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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… (Read more →)
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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… (Read more →)
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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… (Read more →)
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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… (Read more →)
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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… (Read more →)
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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… (Read more →)
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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… (Read more →)
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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… (Read more →)
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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… (Read more →)
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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… (Read more →)