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…

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…

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…

I almost missed it by eleven days. It was a Tuesday afternoon. I was doing my weekly contract check (which I’ll get to in a minute) and I noticed a vendor agreement for a data enrichment service we’d signed two years earlier. The contract had a 12-month auto-renewal clause with a 60-day notice requirement. The…

I’ve referenced this story in passing a few times already, so I figured I should tell the whole thing. It’s the story of how I went from “where are the contracts?” to “I can find anything in 90 seconds” in a single workday. It’s not a heroic tale. It’s more of a cautionary one that…

I’ve spent the last fifteen years managing contracts. Not “overseeing the end-to-end optimization of contractual instruments across the enterprise.” Managing contracts. Finding them, reading them, tracking the dates, making sure nobody gets surprised by an auto-renewal or a missed obligation. And yet, if I go to a conference or read a vendor blog or sit…

Contract Lifecycle Management: What It Actually Means (Without the Sales Pitch) I have a confession: I find the term “contract lifecycle management” genuinely annoying. I’ll explain why in a separate post, because I’ve got a lot to say about it. But for now, let me do the useful thing and explain what it actually means,…

If you Google “what is contract management,” you’ll get about fifty results that say essentially the same thing. Something like: “Contract management is the process of managing legal agreements from start to finish, ensuring they are created, executed, and reviewed effectively.” That’s from Icertis, but it could be from any of them. Swap the company…

I want to tell you about the worst filing system I’ve ever inherited. It was my second week at a mid-size company. About 350 employees, maybe $60 million in revenue. Not huge, but big enough that you’d expect someone to be keeping track of the agreements that made the money come in and go out.…