We are happy to share news from our technology partner DocJuris, whom we recently collaborated with at our Practically Genius event. Here’s some exciting DocJuris product news from Henal Patel, CEO of DocJuris.
We’re proud to unveil DocJuris Amendments—a new, groundbreaking feature that automatically drafts amendments and attaches exhibits. This feature will save countless hours of frustration any time you need to amend a contract.
If you’ve ever had to write a contract amendment, you know they take up a lot of time. On average, a simple amendment takes up to 45 minutes to draft. On the other end of the spectrum, complex redlines that could otherwise be automated with an amendment can take over three hours to complete.
And yet, a contract amendment can’t be avoided. You need to go through the formal process of amending a contract because contracts are binding. Anytime you need to change anything about a contract that has been signed by all parties involved, the contract needs to be formally amended to ensure that it continues to be binding and, therefore, enforceable.
As painful as the contract amendment process is, it’s even more painful to go through the hassle of legal problems that can arise in the future if you fail to execute this part correctly.
Why Contract Amendments Are So Challenging
On the surface, it doesn’t seem like contract amendments would be all that difficult. For example, it should be easy to go into your contract and update the terms from ending in December 2021 to December 2022, right?
You’d think so, but you’d be incorrect (at least, until now with the release of DocJuris’s latest contract amendment feature—but more on that in a minute).
A contract amendment is a separately signed contract that refers to your original signed contract. So, when you’re manually writing contract amendments, you can’t just go into the original contract and change the date.
Instead, you will need to write an amendment with a translation of a redline. For example, a change in terms might have a translation like this: “Both parties have agreed to amend the term of the contract to add 12 months, thereby changing the end date of the contract from 12/31/2021 to 12/31/2022.”
You will need to review the contract carefully, taking notice of any instances when this change in terms would affect any other deadlines or due dates for one or both parties. If changing the terms will have any kind of impact, you will need to create another amendment to address any changes that you will make.
Writing these translations is a time-consuming process that can easily take several hours. In addition, since translations need to use the correct legal terminology, they are often left to the lawyers, further extending the process of amending a contract if a company’s legal team doesn’t get to it right away.
Then there’s the fact that you can’t just go in and directly amend a contract. Often, this process requires you to have the contract open in one window and a PDF or Word version of the document open on another screen where you can make your redlines and add redline translations.
DocJuris’s Solution to Contract Amendments
Training AI systems to auto-redline a complicated agreement with accuracy can be futile. That’s why we’re bringing a contract amendment solution to everyone. DocJuris will help seasoned contracting professionals who surgically prepare amendments at scale and want to save time with a clean, redline-to-amendment workflow. In addition, our latest update will help sales and procurement professionals who want a faster way to get back to the other side with a preferred terms exhibit attached to a simple amendment.
Here’s how it works:
Instead of creating a new amendment document when you need to amend a contract, you can mark up your contract in DocJuris. It works as a “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) editor, which means it’s intuitive for even the busiest and least tech-savvy user to get the hang of.
So, instead of creating an amendment with the redline translation, “Both parties have agreed to amend the term of the contract to add 12 months, thereby changing the end date of the contract from 12/31/2021 to 12/31/2022,” you can go into the contract inside DocJuris and just change the date.
Make any other amendments you need, then download the contract with amendments. DocJuris’s software will automatically create a contract amendment based on your changes, complete with redline translations.
In addition, you can customize the template inside the playbook to define the parameters above and below the amendment text.
Try DocJuris Today!
If you’re not using DocJuris yet and want to learn more about how our software can save your legal team, procurement team, or firm valuable time negotiating, redlining, and amending contracts, schedule a demo today!
Be sure to check out part two of our announcement post, where we’ll dive into more details about the different use cases that apply to this latest contract amendment update.
And for more on how to use DocJuris with Formstack Documents, see how DocJuris brings low code automation and legal engineering together.
