Keys to improve your time management when working with contracts

If you work with complex contracts, you know that proper time management is not a luxury but a necessity. Between drafts, versions, negotiations and internal validations, hours go by without you even noticing. This article is designed for you, the legal professional, in-house lawyer or manager who needs to optimise your working hours without sacrificing quality, compliance or accuracy.

Legal time management becomes a key competency in document-intensive environments, but it seems impossible in the face of increasing demands and the frenetic pace of business. The good news is that there are solutions. In this article, we offer you a practical guide, showing you how to structure your day better, reduce unproductive time and deal with the complexity of contracts using tried and tested methods.

This article is available in Spanish.

In this article, you will find:

1. Understand where the hidden time is
2. Create a predictable and flexible working structure
3. Optimise key phases of the contract lifecycle
4. Align the entire team with the same methodology
5. Automate where it hurts the most to waste time
6. Learn to say no or to renegotiate times
7. Evaluate results and improve your KPIs

Understand where the hidden time is

Before implementing any improvements, you need to know where your time goes. At the contractual level, time thieves tend to concentrate on five locations:

• Searching for previous versions or clauses.
• Drafting repetitive documents from scratch.
• Dispersed approval cycles.
• Lack of centralised templates.
• Siloed work between legal and business teams.

These are some examples, but every professional has his or her own. Consciously analyse your day, your work habits and times, identify your time thieves and make a log for a week. Note how much time you spend on repetitive tasks and how much on strategic work. That simple action will provide you with a roadmap for action.

Create a predictable and flexible working structure

Complex contracts need time and attention, so they will require your time. If you work in a structured way, you will have taken a big step towards optimising your time:

• Deep focus blocks: Set aside uninterrupted chunks of time for review or drafting key clauses.
• Group similar tasks together: Draft several similar contracts or reviews in one session.
• Apply the 80/20 rule: 80% of contracts have 20% recurring clauses. Centralise them and have them ready.
• Avoid multitasking: Working on a complex contract while answering emails or taking calls reduces efficiency and increases errors.

Optimise key phases of the contract lifecycle

There are opportunities to improve time management At every stage of the contract.

• Request: Integrate automatic flows with other areas to avoid back-and-forth emails.
• Negotiation: Centralise comments and changes on a single platform to avoid confusion between versions.
• Validation: Define specific responsibilities and deadlines for each internal approval.
• Signature: Adopt an electronic signature to avoid weeks of printing and scanning.
• Post-signing: Automate renewal, expiry and periodic review alerts.

Learn more about the phases of the contract lifecycle

Align the entire team with the same methodology

Good time management is not only the responsibility of the individual but of the entire legal team. In contract work, a specific order and methodology need to be established:

• Define a unified process for the creation and approval of contracts.
• Enable other business areas to make clear requests.
• Use internal checklists to reduce errors and rework.
• Promote a culture of ‘zero version creep’.

This reduces the time spent per contract, and also minimises errors and ensures the consistency that is key to the smooth running of the company's legal operations.

Automate where it hurts the most to waste time

If your legal team is still drafting every document from scratch or has contracts scattered across their local desks, you are wasting valuable hours and taking on legal and compliance risks.

• Use dynamic templates: Centralise standard contracts with modifiable variables.
• Apply conditional logic: So that the contract adapts according to the type of counterparty, jurisdiction or economic values.
• Create a clause library: never rewrite a standard confidentiality clause from scratch again.

Key tip: a comprehensive CLM (Contract Lifecycle Management) platform will help you systematise these processes and free up time for truly strategic tasks.

Request a demo of our Bigle CLM and discover how far your team can go thanks to technology.

Learn to say no or to renegotiate times

Being assertive is also a legal skill. One of the great enemies of good time management is a lack of boundaries. If everything is urgent, nothing is really urgent. You need to develop the ability to identify true urgencies and differentiate them from tasks that should be put on the back burner.

• Negotiate realistic deadlines with requesting areas.
• Reject assignments that are incomplete or lack a clear brief.
• Establish internal SLA (Service Level Agreement) policies.

Evaluate results and improve your KPIs

There are no magic solutions. What you don't measure, you can't improve. So it's time to turn to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs),  which allow you to specify the time spent on relevant projects. The goal? Discern between efficient processes and those that need an overhaul.

• Calculate the average time it takes you today to close a complex contract.
• Measure the number of versions generated for each document.
• Analyse how many contracts are delayed by validations or signatures.
• Track the administrative tasks that you could automate.

Define indicators and compare them every quarter. You will see where your real potential for improvement lies.

Time is your most strategic resource

As contracts become increasingly complex and volume continues to grow, it's time to manage time better to maintain control, quality and the value that legal brings to the organisation.

Adopting these strategies does not mean becoming a robot, but rather freeing up mental and operational space to focus on what matters: supporting the company with legal insight, anticipating risks and improving business performance.

At Bigle, we support legal teams seeking to do just that. If you want to transform the way you manage your time and contracts, contact one of our experts and get advice on the process - it's time to transform your work on contracts!