, which is more important, to solutions allowing both sharing of content and leap into the “next step”: machine-readable codes and contracts.

The Internet of Things and the development of Smart Cities involve new needs: the need for decision-automation based on service levels defined in contracts as well as the need of legal compliance. I find that the only way for achieving these results both in Smart Cities and in modern Organizations (with global products and IoT) is by adopting Contract Lifecycle Management practices assisted by specialized tools with open standards and protocols such as OpenData or LegalXML and eContracts. In addition to that, the maturity level reached by electronic signatures allows a secure leave of paper-based contracts although it is still largely adopted.

In conclusion, the persistence of paper-based contracts in a fast-growing global market characterized by complex legal compliance and the use of electronic means for enhancing business is comparable to writing modern contracts in cuneiform over clay. CLM is the answer: central repository, open standards, multi-juridical and multi-cultural contract managemen at its best.

Links and resources

• BBC, vellum
• Metropolitan Museum of Art, cuneiform contract

What I notice here is that human-paper interaction is still the best and most natural, no matter progress. I personally classify devices for digital conversion of human writing in two families: replicators and gateways. Replicators try to replace pen and paper with pointers and devices (such as my Samsung Note) while gateways focus on converting the human writing into digital, such as Moleskine’s Smart Writing Set.

Perhaps the key for success in this domain will stay in the writing gateways such as Moleskine’s set because, although some of us already are used to write into digital devices directly, there’s no better experience than writing your thoughts into paper… with no distraction, without obstacles.

Put your ideas into (digital) paper!