For salespeople, one of the most time-consuming tasks involved in negotiating large deals is hammering out the contractual terms. AppExtremes Inc., which does business as Conga, today launched a service that aims to streamline the process by removing the need to consult the legal department at every turn.

Conga Contracts enables companies to put together an internal library of pre-approved agreements, standalone clauses and other legal building blocks. A technology consulting firm, for instance, might assemble terms of service for its different advisory packages. The sales team could then draw on the repository to quickly put together a contract for each client based on which of the company’s offerings they’ve purchased.

For added measure, Conga Contracts provides the option of letting users modify a clause within limits defined in advance by legal department. This feature can help speed up the task of filling in client information, the agreed-upon pricing and other small details that usually don’t require manual approval from outside the sales team.

Even if a company’s legal team doesn’t account for every potential variation in advance, Conga Contracts can still significantly reduce the amount of effort required to put together an agreement, the company said. The resulting time savings in turn help salespeople close their deals faster while freeing up the legal department to perform other tasks.

Conga is further sweetening the value proposition with a few conveniences designed to complement the core contract automation features. Its service makes it possible to quickly sync changes in a contact to the customer records that a company keeps on Salesforce.com, while a built-in analytics console helps identify areas for improvement. If the dashboard shows that a certain type of deal takes unusually long to negotiate, then a firm could have its legal team revise the relevant document components.

Conga is one of several companies that are working to automate day-to-day legal work for companies. Another promising player is FOSSA Inc., which recently raised $2.2 million in funding from Salesforce.com Inc. Chief Executive Marc Benioff, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen and other big-name backers. The startup has built a service for handling the complex licensing requirements of software projects.

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