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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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. And almost all of them are making promises that sound a lot bigger than what the technology actually does when you…

Why Most CLM Platforms Fail (Hint: It’s Not the Software) 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…