Back in 2010, I spent the worst six months of my life hunting through filing cabinets for 1,000 vendor contracts at France's second-largest telecom company. My boss wanted me to save millions by renegotiating these agreements. Simple enough, right?
Wrong. I had to manually read each contract, build a 52-column Excel spreadsheet with 500 rows, then send hundreds of Word documents back and forth for months. Every night, I came home asking myself: Why are we still managing contracts like it's 1985?
That experience led me to build Concord. But what's happening now in contract management makes even our early vision look conservative.
Here's a number that might surprise you: 90% of CEOs and 82% of CFOs believe their companies are leaving money on the table in contract negotiations. Yet 65-70% of our customers at Concord don't even have a legal team anymore. They might have one paralegal, but that's it.
This isn't because legal work disappeared. It's because contracts aren't really legal documents anymore—they're business processes. When you buy software, hire someone, or engage a vendor, you're not negotiating legal philosophy. You're starting a business relationship.
The data backs this up: more than 90% of contracts signed on our platform have zero negotiation. People just sign them. Why? Because in today's fast-moving business world, spending a month negotiating standard terms isn't worth the lost productivity.
Everyone's talking about AI revolutionizing contracts. But here's what they're missing: AI is expected to be embedded in 90% of enterprise software by 2025, and 42% of organizations are currently implementing AI in their contracting process – up from 30% just a year ago.
The real story? AI is just accelerating a shift that started years ago. CFOs and COOs were already taking over contract management from legal teams. COVID just hit the fast-forward button, and AI pressed it again.
Consider the productivity gains we're seeing in real businesses using AI-powered contract management software:
● Creating market reports: 6.7x faster with AI
● RFP generation: 10x faster
● Sales battlecards: 10x faster
● LinkedIn post copywriting: 16x faster
One of our customers used to spend weeks creating an RFP. Now? Half a day. That's not magic—it's what happens when you stop treating contracts like sacred legal texts and start treating them like the business tools they are.
If you're running a small or mid-sized business (50-1,000 employees), you're probably still managing contracts the way I did in 2010. Here's what needs to change:
1. Stop thinking "legal first." Industry research shows that 75% of organizations are expected to implement AI-driven automation for business-critical operations by 2025. If you're still routing every contract through legal review, you're already behind.
2. Embrace templatization. In five years, no one will negotiate standard agreements. We're already seeing this with SaaS contracts. Apply the same thinking to your vendor agreements, employment contracts, and customer terms.
3. Use AI for first-pass reviews. You don't need a lawyer to tell you if a standard NDA has problematic clauses. AI can flag real issues in minutes, not days. This is where automated contract management software becomes invaluable—it handles the routine work so you can focus on what matters.
4. