Clause & Current

Analyst Scan: What Gartner, WorldCC and ISACA Are Signaling for 2026

Analyst Scan: What Gartner, WorldCC and ISACA Are Signaling for 2026

Here is what I see in my year-end “analyst scan” for 2026, as an in-house GC who lives inside this work every day (and runs a lot of it through my own CLM stack).

I will break it down by source: Gartner, WorldCC, and ISACA, then pull the signals together.

1. Gartner – legal turns into a proactive, data-driven risk platform

a. Legal is expected to be proactive and analytics-driven

Gartner’s current legal and compliance research frames the future of legal as a function that combines governance, technology, and agility, with a strong emphasis on using data and analytics rather than anecdote. Their legal risk and operations content stresses that legal should shift from reactive issue handling to proactive, metrics-driven portfolio management, especially as AI and third-party risk expand.
See for example Gartner’s legal and compliance hub and its material on future legal risk strategies:

What that signals for 2026
By 2026, GCs will be expected to have:

  • A defined legal operating model tied to business outcomes, not just matter counts.
  • A data model for contracts and matters that supports trend analysis, not just storage.
  • A credible story on how legal is governing AI use inside and outside the department.

In practical terms, that means CLM configuration, reporting, and AI usage will be scrutinized as part of legal’s overall governance posture. In my own team, a lot of that runs through Concord reports and workflows, because without structured data I cannot honestly claim we are “analytics-driven” in the way Gartner expects.

b. CLM as baseline infrastructure, not a niche tool

Gartner continues to define CLM as a solution that manages contracts from initiation through negotiation, execution, compliance, and renewal, with explicit emphasis on risk mitigation and integration with surrounding systems.
See Gartner’s CLM market definition and peer overview:

What that signals for 2026

  • CLM will be treated as core infrastructure, similar to CRM or ERP, rather than “legal software.”
  • Integration with procurement, finance, and vendor-risk tooling becomes table stakes.
  • Vendor selection will be measured against ability to support AI, analytics, and third-party risk workflows, not just document storage and e-signature.

For a GC, this means your CLM choice has to hold up under IT and risk scrutiny, not just under legal usability tests.

2. WorldCC – standards, value erosion, and contract usability

a. Value erosion and contract effectiveness

WorldCC’s recent contract management whitepaper reiterates a painful statistic: average value erosion from poor contracting practices sits around 8.6 percent, and only a minority of commercial practitioners believe contracts actually deliver the intended business outcomes. Almost 90 percent of business users say they find contracts difficult or impossible to understand.
You can see this in their August 2025 paper:

What that signals for 2026

  • The narrative is shifting from “faster contracting” to “contracts that actually work in practice.”
  • Expect more pressure to simplify language, standardize positions, and design contracts as operational tools, not just legal artifacts.
  • Contract literacy for non-lawyers is going to be a performance topic, not a side project.

From a GC seat, this means that by 2026 I am judged not only on cycle time, but on whether the contracts we sign are understandable and enforceable in day-to-day operations.

b. Global Contract Management Standard and structured processes

WorldCC’s 2025 benchmark report formally introduces a Global Contract Management Standard (CMS) and stresses that 87 percent of organizations report high levels of uncertainty, treating this as the “new normal.” The proposed solution is accountability, structured processes, and adoption of the standard as a foundation.
See:

What that signals for 2026

  • Expect more benchmarking and external comparison of contract operations maturity.
  • Boards and CFOs will become more familiar with “contract management standards” and will ask where the company sits against peers.
  • Adoption of standardized playbooks, clause libraries, and lifecycle controls will be framed as best practice, not optional optimization.

For someone running CLM day to day, that translates to mapping our workflows and templates against these standards and being ready to show how our CLM configuration supports them.

3. ISACA – AI risk, regulatory compliance, and resilience

a. AI risk and regulatory pressure as top concerns

ISACA’s 2026 Tech Trends & Priorities Pulse Poll points to three top focus areas for digital trust professionals next year: managing regulatory compliance, ensuring business continuity and resilience, and managing AI-related risk. AI-driven cyber threats and deepfakes are explicitly identified as the issues most likely to keep practitioners up at night.
Key references:

They stress that AI governance requires more than written policy. Algorithms must be regularly verified, data sets validated, and performance metrics monitored on an ongoing basis.

What that signals for 2026

  • Legal and security will be asked to show concrete controls around AI usage, not just policy language.
  • Vendor contracts will need tighter language on AI use, data handling, model training, and audit rights.
  • Business continuity and resilience will show up in contract templates (SLAs, redundancy, incident response) more aggressively than in prior years.

As GC, this pushes me to work with security and risk teams to embed ISACA-style governance ideas directly into our contract templates and vendor review process. The CLM has to support tagging AI-related obligations and monitoring them over time.

b. Governance frameworks and digital trust

ISACA’s broader governance content frames digital trust as a cross-disciplinary responsibility across IT, security, audit, and legal. Their guidance emphasizes that governance frameworks must be operationalized with clear metrics, verification routines, and risk ownership.
See:

What that signals for 2026

  • Contract operations will increasingly be seen as a control surface for digital trust: where data, AI, and third-party risk are formalized.
  • Legal will be expected to partner with GRC teams to make sure contract language matches the control environment, and vice versa.
  • CLM configuration will need to capture these obligations as structured data so risk teams can monitor them.

4. Pulling it together as a GC using CLM day to day

If I step back from the analyst detail and look at this as a working GC who actually has to deliver something by 2026, the combined signal from Gartner, WorldCC, and ISACA looks like this:

  • By 2026, legal is expected to be a proactive, data-driven function. That means structured contract data, credible KPIs, and a CLM configured to produce real metrics, not just documents.
  • Standards and simplification are moving from theory to expectation. WorldCC’s CMS and value-erosion numbers put pressure on us to redesign contracts so they are understandable and operationally useful, not just “legally correct.”
  • AI and digital trust governance will be tested in contracts. ISACA’s focus on AI risk, regulatory compliance, and resilience translates directly into vendor terms, audit rights, and internal AI usage guidelines that must be reflected in our templates.
  • Contract operations are a shared control surface. Gartner’s integration story, WorldCC’s standards, and ISACA’s digital trust narrative all converge on the idea that contracts sit at the intersection of legal, risk, compliance, IT, and finance.

In my own day-to-day work, this shapes where I invest time: tightening our template set, cleaning metadata so reporting is defensible, mapping obligations to risk categories, and building workflows that match the governance expectations these analysts are writing about.

That is the real 2026 agenda hidden inside the analyst reports.

Theo

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