A new global survey has found that 64% of respondents at corporates believe ‘routine contract work’ hurts employee morale. Also, 18% of the surveyed 1,000 business and legal professionals from across the world said that such work ‘hurts morale significantly’.
The data comes from Ontra, the contract workflow platform. They also found that 78% of those surveyed plan to increase spending on contract automation and outsourcing of BAU contracting needs in 2022.
With regard to morale, some large employers may perhaps not think this is an issue – until they consider that the legal recruitment market is in a state of flux at the moment. Contracting needs are growing, and those with legal skills appear to have a lot of options now, whether they want to work inhouse, at a law firm, or at an ALSP – or within a legal tech company that needs their contract expertise as well.
Also interesting was that 74% of companies said that they spent less than one month ‘onboarding the provider [of] outsourced contract management processes’.
In 3% of the sample it was as quickly as 24 hours – although one would guess that would have been for respondents at quite small businesses…..or one would hope so. And 30% took from ‘a day to less than a week’. All of this seems fairly fast……..
And as to reasons not to outsource contract management needs, these were the reasons:
At the top of the list were security concerns at 55%, then quality concerns at 49%, then ‘too expensive’. Also noted was: ‘onboarding takes too long’ and ‘inaccurate results’ – suggesting that there is still plenty of work to be done to prove value to corporates in this field and that the argument for change cannot be taken as accepted by all yet – despite some promising signals in recent years.
That the ‘onboarding process takes too long’ (noted by 20%) is also a bit paradoxical, as many companies are moving very quickly here – and that could of course lead to some issues, to put it politely. But, clearly some companies want to move very quickly.
Hmm…tricky. If you go too fast it could lead to a bit of a mess in some cases, if you go too slow then the client is not satisfied. A difficult balancing act for sure.
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Demographics:
1,000 business and legal professionals
• Employed at companies in the Financial Services, Healthcare, Real Estate, Technology, Government, Education, Energy and Entertainment industries
• Possesses a role specifically relating to managing routine contracts: CCO, CFO, COO, CLO, general counsel, associate general counsel, partners, senior associates, asset managers, associates, and junior associates
• Employer does business in the US, UK, Hong Kong, or Singapore
• Company sizes ranged from 50-1,000 employees with legal teams of 1-15