With contracts and supplier agreements scattered across SharePoint folders, personal drives and email threads, Legal only gets involved when something has gone wrong: a clause that wasn’t followed, a commitment that was forgotten, or an attachment that can no longer be found. As a result, Legal often works reactively – leaving both governance and risk management unnecessarily vulnerable.
In practice, a centralized contract and supplier overview is not a “nice to have” but a basic requirement for running a healthy and compliant business. Without a unified platform, it is impossible to document which obligations the company has actually taken on, what risks are involved and whether suppliers live up to the requirements to which the company itself is subject. This applies to everything from timeouts on data processing agreements, SLAs and commercial terms – to more critical issues such as data security, subcontractors and changes in regulatory frameworks.
A dedicated contract management system gives Legal the necessary foundation. All agreements – including attachments, amendments, approvals and correspondence – are collected in a structure that Legal defines itself. This allows governance principles, standard clauses, approval flows and documentation requirements to actually be enforced in practice, not just on paper.
Many of the regulations companies have to comply with today – from ESG reporting to supplier management requirements in different industries – are based on a simple premise: you need to know who you are doing business with, what has been agreed and how risks are managed. This requires a single contractual basis, not folders and documents scattered across the organization.
When contracts and documents are gathered in one place, Legal gets an up-to-date overview of suppliers, risk profiles and commitments. This makes it possible to document that suppliers comply with the company’s Code of Conduct and ESG requirements – and to obtain the necessary information directly from the parties. It also makes it easier to identify agreements with special operational, security or outsourcing significance that require closer follow-up.
Personal data management also becomes more robust. DPAs are linked to the right agreements, changes are automatically tracked, and retention periods are enforced through automatic deletion procedures instead of manual routines. Because all contract data is stored in Denmark without US sub-processors, the company also avoids the third-country transfer challenges that many IT platforms today inevitably entail.
When the foundation is in place, compliance becomes not a project that starts at the end of the year or when a regulator knocks on the door – but an ongoing, built-in discipline that strengthens both risk mitigation and governance in practice.
For Legal, template management is not about design and layout, but about control: ensuring the organization is using the right terms, the correct clauses and the latest version of each agreement. When templates live in folders, old versions circulate locally, and employees save their own copies, the risk of deviation is real – especially in larger organizations with many decision makers.
With centralized template management, the legally approved version of each template becomes the only one available. Variables, falling terms and legal caveats are handled through structured fields so users cannot deviate from their mandate or customize terms that require legal approval. This reduces variation, eliminates interpretation and speeds up work without compromising quality.
Once the contract is generated, it can be sent directly for digital signature from the platform. This means that Legal controls both the document basis and the formalization process itself: correct identification, full audit trail, secure storage and automatic archiving on the right agreement. The entire organization follows one unified process – from template to signature – without detours, local customizations or insecure signing services.
The result is a contract process that is legally consistent, documentable and resistant to human error. Legal gets a tool that enforces governance automatically, and the organization gets a faster, more secure and far more professional way to formalize agreements.
In particular, we have added the value that contracts will not cost more than they should – plus it simplifies our processes
Mette Lykke Bak
Group Legal Counsel at SEF
