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I almost cost my company $87,000 once because I missed a renewal by four days. It was a facilities management contract. Three-year term, auto-renewal clause with a 60-day notice window. I knew the contract existed. I’d even flagged it when I first organized the repository. But I hadn’t set an alert, because at the time (Read more →)
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Last year I sat in a meeting where our VP of Sales waved a contract at me and said, “Dave, this vendor is saying we owe them for an extra year. Is that right?” I pulled up the agreement. The auto-renewal clause was on page fourteen, paragraph 8(b), buried in a sentence that ran nine (Read more →)
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Six months ago, I started a project I’d been putting off: going through every vendor contract in our repository that involves any kind of AI or machine learning functionality and checking what the agreements actually say about it. Sixteen contracts. SaaS platforms, analytics tools, an HR screening product, a couple of document processing services. All (Read more →)
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Last year, I sat through a webinar where a vendor described their contract management platform as “an end-to-end digital transformation solution for the modern legal enterprise.” I looked at the demo. It was a searchable database with alerts and some reporting. Which is great. That’s what I use every day. But calling it a “digital (Read more →)
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I need to say something that might surprise you, coming from a guy who writes about contract management software for a living: your spreadsheet is probably fine. If you have 30 contracts, a decent Excel tracker, and the discipline to open it every Monday morning, you’re doing better than a lot of people I’ve met (Read more →)
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I’ve been doing contract management for over fifteen years, and for most of that time, nobody above my direct manager cared what was in the contracts database. As long as nothing blew up, the data quality of our contract records was my problem and mine alone. That’s changed. In the last two years, I’ve been (Read more →)
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I’ve sat through a lot of leadership meetings. Probably too many. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about presenting contract management data to a CFO, it’s this: they do not care about your KPIs. I don’t mean they don’t care about performance. They care deeply about performance. What they don’t care about is your (Read more →)
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I want to tell you about the time a vendor rep just stopped answering my emails during a renewal negotiation. Not a polite “let me get back to you.” Not a “we need to run this up the chain.” Just silence. Three emails over two weeks, zero replies. At the time, I was furious. This (Read more →)
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The Slack message came in at 4:47 PM on a Thursday. It said: “Hey, can legal look at this vendor contract? They want to start Monday.” Attached was a forwarded email chain. No scope of work. No dollar amount. No explanation of what the vendor would actually be doing. Just a sales rep who needed (Read more →)
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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 (Read more →)