We Hear You, Legal Ops: Traditional CLMs Aren’t Cutting It – Here’s Why

If you work in legal ops, you’ve got your hands full. Likely, more than full. You’re charged with everything from managing budgets and controlling costs to finding and implementing a legal tech stack. You live in a world of processes, workflows, and efficiency improvements. So why don’t traditional CLMs deliver on their promises to make your life easier?

We think the answer is that they’re looking at the problem AND the solution, in the wrong order.

What we mean is, by starting with pre-signature and expecting to get the data you need to improve your current operations, and by investing months or years in setup, design and implementation, traditional CLMs are setting your team up for frustration and a heavy lift. 

Why traditional CLMs fail to deliver results

There are a lot of reasons why the traditional CLM approach to contract management fails. Some of the most common ones include: 

  • The CLM is too complicated and contains too many features you don’t really want or need, even if they looked snazzy during the demo
  • Implementation takes too long and leaders at your company question why you’re spending money on the CLM
  • They take aim at new contracts, ignoring the valuable insights and immediate value of your historic ones
  • Internal adoption is low (or worse). After all, who wants to use an overly-complex system that doesn’t allow immediate access to reporting or analysis of your entire contract history? 
  • The AI doesn’t work very well. Despite the promises, you and/or your legal team spend countless hours manually cleaning up contracts and tagging key terms, pay for another vendor to do it for you, or simply settle for a CLM full of inaccuracies or missing information

If any of these reasons sound familiar to you (or if you’d like to avoid them altogether), Pramata’s approach is different. We take all those downsides of traditional CLMs and literally flip the script. By starting with an accurate and complete picture of your historic contracts, legal ops and legal teams experience quick wins that show the business an immediate ROI. 

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to say: “No one questions why we have Pramata. People see the value every time they have a “quick question” right before a big meeting and I can actually give them the answer.” 

With Pramata, it’s possible to get to contract nirvana quickly and without any heavy lifting. Really! 

How Pramata is different 

A radically simple end-to-end platform. A team that does the heavy lifting for you. Self-service access to empower others across the business to get the answers they need from day one. Pramata does all of this, and more, by taking a different approach to contract management. We know the priorities that lead to wins and quick ROI for legal ops teams include: 

  • Centralized visibility to the agreed contract terms across all stakeholders and automatic digitization of new contracts going forward
  • Automated workflows customizable to departments or roles, triggered by key terms, dates or other information captured in the contract analysis
  • Parent-child structure that recognizes metadata in the contract, so it can automatically relate it to the appropriate existing contracts in the repository
  • Robust import/export capabilities
  • Easily configurable, dynamic request forms and an easy-to-use, centralized dashboard (even in CRM!) across all in-flight contracts
  • Valuable metrics into team performance with customizable dashboards and reports to optimize workload distribution and identify bottlenecks

It might be contract nirvana (in the words of one of our customers) but it’s not a dream!

Read more about why traditional CLMs don’t cut it for legal ops and how flipping the script can change the game in our guide: Flip the Script: How Legal Operations Leaders Can Redefine a New Era of Legal Efficiency. 

Subscribe to Our Legal Impact Newsletter

Get exclusive event invites, peer best practices and the latest industry news right in your inbox!

More To Explore

Blog

Avoid the “Redlining Tool” Trap: Why Redlining is Just the Start and How a Comprehensive CLM Changes Everything

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.

Blog

4 Unique Ways to Use Industry-Specific Contract Data

When you think about contract management, and what it looks like to use a contract lifecycle management system (CLM), you’re likely imagining the very basics – like being able to search through a digital repository of your contracts and locate a specific agreement quickly.