Most Popular Contract Drafting Software for Corporate Legal Departments

Tech tools and automation are necessities in today’s complex business world. Contract drafting software in particular is foundational for many corporate legal departments, greatly streamlining the process of creating agreements for two or more parties to sign. 

While some of these tools have been available since the early 2000s, corporate legal departments are now adopting software solutions at a faster rate as it becomes increasingly apparent that manual processes can hinder growth and success. 

Below are some of the most well-known contract drafting software solutions currently on the market; however, they are of no benefit to reviewing a counterparty’s contract—an endeavor that is orders of magnitude more time consuming and difficult. So for corporate legal departments to save even more time and money, these solutions should be coupled with a next-level platform that incorporates artificial intelligence (AI) capable of contract review and negotiation.

The Most Popular Contract Drafting Software Solutions in 2022

*Crunchbase ranks companies’ relevance based on ranking signals like web traffic, news mentions, community engagement, funding events, acquisitions, and more.

PandaDoc - For Digitized Clause Libraries & Contracting

What It Does: PandaDoc’s online document generation software lets users create, approve, and eSign agreements by populating templates with clause library text. 

Pros: PandaDoc can be implemented across multiple corporate legal departments. 

Cons: Users have reported formatting errors after making slight edits on forms created from scratch.

Formstack - For Creating Custom Documents On A Small Scale

What It Does: Formstack’s document generation software enables users to create custom forms and templates, save them in various formats, and collect eSignatures for approvals. 

Pros: Organizing documents in folders is fairly straightforward. The software can integrate with Excel and other programs, allowing data importations. Features like automated notifications can improve workflows.

Cons: Users claim it doesn’t go far enough as they can’t collect payments. The per user charge system can be limiting and makes it difficult to test forms or scale on a budget.

Thomson Reuters HighQ - For High-Volume Legal Departments

What It Does: HighQ’s workflow platform aims to improve how organizations plan, organize, track, and complete drafting work via client portals, machine intelligence, analytics, task lists, and templates.

Pros: Users populate documents using a plain-language questionnaire. The interface features templates and includes the ability to assign tasks and track workflows. 

Cons: A steep learning curve can prevent users from getting the most out of HighQ. Users without prior coding experience find the template creation process somewhat frustrating. A good deal of manual entry is still involved. Some users had to create workarounds to manage existing executed agreements.

Documate - For Document Assembly

What It Does: Users can create a questionnaire, load templates, and customize them with logic jumps, conditions, and formatting specifications. Automation measures are integrated into workflow processes. 

Pros: Customers enjoy the flexibility, integrations, and affordability of the product.

Cons: Some users find they are unable to customize certain design aspects such as fonts and colors on client-facing documents, which makes branding consistency a major challenge.

ClauseBase - For Building Docs & Templates With Clauses

What It Does: ClauseBase stacks together and swaps out contract terms. The software works with ClauseBuddy, an MS Word plugin, and inserting additional legal language intro contracts during negotiations is possible. Previously selected legal terms are  remembered and automatically applied. 

Pros: Integration functionality and helpful customer service are frequently cited by ClauseBase users.

Cons: Some users report a steep learning curve when attempting to fully utilize all of ClauseBase’s features.

Taking the Next Step With LexCheck

There’s no disputing the fact that contract drafting software can save corporate legal departments a great deal of time while improving consistency, but the need for technology doesn’t end there. Review and negotiation processes can take just as long—if not longer—than initial drafting.

LexCheck—an award-winning contract review and negotiation platform developed by lawyers, linguists, and AI experts—fully redlines, risk assesses, and suggests revisions for a draft in minutes, helping legal departments stay ahead of the curve.

Its technology is built with the latest advances in AI, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning. Unlike other solutions, LexCheck goes the extra mile by comparing an uploaded agreement to your AI Digital Playbook and best practice templates. The end results are surgically precise revisions that improve contract quality.