Meeting Street + Concord

Challenge

Meeting Street’s admins never seemed to be able to find contracts when they needed them. Some were attached to emails, while others were stored on shared drives, or printed out and kept in cardboard boxes. Each time a new amendment arrived in their inboxes, Meeting Street’s admins had to go in search of the matching contract – a process that often consumed days or even weeks, while deadlines drew nearer.

“It lacked organizational structure,” recalls Yolanda Lamboy, Meeting Street’s director of business operations and assistant general counsel. “Somebody would send me an amendment to review, and I’d say, ‘Okay, what contract is this amending?’ Nobody knew.” Even after Lamboy figured out which contract an amendment applied to, no one knew what format that contract was stored in, or where it was located, or what it was named. Simply tracking down agreements became a full-time job.

Meanwhile, contracts were auto-renewing without anyone’s knowledge. Since Meeting Street had no contract lifecycle management system in place, agreements signed by people who’d left the organization were filed away and forgotten – resulting in unexpected recurring costs. Many of these costs came as unpleasant surprises to the departments that had to pay them, since current staff members weren’t even aware those contracts existed.

Lamboy was determined to track down and eliminate these recurring charges, and get Meeting Street’s contract review process under control. To achieve these goals, her team needed a contract management platform that would integrate seamlessly with their existing workflows. “What I really wanted first and foremost,” she says, “was a system where I could organize contracts and their amendments, and keep them all together.”

"Now, instead of coming to ask admins to find every contract, people are more likely to look in Concord themselves first." – Yolanda Lamboy, director of business operations and assistant general counsel at Meeting Street

Solution

After seeing a demo of Concord in action, Meeting Street’s operations team quickly determined that the Enterprise plan was a solid fit for their needs and budget. Rather than bringing all Meeting Street’s legacy contracts into Concord in bulk, Lamboy realized it would be more seamless to bring in each contract as team members received documents related to it.

“If I get an amendment to a contract,” Lamboy says, “the first question I ask in my response email is, ‘What contract is this amending?’ And I have the person send it to me so I can upload it into Concord.” For example, if a schedule arrives separately from the contract itself, Lamboy attaches that schedule to the contract in Concord, so team members can easily find both docs.

Lamboy finds it especially useful to add her own notes to a contract, and look them up later to tell Meeting Street employees responsible for contract negotiations why she’s not accepting a term previously accepted. “What I might find acceptable this year may not be applicable next year when the contract comes up for renewal,” she explains. “Now I can go back to my notes in Concord, and tell the administrator exactly what I changed my mind about, and why.”

Concord also enables Lamboy and her team to set up automated alerts for contracts that auto-renew. As soon as they bring a contract into the system, they simply type in the renewal date – then Concord automatically sends selected team members an email as that date approaches, letting them know it’ll soon be time to renew or cancel the agreement.

Results

Since Lamboy began using Concord, her daily workflow has become a lot less cluttered. “Now, instead of coming to ask me to find every contract, people are more likely to look in Concord themselves first,” she says. This improvement has freed up significant time for Lamboy to focus on more critical tasks, while her team members feel more confident and empowered to self-serve when looking up contract details.

Now, instead of having to hunt down a contract across many different locations, team members can easily find every agreement in its correct Concord folder, along with all related amendments and notes. This means they spend less time cross-checking changes and decisions with one another, and can act immediately to amend each contract as appropriate. What’s more, Concord’s renewal notifications help the team catch and cancel unneeded agreements that would’ve otherwise auto-renewed.

On the whole, Lamboy says Concord has done much more than just save her team time and money. It’s trained team members to think more strategically about their contracts’ lifecycles. “Now we get notifications when a new contract is coming, and when it’s been signed, and when it’s up for renewal,” she says. “It’s really raised awareness of how much we stand to benefit by managing our contracts proactively.”

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