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Here is how I’m thinking about AI in contracting for 2026, speaking as an in-house GC who uses CLM in my day-to-day work. I’ll group it into themes instead of predictions, because that’s how it shows up operationally. 1. From pilots to obligated performance A 2025 Gartner survey of general counsel found that over a…
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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…
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(GC perspective, 15 years in-house) Parallel routing only works when ownership is unambiguous and information arrives complete. The goal is simple: legal should not be the system of record for technical, commercial, or security questions. Legal should manage legal risk. Everyone else needs to handle their part upstream. My playbook breaks into six stages. 1.…
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Contract operations in Q4 2025 reflect a shift I have not seen this clearly in my fifteen years as in-house counsel. Contracting has moved from an administrative process to an operational system that influences revenue timing, spend control, audit readiness, and enterprise risk. Industry research points in the same direction. The analysis in the WorldCC…
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As a GC who has been inside hypergrowth and enterprise environments for fifteen years, Q4 2025 feels like a transition quarter. The surface narrative is “AI everywhere,” but what stands out from inside the building is different. The patterns are more operational, more structural, and more about how teams actually behave when pressure increases and…
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Background and context Procurement now sits at the intersection of commercial pressure, regulatory expectation and cybersecurity exposure. Contracts with technology vendors, outsourcers and data processors create both business value and structural risk. Research from World Commerce & Contracting shows companies can lose up to 15 percent of annual business value through inefficient contract management and…
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Tl;dr Contract lifecycle management pricing in 2025 ranges from low four-figure annual subscriptions for lightweight systems to multi-year, multi-six-figure contracts for enterprise platforms. This index summarizes typical pricing ranges for leading CLM vendors based on publicly available information, industry roundups, customer disclosures, and current 2025 pricing guides. Concord sits in the lower-complexity, lower-TCO quadrant while…
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Tl;dr Contract lifecycle management rarely works in isolation. The adjacent stack that surrounds a CLM platform determines data quality, cycle time, and auditability. In 2025 the most important adjacencies are intake and ticketing, e-signature, document management, e-billing and matter management, procurement and source-to-contract, CRM and CPQ, eDiscovery and records, and the integration layer that moves…
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Tl;dr A contract’s value comes not just from its text, but from how it is modelled within an organization: the entities it references (parties, obligations, assets), the links it establishes (between terms, workflows, systems), and how it progresses through its lifecycle. A well-designed data model treats contracts as living data objects, turning them from static…
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TL;DR Legal operations leaders compared notes on projects that shipped, stalled, or never should have started. Common regrets coalesce around five themes: start with process before tools, fund change management as a real workstream, standardize playbooks before automation, measure outcomes that leadership understands, and stage releases in production-like sandboxes. The references below provide independent grounding…