In Contract Management, Standards Lag Behind Investment

Reinvigorated by the promise of large language models and other types of artificial intelligence, legal departments are increasing their technology spend and investing heavily in new tools and processes to improve contract lifecycle management (CLM) workflows. Directing these investments to CLM makes sense, yet with challenges resulting from inefficient contracting workflows, and the lack of a standardized framework for end-to-end CLM, success is not guaranteed.

This report explores a framework for CLM - a Digital Contracting Reference Model (DCRM) - and provides a common language framework for practitioners, technology vendors and legal service providers to align on and follow, allowing best practices to develop across disciplines.