Contract operations maturity is not a vibe. It is observable in what your team can do on demand, under pressure, without heroics.

An auditor asks for a population. Sales asks for an exception. Finance asks for renewal exposure. A regulator asks who approved a deviation and why. Mature teams answer those questions with repeatable system output. Immature teams answer them with Slack threads and late nights.

The most useful framing I have found is the one ACC uses. The ACC maturity model makes a simple point that holds in real legal departments: maturity is uneven. You can be advanced in one function and early in another, and most departments will not be advanced everywhere.

Contract ops is the function where that unevenness shows fastest.

The curve in five stages

ACC’s contract management ladder in the ACC Legal Operations Maturity Model 2.0 is written as three stages, but in practice I see five operational plateaus. They map cleanly to the ACC stages while making the transitions clearer.

Stage 1 Ad hoc and scattered

This is the “contracts live everywhere” stage. The ACC model calls out the markers: no contract tool, contracts saved in multiple locations, ad hoc legal review, inconsistent terms, and no automated follow-up in the ACC contract management section as a baseline.

What “good” looks like here is not sophistication. It is containment.

• A single intake path, even if it is an email alias
• A basic naming convention that stops total entropy
• A simple escalation rule so the business knows when legal is required

CLM supports this stage mostly by being a repository. The trap is buying a tool and leaving the operating model untouched.

Stage 2 Centralized repository with basic workflow

This is where many teams land first. You centralize storage. You introduce templates. You add e-signature. You start measuring cycle time, even if the data quality is shaky.

The ACC model describes this as “intermediate” contract management with a CLM tool, central repository, defined ownership, templates, clause libraries, and reporting and audit history as part of the toolkit in ACC Maturity Model 2.0 as a capability bundle.

What “good” looks like here is repeatability.

• The business can self-serve low-risk paper without inventing process
• Legal reviews exceptions rather than rewriting everything
• Approvals happen inside a system with a visible record

This is also where a lot of teams mistakenly declare victory. They have centralized documents, but they still cannot answer portfolio questions.

Stage 3 Standardized metadata and defensible reporting

This is the first real maturity inflection.

You stop treating contracts as documents and start treating them as a portfolio with defined fields, controlled vocabularies, and consistent reporting definitions. That sounds dry. It is the difference between “I think” and “I can prove.”

This is exactly where the governance and value conversation starts to connect. WorldCC’s Deloitte collaboration in The ROI of contracting excellence ties maturity to portfolio segmentation and lifecycle clarity, because you cannot manage what you cannot segment.

WorldCC is also explicit that the pain is not just transactional. The WorldCC Benchmark report 2023 calls out that many organizations lack rapid portfolio insight for instant, accurate management reporting, and that gap is a maturity problem.

What “good” looks like here is audit-ready reporting.

• You can produce the population that matches a policy, quickly
• You can rerun the same report next month and get a coherent delta
• You can reconcile the report to a defined data model and workflow logic

CLM supports the transition through controlled fields, reporting, and audit trails, but only if configuration is treated like part of the control environment.

Stage 4 Negotiation discipline and portfolio governance

This stage is where contract ops stops being a legal ops function and becomes a business operating discipline.

WorldCC’s public stats on the contract management whitepaper page are uncomfortable for a reason. Only 39% of commercial practitioners believe contracts deliver the desired outcome, and only 16% believe negotiations focus on the right topics, which is a maturity failure in how organizations negotiate and govern the portfolio.

At this stage, “good” looks like discipline.

• Playbooks that define fallback positions and escalation paths
• Exception tracking that feeds template governance, not just post-mortems
• Portfolio segmentation that changes approval pathways and negotiation posture

CLM supports this stage by making the discipline executable. That means conditional approvals, controlled templates, and structured reporting that is stable enough to govern against.

Stage 5 Value management and continuous improvement

This is where the best teams live, and it is rarer than vendors pretend.

You treat the contract portfolio as a managed asset. You measure value erosion drivers. You connect contract terms to operational outcomes and renewals. You do post-signature obligation tracking that is actually used.

The point of maturity is not that contracting becomes “faster.” It is that it becomes less lossy.

WorldCC’s benchmark in The ROI of contracting excellence pegs average value erosion at 8.6%, with wide dispersion between best and worst performers, and mature teams behave like they believe that number has an owner.

What “good” looks like here is closed-loop learning.

• Clause and playbook changes are tied to observed disputes and leakage
• Renewals are managed as a portfolio, not as calendar reminders
• The business can see risk exposure and commercial upside in the same view

Where most teams actually sit

Most teams I see sit in a split position. They look like Stage 2 on tooling and Stage 1 on governance.

They have a repository. They might even have templates and e-signature. But they do not have a controlled metadata standard, and they cannot produce defensible reporting without manual cleanup.

The ACC Docket article on using the maturity model makes a related point in a polite way: departments pick where to be intermediate or advanced based on resources, and few are advanced across all functions. Contract ops is usually one of the functions where ambition outpaces operational design.

The practical implication is that “we bought CLM” is not a maturity milestone. “We standardized and can defend the output” is.

How CLM supports the transitions, with real boundaries

CLM is not the maturity curve. CLM is the platform that either amplifies maturity or exposes the lack of it.

Two specific Concord examples, used accurately, map to the transitions I care about in daily GC work.

First, when approvals and audit evidence matter, Concord’s documented audit trail logging is useful because it records versions, status changes, drafts and redlines, signatures, and approval workflow creation, which lets me reconstruct what happened without rebuilding it from email. Note that metadata governance still needs a real owner inside the operating model.

Second, for higher maturity approval design, Concord’s approval workflows support conditional steps based on Smart Fields, which makes it possible to express policy like “amount, region, or term triggers” as workflow logic rather than as tribal knowledge.

A third point that matters in regulated settings is continuity. Concord’s SalesForce integration updates Concord’s audit trail when you update SalesForce properties, which helps when auditors care about the full chain from draft to signature.

None of that creates maturity by itself. It just means the system can carry maturity when the operating model is ready.

The maturity conversation most teams avoid

The hard part is not tooling. It is governance and operating discipline.

Gartner’s view of legal operations in its public legal operating model guidance treats “contracts” as one of four core components alongside strategy, talent, and process, which matches what I see in practice. Contract ops maturity is not a contracts team problem. It is an operating model problem.

If you want a practical takeaway, it is this.

• If you cannot define the population, you are not ready for Stage 3
• If you cannot control exceptions, you are not ready for Stage 4
• If you cannot link terms to outcomes, you are not ready for Stage 5

The teams that move up the curve do not start by asking which CLM is best. They start by deciding which questions they want to be able to answer without drama, and they configure process, data, and reporting backward from that target.