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 (looking at you, Concord Horizon!!!) And almost all of them are making promises that sound a lot bigger than what the…

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…