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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…
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Legal teams keep mixing up two very different questions. The first question is, “Help me find the right thing to look at.”The second question is, “Help me prove the number I just told leadership.” Both questions matter. They just do not belong to the same tool path. When I see teams get burned, it is…
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When an auditor or regulator asks how a control works, they are rarely asking for the contract PDF. They are asking whether your systems can produce a reliable record of what happened, who approved it, and whether the process you described is the process you actually ran. That shift is subtle until you live through…
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In leadership meetings, “value erosion” gets treated like an abstract efficiency number. A procurement problem. A sales discount problem. Sometimes a “legal redlines took too long” problem. World Commerce & Contracting is talking about something more concrete. WorldCC’s Contract Management Whitepaper defines value erosion as “the deviation from expected results,” which is exactly how it…
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There is a pattern I see every time a regulator, auditor, or sophisticated customer asks the same question in different words: “Show me how this works in practice.” Most legal teams still answer with contracts. They pull the clause. They point to the vendor’s certification. They attach the policy. Then they act surprised when the…
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AI governance used to live in a familiar box. IT owned the tools. Security owned the controls. Compliance owned the policies. Legal showed up at the end to approve language. That model is breaking. Not because governance got trendy, but because the work moved. The highest-leverage AI risks are now created, allocated, and monitored through…
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I have sat in the meeting where the CFO points to a single contract cycle time number and asks the obvious question. If cycle time is down, why does it still feel like deals are stuck. Sales says legal is slow. Procurement says approvals are slow. Finance says signatures are slow. Everyone is right, and…
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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.…
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From a GC perspective, most obligation failures are boring, preventable, and expensive. They rarely come from exotic legal issues. They come from gaps between what the contract actually says, how the business operates, and how we track the work. Here is how I would group the common causes, drawing on ACC guidance and recent enforcement…
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From a GC chair, contract portfolio maturity is easier to recognize than to define. In practice, you know it when you stop firefighting individual deals and start managing the portfolio like an asset. Looking across what WorldCC, ISACA and others are publishing, and comparing that with what I see in my own Concord instance day…