Contract Management

Third-party risk management is the process of identifying, assessing, and mitigating the risks that arise from an organisation’s relationships with external parties: vendors, suppliers, service providers, technology partners, outsourced functions, and any other third party that has access to the organisation’s data, systems, operations, or customers.

Clause standardisation is the process of defining approved language for the key provisions in an organisation’s contracts, establishing fallback positions for negotiation, and building systems to ensure that deviations from those standards are identified, escalated, and documented. For enterprise legal teams managing high volumes of contracts across multiple business units, clause standardisation is the foundation on which contract governance is built.

Contract risk scoring is the systematic process of assigning a quantified risk level to a contract or contract clause based on predefined criteria. For enterprise compliance teams managing hundreds or thousands of active agreements, contract risk scoring turns the subjective judgment of “this contract looks risky” into a structured, consistent, and scalable process that can be applied across the full portfolio.

Contract intelligence is the process of turning contracts from static legal documents into structured, searchable, and actionable business data. Using artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and machine learning, contract intelligence platforms read contracts, extract key terms and obligations, identify risks, and make the information accessible to legal, finance, and procurement teams in a form they can actually use.

E-signature adoption in BFSI, healthcare and government in India is no longer a question of whether electronic signing is legally valid. The Information Technology Act, 2000 settled that over two decades ago. The question today is how organisations in each of these sectors are implementing e-signatures in a way that is consistent, secure, and audit-ready at the volumes they need to operate at.

A contract lifecycle management platform holds some of the most sensitive commercial data an organisation produces. Executed agreements, pricing commitments, indemnification caps, liability thresholds, vendor terms, and confidential counterparty information all sit in one place. For enterprise procurement teams evaluating CLM vendors, security is not a secondary consideration to be reviewed after functionality. It is a foundational requirement that shapes the rest of the evaluation.

The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India released the Insurance Fraud Monitoring Framework Guidelines on 9 October 2025. These Guidelines come into force on 1 April 2026 and replace the IRDAI Fraud Monitoring Framework circular that had governed the sector since January 2013.

When two parties enter into an agreement, something must be exchanged between them for that agreement to be legally enforceable. A promise made without anything in return is, in most cases, just a promise. It may be morally binding, but the law generally does not treat it as a contract.

Every contract that is validly formed must eventually come to an end. The obligations it creates — to pay, to deliver, to perform a service, to refrain from an act — cannot continue indefinitely. At some point, the legal relationship established by the contract is extinguished, and the parties are released from their duties under it.

Most people think of a contract as a formal agreement where two parties sit across a table, negotiate terms, and both sign on the dotted line. This is the most familiar form of contract. But not all contracts follow this structure.

Every organisation, regardless of size or industry, depends on external parties to keep its operations running. Software providers, law firms, logistics partners, IT service companies, consultants — these are all vendors that businesses engage with on a regular basis.

Contracts get signed every day. Agreements are executed, financial documents go out, regulatory filings are submitted. But who actually has the legal right to do all of that on behalf of a company?