Author name: Samantha Nickerson

In-house legal teams spend a great deal of time negotiating contracts. Whether it’s with brand new customers, customer renewals, vendors, employees or any other contractual relationship, negotiation is a vital part of the job. Naturally, this leads to a lot of redlining activity. And that means legal teams are often seeking a tech tool to simplify and shorten the redlining process.

As an attorney who’s worked in CLM software for the last three years, I have a unique perspective on what goes into contract management from both the user and the technical sides. One thing I’ve seen over and over is software promising to make contract management easy for legal teams and other users, both when it comes to getting started and in terms of ongoing upkeep and use. I’ve also seen a pattern of most CLMs falling short of this pledge.