Documents, contracts, affidavits and deadlines — the life of a legal professional is jam-packed with responsibilities, stress and high stakes. In a field where mental capacity comes at a premium, and every second counts, entering the same information several times and digging through stacks of documents, searching for the correct clauses is a waste of time. Enter legal workflow software.

Legal workflow automation software helps your legal team streamline different phases of contract management, use a shared workspace for team collaboration, add reminders about specific documents and more.

Legal workflow software allows legal professionals to ditch the admin work and focus on the things that matter the most — analyze information, make inferences, work with clients, and make informed decisions. Before we present some of the best legal workflow solutions available in the market, let’s get a better understanding of what document workflow automation really is.

What is legal workflow automation?

Legal workflow automation is the implementation of technology applications and tools that minimize human input, simplify and streamline repetitive, manual legal tasks.

A recent survey by legal industry software provider Mitratech saw 190 law firms and in-house attorneys, legal operations staff and other legal professionals shared their views on legal workflow management software. 44% of partakers pointed out that contract management and legal workflow software is the technology their team will use in 2021. Following that trend and trajectory, it’s safe to say that the number will increase going into 2022.

Participants then went on to identify the key features they’d like to see from a solution designed to optimize their contract management workflows:

• Automated contract creation
• Delegation of contract preparation
• Document review, redlining, tracking changes, and execution
• Contract management, auto-triggers, notifications, amendments, renewals
• Audit trails
• Analytics, optimized search

Now that we’ve identified what legal workflow software is, what is expected of it and how much legal professionals value it, let’s move on to some examples.

Avokaado: Best for contract lifecycle management (CLM)

Avokaado is an end-to-end contract lifecycle management solution, centralizing all your legal document processes and operations in one place — smart drafting, co-editing with other users, approving, e-signing, metadata search, tracking changes through a dashboard and so much more.

Pros:

• Scenario-based document automation is designed to quickly and safely draft uniform documents with the required fields; advanced formatting, bilingual formatting, automated cross-references, and more.
• Structured data and template library lets you create smart templates that are accessible to your entire team 24/7 standardising internal documents, avoiding outdated versions and ensuring everyone is on the same page.
• Avokaado does not work as a standalone legal workflow software solution. It can be easily integrated with your existing technology stack whether that’s a data register, CSV tables, CRM, or your own software.

Cons:

• There is a lack of visual content such as training videos and webinars to help you better understand how the software can help your team. However, there’s a Help Center and Customer Support team available within the product
• The legal profession spans continents and reaches way beyond English-speaking locales so Avokaado is working on adding more language options to the document template library and the product interface.

Price plans:

Avokaado offers a 7-day free trial to all its plans. There is also a freemium option allowing for 100+ free pre-lawyered templates, unlimited downloading of PDFs, and secure electronic archiving.

The plans are:

• Starter at 29€/month — best for solo users to draft, sign and manage documents
• Standard at 49€/month — best for team collaboration for dynamic workflows
• Premium at 60€/month — best for automation and personalization for teams with a legal department
• Custom — fully customizable for large teams and API users

Evisort: Best for AI-powered contract analytics

Evisort is legal workflow software that helps users answer any contract-related questions and close deals at a faster pace. Using its powerful analytics features, you can retrieve historical data points from past deals and optimize future contracts for better compliance, less risk, and quicker execution.

Pros:

• Evisort simplifies and accelerates the contract review process using AI-based legal workflow software to request, draft, redline, approve, sign, and renew contracts. It allows you to get all interested parties working on the same document.
• Extract valuable data from contracts to find revenue, cost-savings, and risk-reduction opportunities. Acquire the business intelligence you need to get more out of your future contracts by accessing visual key performance metrics.
• Sync all existing contracts across different departments without the stress and logistics of an IT-led migration. Do not interrupt your workflow during the integration.

Cons:

• There is still room for improvement regarding user permission control, as well as the grouping logic within the system.
• Document incorporation can be bumpy in some cases, requiring revisions and corrections.
• The Optical Character Recognition (OCR) can be less effective with poorly scanned documents, slowing down the entire workflow as documents need to be re-scanned and re-uploaded.

Price plans:

Evisort does not provide information regarding pricing plans and free trial options. This is common practice amongst software service providers as solutions often need to be customized to fit the needs of each specific use case. You can inquire privately and get a custom quote.

Conga: Best for revenue operations

Conga is the ideal legal workflow software platform to improve your commercial revenue operations, simplifying the management of core business activities such as quotes, contracts, and documents. 

Pros:

• Conga allows your team to sell more by streamlining quotes, digital commerce and improving the overall customer experience. Sales are the main revenue driver in every business and Conga helps them reach their potential.
• A deal is not finished once the contract is signed. On the contrary, that’s when the real work starts. Conga allows you to manage orders, billings, promotions and communication for a centralized customer experience.
• The eSignature tool allows you to easily capture the signatures from clients to fast-track deal completion and revenue gathering.

Cons:

• The user interface can sometimes be a little tricky and difficult to work with. You need some extra time to familiarize yourself with the working environment.
• Errors that appear within the system can often confuse users as to what the error is and how it can be resolved.
• The setup can be technical and needs a detailed walkthrough from the Conga team.

