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…

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…

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…

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…

Contract Lifecycle Management: What It Actually Means (Without the Sales Pitch) I have a confession: I find the term “contract lifecycle management” genuinely annoying. I’ll explain why in a separate post, because I’ve got a lot to say about it. But for now, let me do the useful thing and explain what it actually means,…