Seven signs you need contract lifecycle management

Introduction

Contracts are the foundation of every business relationship, yet many in-house legal teams still manage them using spreadsheets, email chains, or scattered shared drives. While this might feel “good enough”, it often leads to familiar frustrations: missed renewal deadlines, time-consuming searches for the latest version, internal bottlenecks, and the sinking feeling that something important could easily slip through the cracks. As workloads grow and expectations rise, these manual processes become more than a nuisance – they become a genuine risk to the business.

This article outlines seven key signs that indicate it may be time to adopt a contract lifecycle management (CLM) system. Think of it as a practical checklist designed to help you determine whether your current approach is holding you and your team back.

What is contract lifecycle management?

Contract lifecycle management refers to the end-to-end process of managing an organization’s contracts – from the moment someone requests a new agreement through drafting, negotiation, approval, execution, performance tracking, and eventual renewal or expiration. In other words, CLM is the structured approach that ensures every stage of the contract journey is efficient, compliant, and aligned with business goals.

While CLM can technically be done manually, it is best achieved through dedicated CLM software. These solutions streamline the entire process by centralizing contract data, automating workflows, tracking obligations, and providing visibility into key terms, dates, and risks. For in-house legal teams, this means less administrative burden, fewer missed obligations, and far greater control over contract performance.

Modern CLM platforms also deliver significant time and cost savings. Features like version control, in-platform collaboration, automated approvals, e-signatures, and AI-powered clause extraction eliminate the need for tedious manual review and monitoring. By reducing human error and improving oversight, CLM software minimizes exposure to financial and compliance risks.

In essence, CLM helps organizations optimize how contracts are created, managed, and executed – creating a smoother experience for both the legal department and the wider business.

Seven signs you need a CLM system

1. Unstructured contract requests come in from every direction

Symptom:
Every department engages legal differently – a DM in Teams, an email to the GC, a PDF left in someone’s inbox. Legal often doesn’t get the information they need upfront, resulting in lengthy back-and-forth conversations just to start the process. It’s chaotic, slow, and frustrating for everyone involved.

Solution:
A CLM provides a dedicated, user-friendly legal intake portal that guides business users through submitting the right information the first time. Built-in integrations with email, CRM systems, and tools like Slack, and Teams allow seamless, guided intake no matter where people work. Legal receives complete, structured requests, reducing admin time and speeding up contract creation and turnaround.

“What this has done for our legal team, is it’s eliminated hundreds if not thousands of emails, Slacks – all these little things that really add up over the course of the year.”– Zac Bates, Legal Operations at The Pokémon Company International, on offering self service contracts to the business

2. Contract renewals or obligations are being missed

Symptom:
Contracts auto-renew without notice, key commitments go unfulfilled, and important dates sit buried in spreadsheets or someone’s memory. Where an in-house legal team isn’t equipped with contract management software, it poses a wide variety of financial and legal risks and inefficiencies for both the legal team and the wider business. These oversights can lead to financial loss, compliance issues, and damaged relationships.

Solution:
A CLM automatically tracks renewals, milestones, and obligations. Alerts and reminders keep the team ahead of upcoming dates, ensuring nothing slips through the cracks and reducing the business’s operational and financial risk. The introduction of contract automation, has changed how to oversee, execute, track and renew contracts.

3. Contract cycle times are dragging

Symptom:
Deals get stuck in legal because of manual redlining, slow approvals, or confusion over who needs to sign off. Sales and other teams feel held up and worried they’ll lose the deal, and legal feels overwhelmed by the sheer volume of admin – gathering info, providing updates, before they have even started on the negotiation.

Solution:
Workflow automation speeds up every step, from contract extraction, drafting and review, to approval and post-signature analysis and reporting. Commenting, redlining, e-signing, and collaboration tools inside the CLM mean everyone works in one place, reducing delays and accelerating deal velocity.

“In paying attention to the usage data in LawVu, we’ve reduced our contract review response time by five days.” – Northern Tool

4. Contracts are scattered across multiple systems

Symptom:
If finding a contract feels like a treasure hunt – digging through email chains, old folders, or even filing cabinets – that’s a major red flag. Not only is this time-consuming, but it also increases the risk of missing key clauses, dates, or obligations.

Solution:
A CLM provides a centralized, searchable repository with full version control. Legal can instantly locate any contract, and the business gains visibility into contract status, eliminating bottlenecks and confusion. A contract repository held within contract management software offers businesses numerous benefits, including enhanced security, improved compliance, streamlined collaboration, and easier CLM, all while reducing risks and costs.

