Author: Dave
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I spend most of my time on post-signature contract management. The stuff that happens after the deal is done. Tracking obligations, monitoring vendor performance, making sure deadlines don’t slip, chasing down deliverables, confirming that what we agreed to is actually what we’re getting. It’s the least glamorous part of this work. Nobody writes conference keynotes…
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There’s a stat that gets cited at every contract management conference, dropped into every vendor whitepaper, and referenced in every pitch deck for CLM software. It comes from World Commerce & Contracting (WorldCC, formerly IACCM), and it goes like this: organizations lose an average of 8.6% of their contract value to poor management. That number…
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I’ve spent my entire career at companies with fewer than 500 employees. The kinds of places where “legal department” means one attorney and someone like me. Where “procurement” is a person, not a floor. Where the idea of spending $200,000 a year on contract management software would get you laughed out of a budget meeting…
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I’ve been through four CLM platforms in my career. Two I inherited. One I picked. One I picked after learning from all the mistakes I made with the other three. I’m not going to name the first three, because this isn’t a product review. The problems I ran into weren’t really about the software being…
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Six months ago, I renewed a marketing analytics platform and noticed something new in the vendor’s terms: a three-paragraph section on artificial intelligence that hadn’t been there before. It covered how the vendor uses AI in their product, what happens to data that gets processed through their AI features, and whether they retain the right…
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Every CLM vendor on the planet has added “AI-powered” to their marketing page in the last two years. Some of them mean it. Some of them added a chatbot and called it artificial intelligence (looking at you, Concord Horizon!!!) And almost all of them are making promises that sound a lot bigger than what the…
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I’ve watched three CLM implementations fail. Not “fail to deliver ROI” in some abstract consulting-report sense. Fail as in: the company bought the platform, spent months setting it up, and twelve months later almost nobody was using it. The contracts were still in email. The renewals were still getting missed. The software was just sitting…
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I’ve built a contract management process from nothing at two different companies. The first time, I had no budget, no tools, and a boss who thought “contract management” meant “make sure we don’t get sued.” The second time, I had a small budget and the benefit of knowing all the mistakes I’d made the first…
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I keep a list. It’s not an official document or anything. It’s a note on my phone called “Things That Didn’t Have to Happen.” Every time I see or hear about a contract management failure that was entirely preventable, I add it to the list. The list is long. Here are some highlights. A company…
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If you Google “stages of contract lifecycle management,” you’ll find a vendor blog for every number between five and twelve. Five stages. Seven stages. Nine stages. One site listed twelve, which I assume includes stages like “Despair” and “Acceptance.” They’re all describing the same thing. The number of stages depends on how granular the author…