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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

There’s a stat that gets cited at every contract management conference, dropped into every vendor whitepaper, and referenced in every pitch deck for CLM software. It comes from World Commerce & Contracting (WorldCC, formerly IACCM), and it goes like this: organizations lose an average of 8.6% of their contract value to poor management. That number…

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…

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…

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…