The death of Contract Lifecycle Management

In Grant Gilmore's seminal book The death of contract, American law students learn about the numerous functions of a contract. Interestingly, the book presumes that the theory of contracts has its roots in (the common law of) America. As if Roman law had never existed, let alone influenced common law. If you know the truth about “indemnify and hold harmless” or the likes of “null and void” and “right, title and interest”, you know better.

The 11th century of law and legal

Indeed, this American contractual legalese goes back on Vikings and Romans. In the book Cross-border contracting - how to draft and negotiate international commercial contracts (written by Willem Wiggers, Weagree's CEO, and freely accessible) for the United Nations and WTO, he introduces the notion of contract by delicately stating that not having a contract is not crucial in business transactions. There is abundant psychological evidence that this is true: managing a transaction or relationship well is worth millions more – managing well, with empathy and due care, can hardly be compensated by tough contract terms.

But like the shift of power in medieval England from Romans to Vikings and then on to the French, also the role of a legal department may be considered. Waiving responsibility for accepting certain contract clauses as being a ‘business decision’ (as not up to the legal counsel) and a manually slow process to reach agreement may explain some disinterest in elevating contract management practices beyond the basic parameters that register the existence of a contract or mark the right to terminate it.

The 21st century of legal and contracts

In the early 21st century, legal departments became increasingly aware of the necessity to manage contracts properly. That is to say: to provide a buyer of their company adequate insight in whether the company's (material) contracts could be terminated following the takeover, or their internal clients insight and alerts preventing that a termination right will be missed.

‘The business’, meanwhile, have pursued different ways to manage their transactions and relationships. In avoiding the bureaucracies of Legal Affairs, departments and business units dressed down the scope or extent of their contracts to the bare minimum, reducing them to the legal essentials and not much more. Business is conducted through SOW's (Statements of Work), PO’s and project specifications.

With the dressed-down scope of contracts and basics-extent of managing them, came also the complication of registering contracts in a CLM. Registering a signed contract is error prone if extracting the agreed key terms is done by insufficiently skilled persons. The subtle outcomes of negotiations may be overlooked, and because registering a contract is also 'not the most exciting job' for a senior legal counsel, contract management has evolved into registering signed contracts for basic data only.

Contracts in 2025 (towards 'CLM maturity')

We arrived in the age of generative AI and AI agents, and while 'AI' might not be fully mature, CLM solutions like Weagree provide appropriate tooling to extract all desired CLM metadata from a signed contract and proper tooling to validate such AI-returned data. Because (high quality) data are essential for effective revenue operations (RevOps) and AI is more powerful if such data are managed centrally (i.e. not in data silo's and not by departments working in silo's), the need for mature CLM increases quickly.

One month ago, a worldwide consultation paper saw the light of day: a draft consultation of The Contract Management Standard that aims at becoming a global, uniform reference framework for best practices of contract lifecycle management. Needless to say that at Weagree, we are deeply fascinated and excited to dive into these (draft) contract lifecycle management best practices, and apply them when onboarding our customers.

Needless to emphasise also that Weagree's customers will benefit tremendously from our (ongoing) learnings from this best practices framework for contact management. Rather, legal departments may not ignore that managing a contract, whether it is a one-off transaction or ongoing commercial relationship, entails much more than insight in an expiry date and whether a change-of-control clause was included. Therefore, the 'death of contract lifecycle management' refers to that basic (pre-AI era) level of CLM.

Enterprise-grade CLM

A mature contract lifecycle management solution (CLM) is an enterprise-grade application that lives alongside (and is fully integrated with) an ERP and a RevOps application (where a RevOps platform is the nowadays' upgraded standard for CRM). Therefore, a CLM must provide instant insight (in many aspects as the central point of truth) in all those variables that a business transaction or relationship may entail.

With Weagree’s 19 years experience (see also the above-mentioned book Cross-border contracting of 2016), we have developed the CLM that achieves precisely this maturity level for legal departments (or rather: for 'the business' they support):

• A CLM that caters for mature contract management, not merely the essentials
• Enterprise-grade flexibility for managing contracts of thousands kinds
• Ease of implementation (user-friendly and flexible)
• One-click access to metadata and to contract files (by role-based authorised users only)
• Robust contract creation: anchoring business decisions and data responsibly

Well, and that is only the beginning of mature contract lifecycle management. But indeed, it is in that higher maturity level where Weagree resides. Do you like to assess with us:

...how mature your contract management is?

Or do you want to study yourself about mature contract management (best) practices?