We had a Google Sheet listing all of our contracts, all the contracts stored in Google Drive. It’s extremely time consuming every time to have to go through, manually update 20 columns of data per contract, even for relatively low-value contracts. Trying to do that quickly because it’s that time consuming, inevitably errors are going to creep in. And then likewise, people simply forgetting to do it.

It’s a manual process, very few controls around it. The third or the fourth order form under an MSA might be stored in a totally different folder to everything else, and it’s all scattered. We had, you know, a Zapier link from a Google Sheet to Slack, that would send a message whenever a renewal was due. However, that relied on us actually calculating the date correctly. I’ve seen it plenty of times in the past where people have forgotten about it, and we’re on the hook for tens of thousands.

The main question mark about Nomio was going to be the accuracy of automatically extracting the relevant bits of data. Having used tools in the past that made certain claims around this, they didn’t really live up to those expectations. It still required a lot of manual intervention. As soon as we’ve signed a contract, we can upload it to Nomio, and that’s it. Nothing else to do. I can come back to it weeks later, type the name in the search bar and I’ve got all the information at my fingertips.

So that’s incredibly useful. If I ask people like: ‘Could you just upload this to Nomio?’ in future, I don’t have to instruct them how to do it. It’s drag and drop and that’s it, it’s done. That in itself is good because it makes people not afraid to use it. The contracts that we look at in Nomio, we do occasional spot checks, just to satisfy ourselves that it’s still performing as expected. And it has done every time.

I’m now really confident whatever contract goes into Nomio, it’s extracting all the relevant data. It’s organising it sensibly, along with other related contracts. There are three main pillars for us. So one was time saving. So calculating, you know, how many contracts are we reviewing and signing each month that come via the legal team? And how much time is it taking per contract to extract the relevant information?

And calculating what the cost of that is. Second is missed renewals. It only takes one renewal, average price like £10K, to justify buying the tool in the first place. And then the final one was, for us, like exit readiness. We need to represent ourselves well to a buyer, to look as much like a professional organisation. Having a tool that centralises all your contracts easily in a way that’s sustainable over five, ten years.

Having them all together and all the interrelated documents in a nice neat list allowing you to move between each of them. You are very easily and quickly able to answer all of their questions, extract relevant documents. You can easily search for all the clauses in there. Again, answering questions really quickly. You are presenting yourselves as a professional body. Nomio’s been extremely responsive.

You can do a quick screenshot, write a note, send it off. And then, you know, I’ve been getting responses usually within the day, with the issue being fixed. I don’t think I’ve had one situation where there’s been a constant back and forth trying to resolve something. Usually it’s kind of one and done. We had some feedback around how the weekly emails operate and what would be really useful for us.

And now we have exactly what we’re after, which is fantastic. When we went out to market to look at various different tools that could do this, there aren’t really other providers that I’ve come across that are pure repositories like Nomio is. For us, the problem we were trying to solve was the repository. And so it made more sense to come to somebody who’s really focussed on solving that problem, than the broader CLMS who, yes, have additional functionality.

But we didn’t really need it, and we’d be paying slightly more for the privilege. I’ve used a couple of them in the past, and my experience has been like the repository was actually the most useful element for us, and all the extra stuff is bells and whistles. Like, it’s occasionally used, but it’s not the core purpose. I think everyone should have like one eye on where their business is going. And if you’re in a business that’s growing quickly or likely to expand quickly, better to implement something sooner rather than later, so that you’ve got the system that you can scale with.