Category: CLM Software
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I once watched a vendor contract go through nine rounds of redlines over six weeks. Nine rounds. The final version had exactly three material changes from the first draft. The other six rounds were people on both sides editing the same clauses back and forth, losing track of what had already been agreed, and reopening…
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Two years ago, our external auditors came in for the annual review and asked me something nobody had ever asked me before. They didn’t want to see a contract. They wanted to see how my contract management system was set up. Specifically, they wanted to know: Who can edit contract records after they’re finalized? What…
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I used to think sales hated legal. Turns out they just hated waiting three weeks for someone to approve a contract that should have taken two days. The frustration was real and it was specific. A sales rep would send over a new vendor agreement or a customer MSA, and it would disappear into a…
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Last fall I decided to test something I’d been hearing about at every legal ops conference for two years: AI-powered metadata extraction. The pitch is simple. You upload your contracts, the AI reads them, and it spits out structured data: party names, effective dates, expiration dates, renewal terms, governing law, payment terms, the whole catalog.…
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I can tell you the exact moment I realized how broken post-signature contract management is at most companies. I’d been at a mid-size manufacturing firm for about three months. Long enough to know where the contracts lived (mostly), who the key vendors were (roughly), and which ones had renewals coming up (barely). A project manager…
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I’ve implemented contract management software five times across my career. One of those implementations took a single day. Another took the better part of six months and still wasn’t fully adopted a year later. The difference wasn’t the software. Not really. It was what we were trying to do with it. The day-long implementation was…
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I’ve set up contract repositories at four different organizations. Three of them failed. Not because the software was bad (it wasn’t, mostly) but because nobody thought about what a repository actually needs to do before they bought something and started dumping files into it. The fourth one worked. It’s the one I still use. And…
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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…
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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…
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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…