5. Reporting is manual – or practically impossible

Symptom:
Leadership asks for contract data, KPIs, or risk insights, and legal scrambles to collect information from emails, spreadsheets, and disconnected systems. When your contract data lives in multiple places, producing accurate reports becomes a drain on time and energy.

Solution:
With contract management software in place, it is possible to collect and present all the contract metrics and reporting needed just by doing the day-to-day tasks involved in contract management. Imagine the time savings and operational decisions that could be made with a contract turnaround time dashboard.

6. Too much legal time is spent on low-value work

Symptom:
Legal teams constantly draft NDAs, MSAs, DPAs, and routine commercial contracts manually. These repetitive tasks eat into time that should be spent on higher-value, strategic work. According to the 2024 In-house Legal Technology Report, 35 percent of in-house legal professionals spend three hours or more per day drafting or reviewing low-risk or routine contracts. That’s a lot of legal time and resources sacrificed to the administration required by manual contract management. Bottlenecks from manual CLM can also trigger extended sales cycles, and the business potentially missing out on revenue opportunities.

“In the past, I’ve found that people don’t want to do their own NDAs because it can take at least two weeks to manage and approve the template manually between various team members. But with LawVu, ours literally take two minutes.”
– Beth Plunkett, Legal Counsel at 4D Medical

Solution:
CLMs offer pre-approved templates and guided self-service tools, allowing business users to generate contracts on their own while keeping legal in control through clever workflows and approvals. Legal gets time back – and the business moves faster.

7. Compliance and audit risk is growing

Symptom:
There’s no clear audit trail for approvals, signatures, or changes. It’s difficult to prove who approved what, when, or why. This creates compliance exposure and makes audits stressful and slow.

Solution:
A CLM creates audit-ready workflows with time-stamped approvals, e-signatures, and strict role-based permissions. You get full visibility into every action taken across the contract lifecycle, reducing risk and improving compliance confidence.

Elevating legal’s strategic value

Addressing these contract management challenges unlocks meaningful benefits for both legal and the wider business. First and foremost, efficiency improves dramatically. With structured intake, instant search across your entire legal repository, automated workflows, and centralized contract storage, teams spend far less time chasing information or navigating endless back-and-forth conversations. Deals move faster, internal friction decreases, and legal becomes a true business partner and accelerator, rather than a bottleneck.

“LawVu has saved us an immense amount of time due to numerous features, but the big one is the full-text search functionality … It has truly saved hours upon hour of time we would otherwise have spent trying to track work down.”– Matt Pentz, Assistant Town Attorney – Cary, NC

Risk is also significantly reduced. Automated alerts and obligation tracking ensure important dates never go unnoticed, while version control and clear audit trails improve accuracy and compliance. This reduces the chances of costly oversights and strengthens the organization’s overall risk posture.

Perhaps most importantly, solving these problems elevates legal’s strategic value. Instead of drowning in administrative work, legal professionals can focus on high-impact advice and business partnership. The visibility provided by CLM analytics empowers leadership, the CFO, and departmental stakeholders with data-driven insights into contract performance, bottlenecks, and exposure. Better information leads to better decisions – and better business outcomes.

Take the next step toward contract clarity

If the symptoms described above feel familiar, it’s a clear sign your team has outgrown manual contract management. As businesses scale, relying on spreadsheets, email chains, and disconnected systems becomes unsustainable – and risky. Small inefficiencies quickly multiply into lost time, missed opportunities, and unnecessary exposure. Fortunately, these challenges are entirely solvable with the right contract lifecycle management solution.

Investing in CLM now prevents your team burning out on low-value work, helps elevate legal to a proactive business partner, and stops bigger issues surfacing later. A well-implemented CLM is one of the most reliable ways to reduce costs, limit risk, and free up legal professionals to focus on higher-value work.

It strengthens compliance, speeds up turnaround time and deal cycles, and gives you full visibility into your contract landscape. Even more importantly, it frees your legal team to do what they do best: support the business, shape strategy, and drive meaningful outcomes.

If your organization is ready to modernize its contract processes, now is the perfect time to explore a CLM platform that matches your needs. To help you evaluate your current approach to CLM, we’ve created this guide showcasing the benefits of contract management that you should be experiencing (or may not be).

Solutions like LawVu make it easy to streamline workflows, empower business users, and unlock the full value of your contracts. Don’t wait for missed renewals, stalled deals, or compliance challenges to become the tipping point.

Start your CLM journey today and set your legal team up for long-term success.