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:
Before implementing any improvements, you need to know where your time goes. At the contractual level, time thieves tend to concentrate on five locations:
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.
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:
There are opportunities to improve time management At every stage of the contract.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Define indicators and compare them every quarter. You will see where your real potential for improvement lies.
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!