Price plans:

Conga offers a free trial but its pricing structure can only be provided through inquiry and getting a custom quote.

Legito: Best for document management workflow

Legito automates the document management workflow by ensuring the right people act as they should on documents. Set rules, notifications and assign actions to avoid manual mistakes and double-entries.

Pros:

• A document’s audit trail is as important as its content. Knowing who did what and when they did allows for full transparency and potential for optimization.
• Never miss a deadline with Legito’s automated data extraction tool. Legito scans a document, extracts important dates and notifies you in time so that you are always on time.
• Legito allows you to turn unstructured data from your own documents into legible, digestible information in its own smart templates.

Cons:

• Legito comes at a premium, making it an expensive choice for SMEs. To give you some context, their basic plan comes at $ 1,200.00 per year for a single user.
• Collaboration tools between different users such as working on the same document simultaneously is an area Legito could definitely improve in.
• Email notifications are another area of improvement for Legito, maybe adding links that directly lead to new document versions.

Price plans: Legito offers a free trial period. Here are their different plans:

• Basic at $1,200.00/year for 1 user
• Small Business at $ 9,600.00/year for 10 users
• Custom at a price points you’ll discuss with Legito for 20+ users

Onit: Best for on-platform collaboration

Onit is legal workflow software streamlining business processes and better workflows for the legal industry.

Pros:

• Onit’s Automate NDA solution helps you automate the non-disclosure management process by drafting, reviewing, negotiating, and executing of NDAs in a self-service customer portal. This solution cuts time spent on NDAs by up to 70%.
• The InvoiceAI feature can help you review historical data, detect real-time errors, and identify cost-saving opportunities.>
• Using Onit allows you to identify clauses that add risks to your agreement. This gives you the opportunity to give contracts a risk score, helping you make an informed decision when negotiating a deal.

Cons:

• There is no live support.
• Onit does not offer a free trial.
• There is no SAP integration.

Price plans:

Price plans come after inquiring through Onit’s website.

Contract Logix: Best for standardised legal workflows>

Contract Logix is legal workflow software that empowers legal, finance, and sales professionals to automate their contract processes.

Pros:

• Bird’s eye view of every contract detail for full transparency. Manage the stage, status and report on progress.
• Manage contract changes in real-time and never miss a comment, an amendment or a deadline with automated reminders, tasks, and calendars.
• Mirror your business processes with configurable workflows based on your team’s needs and compliance requirements.

Cons:

• The online version of the system can sometimes be slow and cause crashes.
• Software customization often needs considerable time for technical assistance.
• The user interface could be more intuitive and user-friendly.

Price plans:

Contract Logix offers two main plans: Premium CLM and Express CMS. The plans start at $59.00/month with a per/feature pricing model on top of that. There is no free trial available.

Agiloft: Best for customizable contract management

Agiloft provides true and fast customization that supports many different legal workflow examples.

Pros:

• Agiloft provides deep protection to users with precise access controls down to the specific fields within records.
• Add and edit custom fields, track changes and manage the language across different contracts.
• Dashboards, charts, and reports are accessible and visible by the entire organization and can be customized to fit specific needs.

Cons:

• The UI is sometimes complicated, busy and not intuitive enough.
• Due to how easily customizable it is, understanding the relationships between tables when setting up new fields can prove to be confusing.
• It’s challenging to integrate multiple processes such as legal, privacy, and security.

Price plans:

Agiloft offers a free trial with pricing plans starting at $65.00/month with custom quotes for Professional, Professional Extended, Enterprise and Enterprise Extended plans.

Icertis: Best for contract intelligence

Icertis is a legal workflow software providing a contract management solution to enterprise businesses, helping them turn static documents into sources of strategic advantages. By extracting valuable information from the documents, businesses can optimize their business processes and workflow.

Pros:

• Icertis is Microsoft Azure-native, highly scalable and built on an integration-friendly architecture.
• Reduce communication overhead by getting all interested parties on the same document. Vendors, employees and third parties can register on the Icertis portal and access contracts, to edit them accordingly.
• Icertis provides dynamic, personalized dashboards to accurately measure and visualize contract status and performance.

Cons:

• Not all customer requests end up in signed contracts. A legal workflow software platform like Icertis needs more status fields to reflect the different stages of a client’s life cycle.
• Design and user experience lack the sharpness and minimalist approach of other players in the same space. They are not as intuitive and customer-friendly.
• The customization process may end up being complex and costly.

Price plans:

Icertis pricing plans are not readily available on their website and you need to inquire for a custom quote.

Choosing the right legal workflow software

There are a lot of legal workflow software solutions in the market and choosing the right one seems daunting. With so many choices available here are some of the main things you need to consider:

• Your vertical and company needs
• Customization abilities
• Cost
• User interface and easy-of-use
• Support

If you are interested in legal workflow software that can cover the entire contract process from legal documents preparation to actual execution consider using contract lifecycle management tools like Avokaado. Avokaado CLM software assists with standardizing legal documents, making contract execution more efficient and transparent, and keeping all the contracts in a unified data-driven management system.