LegalTech · Consulting, Technology
Contract review and approval workflow that cut the cycle from 12 days to 5
A corporate legal department lost time on contracts because nobody owned each handoff and drafts circulated as email attachments with no version control. A rule based workflow for contract initiation, review, approval and archive, with secure document access and a central dashboard, brought the contract cycle down from 12 days to 5.
12 days to 5Contract cycle from request to signature- Client
- The in house legal department of a diversified Indian business group
- Region
- India
- Sponsor
- General counsel and the company secretary
- Duration
- 12 weeks to the first release, with a month of parallel running before email intake was switched off
Engagement model
O2E: Output Oriented Engagement
The outputs were defined with the general counsel as a working contract workflow for four contract types, a document repository with version control and a contracts dashboard, accepted after a month of parallel running.
How O2E worksThe team
- Legal operations consultant1
- Workflow engineer2
- Security and integration engineer1
- QA engineer (shared)1
The challenge
Where things stood
- Business teams sent contract requests to individual lawyers by email, so the legal team had no single list of what was pending.
- Drafts went back and forth as attachments, and lawyers sometimes reviewed an outdated version while the counterparty had a newer one.
- Handoffs between the requesting team, legal, finance and the signatory were unclear, and contracts stalled at each one.
- Executed contracts were stored in shared drives and cupboards, which made renewals and audit requests slow to answer.
The approach
How we ran it
Weeks 1 to 3
Contract types and checkpoints
Worked with the general counsel to define four contract types to start with: NDAs, vendor agreements, customer contracts and leases. For each we agreed who reviews, which clauses need finance or compliance sign off, and the approval limits.
Weeks 3 to 7
Intake and rule based routing
Built a contract request form on AksharAI that captures counterparty, value, term and template used, and routes the request to the right lawyer by contract type, business unit and value.
Weeks 6 to 10
Review, versioning and approval
Added a document repository with version history, checkpoints that cannot be skipped, and role based access so business users see only their own contracts while legal sees all.
Weeks 10 to 16
Archive, dashboard and parallel run
Executed contracts are archived with key dates indexed for search, and a dashboard shows every active and past contract. We ran the old email route alongside for a month before switching it off.
What it looks like
Representative screens
Drawn to show the kind of system we delivered. Client screens and data stay private.
CTR-25-0598, master supply agreement
- Counterparty
- Customer C-112, Mumbai
- Contract value
- ₹2,15,00,000 over 3 years
- Current version
- v4, counterparty redlines of 08 Oct 2025
- Flagged clauses
- Payment terms 90 days, uncapped liability, auto renewal
- Reviewer
- Adv. Meera Iyer, senior legal counsel
- Signatory
- Chief financial officer
- Request raised by consumer products sales
- Draft on group template, legal review
- Finance review of payment and liability terms
- Approval by general counsel
- Signature and archive
What we delivered
Modules and features
- Contract request form with templates for NDAs, vendor, customer and lease agreements
- Rule based routing to reviewers by contract type, business unit and value
- Version controlled document repository with redline history
- Mandatory checkpoints for finance and compliance review on defined clauses
- Role based, logged access to contracts and attachments
- Searchable archive of executed contracts with expiry and renewal dates
- Central dashboard of active and past contracts by stage, owner and age
What changed
Outcomes
- 12 days to 5Contract cycle from request to signature
- Approval checkpoints that cannot be skipped
- Central dashboard for all active and past contracts
Figures as reported by the client.
Looking back
We started with four of the many contract types the group signs, and that kept the first release small enough to get right. The harder change was persuading business teams to stop emailing lawyers directly; the month of parallel running helped, but switching off the old route on a fixed date mattered more. If we did it again we would index renewal and expiry dates from the start, since the dashboard became the place the company secretary checked renewals far sooner than we expected.
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