September 2006

Thomson Reuters deploys DealBuilder ContractExpress for sales executives in the Americas

Prior to 2005, the legal department at Thomson Reuters was spending too much time negotiating sales agreements with clients, a process that slowed down the sale of products and limited the time the department could devote to more pressing legal issues.

"Like most legal departments in large organizations, we draft and store our many sales agreements using manual processes - processes that are time consuming and vary from region to region" said Rosemary Martin, Global General Counsel at Thomson Reuters. "Our aim is to enhance customer satisfaction while reducing the time from order to contract".

"Our customers didn't want a large document that would require a long legal review process," says Karen Gray, vice president and principal legal counsel at Thomson Reuters America.

So Thomson Reuters decided to automate the contract creation process in early 2005 by using DealBuilder contract automation software. The solution allows sales staff in the Americas to generate precisely tailored contracts in English, Spanish, or Portuguese in minutes by answering simple questions online. Then to send it as a locked PDF (so it can't be edited!) to the customer without the need for legal review.

The system went live in New York in July 2006. According to Karen Gray "We believe the system will sharply reduce the amount of negotiations our customers engage us in."

But, if a customer does insist on negotiating the legal text of the contract, Thomson Reuters' negotiators are authorised to download a Word version of the contract from the DealBuilder system. Following normal legal negotiation and agreement, the DealBuilder system stores the negotiated text and then automatically incorporates the negotiated text along with additional standard text into the next PDF version when the sales executive sells additional products.

Other GCs are realising the full potential of DealBuilder. In the past 12 months, Microsoft Corp. began using DealBuilder to automate software End User Licence Agreements (EULAs) in 35 languages, and Cisco Systems Inc. began using DealBuilder to automate its global NDAs and sales contracts.

These solutions save so much time largely because they eliminate lawyer review from the process. Because Legal creates the master template and legal and compliancy rules, it is virtually impossible for a business user to draft a non-compliant contract.

"Our internal clients and our external clients want things done quickly," Gray says. "You can't just be this pie-in-the-sky legal department. You have to really be responsive to the internal and external needs, and this is really one way for people to do that."