It’s a common technology tale for many in-house lawyers: the new contract lifecycle management platform just came on line. It’s kind of a disaster. No one really wants to use it.
That was the experience for Validae Health, a pharmaceutical investment firm, when the company implemented a new CLM solution in June 2023, said Tina Czepiel, a Validae vice president and CLM product owner.
“Nothing was working as expected,” Czepiel said of the company’s CLM transition to a live production environment from development. “So right from the get-go there was a very poor adoption of the system. People refused to use it.”
She described the CLM implementation Tuesday on a webinar sponsored by Integreon, which provides legal operations support services.
The CLM market has experienced robust growth of late with the market expanding from $2.3 billion in 2023 to $2.6 billion this year, with another $100 million of revenue forecast for 2025, according to data Integreon provided on its program.
Still, despite the tools’ popularity among corporate legal teams, migrating current contracting systems to a modern CLM platform can be daunting, at best – and disastrous at worst. That’s why the various steps a legal department or legal operations team take in the post-CLM implementation period are so critical for most employees who interact with company contracts, according to the expert panel.
Companies need to define success as identifying one or two CLM objectives in the early days of the integration and not to expect the solution to become a quick panacea for contracting, said Diane Homolak, Integreon’s vice president of technology solutions. The system’s initial reporting is likely to be limited, with narrow application across an organization as employees train and learn.
Managers are “expecting the magical and you know it’s not going to be magical,” she said. “It’s going to be better but it’s not going to be magical.”
Amid the rocky early days with a new CLM, what are the most critical best practices for successful adoption? Setting clear expectations on what the tool will and won’t provide is one of the most important things a CLM implementation team can do, according to a live vote taken of webinar participants.
Guides, “cheat sheets,” how-to videos and instructional directions within the CLM will also help speed adoption, according to the participants.
In many cases, employees need “forcing mechanisms” to spur their engagement with the CLM platform, said Douglas Martin, CLM program director within legal/compliance at Morgan Stanley. For Validae Health, that mechanism is a “PO function” for anyone who is seeking a contract review, said Czepiel, referring to the software’s purchase order function.
“You do have to build some rails so that people get to know these systems,” Martin said. “At the end of the day there’s something beyond just executing contracts.” Companies with contracts and CLM tools “want to sell products, they want to buy services.”
Another area of frustration can be the poor quality of the early reports a CLM generates, not to mention the slow pace of progress many managers experience as they try to ferret out process flaws, organizational problems and other workflow inefficiencies these reports purport to detect.
It’s worth remembering that “someone asked for this CLM system in the first place,” Martin noted. In lieu of pursuing expansive, “gold-plated reporting” in the initial phases of an implementation, ask “what is the pain point?” that a manager may be seeking to solve.
“What are the frustration points from the key stakeholders?” he said. “Maybe that’s where the reporting process should start.”
