Hitting a Contract Management Home Run for the Tampa Bay Rays

Industry

Sports

Challenge

With a one-person legal team managing hundreds of contracts across departments, the Tampa Bay Rays needed a scalable solution. Their manual processes, lack of contract visibility, and disconnected eSignature tool slowed workflows and created inefficiencies.

Result

With IntelAgree, the Rays streamlined contract creation, approvals, and eSignatures. By improving visibility and standardizing contract language, they reduced risk, empowered their corporate partnerships team with self-service capabilities, and built a more efficient, scalable process.

www.mlb.com/rays/

"The way I see it, there are two major benefits to using IntelAgree. The first one is that my job is to make everybody’s life easier. If they can spend more time selling and less time preparing documents for review or negotiating terms, that’s a win-win. And the second one is the level of consistency among such a large group of people. The standardization of language has been a huge benefit."

John Higgins

SVP of Administration and GC

Tampa Bay Rays

The Tampa Bay Rays are a Major League Baseball (MLB) team established in 1998. The Rays are known for using data science, innovation, and technology to drive decision-making both on and off the field. They’re the only MLB team with a uniformed analytics coach using data to optimize players’ performance.

Overview

Like most professional sports teams, the Rays work with a massive variety and volume of contracts—limiting bandwidth for John Higgins, Senior Vice President of Administration and General Counsel for the Tampa Bay Rays and the Rowdies. From corporate partnership agreements to ticketing agreements, Higgins interfaces with every department to ensure the Tampa Bay Ray’s contract management success. But for a one-person legal department, managing hundreds of agreements across the entire organization isn’t just time-consuming—it’s difficult to scale.

Challenges

• Manual contract process was laborious and unscalable for a growing volume and variety of agreements

• Limited knowledge sharing and visibility of agreements across departments

• Third-party eSignature tool didn't adapt to existing contract management process

• Lack of centralized repository to store, manage, and search agreements

Key Results

• Increased visibility of contractual opportunities and obligations

• Streamlined contract creation and approval workflow for corporate partnerships department

• Simplified contract execution with intuitive eSignature process

• Reduced risk due to more consistency and standardization of contract language

Solution

When Higgins learned about IntelAgree, he was interested in its contract creation wizard, unlimited eSignatures, and searchable contract repository. He knew the Rays’ corporate partnerships department would benefit from IntelAgree’s end-to-end functionality; so, he began implementation with them before rolling it out to the rest of the team.

During the implementation process, the IntelAgree team conducted a series of discovery sessions with Higgins to determine which items were important to the Rays team. Working side by side, they configured the contract creation wizard, which uses the Rays’ custom templates to generate contracts, ensuring consistency and compliance with corporate standards. Higgins also cataloged key terms and conditions for each corporate partnership inventory item. That catalog was then entered into the Ray’s clause library inside IntelAgree.

Now, the contract creation process is more intuitive for the salesperson and more streamlined for Higgins. Using IntelAgree’s Word add-in, a salesperson can access the clause library to inject approved contractual language into an agreement. Once the contract is created, it’s routed to Higgins for review and approval. From there, the salesperson can execute the agreement with IntelAgree’s intuitive eSignature process. Thanks to IntelAgree, the corporate partnerships team can generate self-service agreements, while also helping Higgins mitigate risk.

Higgins has also seen the value in IntelAgree’s contract repository, which stores the Rays’ and Rowdies’ agreements. The Tampa Bay Ray’s contract management process now has greater visibility of its contractual obligations and opportunities related to corporate partnerships. As a result of this success, Higgins is looking forward to implementing IntelAgree across the organization.