From a GC chair, 2025 felt like the year contract operations stopped being a side project and became core infrastructure. The patterns we kept coming back to in Clause & Current all year show up the same way in the research. Legal demand is up, risk is up, and tolerance for fuzzy data is down.

Here is how I would summarize the year.

1. Demand is up, capacity is flat, and value pressure is real

Most in house teams are being asked to do more with roughly the same headcount. The CLOC 2025 State of the Industry report describes a legal function where 83 percent of departments report rising demand while budgets and staffing lag that demand.

The Thomson Reuters Legal Department Operations Index 2025 adds that GCs are being measured more explicitly on “value” and operational performance, not just legal outcomes. At the same time a 2025 legal spend survey shows outside counsel rates climbing and cost containment becoming a top strategic priority.

The net effect is simple. Contract operations have to absorb more volume and complexity without proportional resources. That is not sustainable unless the operating model changes.

2. Contract operations became enterprise infrastructure

This year, contract management finally broke out of the “legal admin” box. The ACC contract management overview explicitly frames CLM as one of the most intricate legal operations functions because it connects people, processes, policies, and technology across the enterprise.

WorldCC describes the commercial side of the same issue. The WorldCC contract management whitepaper reports average value erosion of 8.6 percent and notes that almost 90 percent of business users find contracts difficult or impossible to understand. When you combine that with ACC’s lifecycle view, you get a clear message. Contract operations are not about storing PDFs. They are about running the business without bleeding value.

In my own day to day work, a large portion of that infrastructure runs through Concord. It gives us a single source of truth and a place to build the workflows and reporting we need, but the real lift comes from how we design the process on top of the tool.

3. AI moved from experiment to expectation

AI stopped being a novelty this year. CLOC notes in its 2025 State of the Industry report that AI adoption in legal nearly doubled compared with the prior survey period, particularly in areas like contract review, intake, and knowledge retrieval.

At the same time, ISACA’s 2026 Tech Trends and Priorities Pulse Poll shows that AI related risk, cyber threats, and regulatory preparedness are now top of mind for digital trust professionals. That means any AI we put into contract operations is going to be viewed as part of the control environment, not just a productivity hack.

The practical takeaway for a GC is that AI has to sit on top of clean data, good templates, and defined governance. If the repository is a mess, AI just helps you produce faster bad answers. I use Concord’s extraction and reporting to reduce manual metadata work, but we still spend a lot of time on the underlying data model and guardrails.

4. Cycle time stopped being a single number

We spent a lot of this year unpacking why “average cycle time” is a useless KPI on its own. Low complexity contracts behave one way. High complexity contracts behave like mini risk projects.

Research and practice are converging here. WorldCC’s value erosion analysis in the WorldCC contract management whitepaper highlights how poorly structured negotiation on complex deals drives both delay and value loss. ACC’s article on streamlining contract approvals shows that internal routing and approvals often add more delay than the actual redlines.

By Q4 most mature teams were segmenting cycle time by contract type and by ownership slice. Customer deals versus procurement. Standard forms versus bespoke MSAs. Legal review versus security or finance approvals. That segmentation is what turns cycle time from a blunt instrument into a tool for resource planning and process change.

5. Obligations tracking moved to the front of the risk agenda

Obligation failures used to be something you worried about after a renewal went sideways. Regulators changed that. Enforcement this year focused heavily on whether companies do what they say they do, especially around privacy, cybersecurity, and recordkeeping.

ACC’s contract management guidance warns that contract obligations sit across the lifecycle and across functions, and that weak connection between contract language and operational processes is a major source of risk. WorldCC’s emphasis on accountability and structured processes in the Benchmark 2025 report ties directly into that theme, arguing that contracts cannot be managed effectively without clear responsibility and measurement.

In practice, this means GCs are now expected to answer questions like “Where are all our audit rights,” “Which vendors hold regulated data,” and “Which contracts carry unusual termination or notice requirements” with actual data, not hand-waving. That is where AI reporting and a well structured CLM start to matter as much as black letter law.

6. Approvals and ownership emerged as the persistent bottleneck

No matter how good the templates or negotiation playbooks became, the laggards this year were almost always approvals and ownership. ACC’s systematic approach to streamlining approvals describes the pattern clearly. Work queues pile up because nobody has defined who approves what, which risks justify escalation, or how to handle exceptions.

That matches what I see on the ground. Most “legal delays” in Q4 were actually security, finance, or business owners juggling conflicting priorities without clear rules of the road. The CLM helps when it can enforce routing logic and surface SLAs, but the real fix is governance.

7. Analyst expectations for 2026 raised the bar

Looking ahead, analysts are not giving legal much room to hide. WorldCC is increasingly blunt about the cost of poor contracting, with news coverage of its latest study noting that companies may be losing up to 15 percent of annual value to inefficient contract management, as reported in a WorldCC value loss summary.

ISACA is telling boards and technology leaders that AI risk, cyber threats, and regulatory preparedness will shape 2026, as highlighted in the ISACA 2026 Tech Trends poll synopsis. ACC is publishing more detailed benchmarks on law department management and maturity in reports like the ACC 2025 Law Department Management Benchmarking Report.

The message is consistent. Legal is expected to be data literate, technology fluent, and operationally credible, not just a pool of experts who review documents.

What this means for GCs heading into 2026

Looking back over the year, the through line is clear.

• Contract operations are now a lever for value, not just a cost center.
• Demand will keep rising faster than resources.
• AI will be everywhere, and regulators will eventually treat it as part of the control environment.
• Cycle time, obligations, and approvals will be judged with real metrics.
• CLM configuration and data hygiene will be as important as clause drafting.

For a GC who actually has to make this work, CLM tools are necessary but not sufficient. The real work is in designing an operating model that treats contracts as living assets with owners, data, and measurable outcomes.

If 2024 and 2025 were about experimenting and buying systems, 2026 is going to be about proving that those systems and processes hold up under scrutiny.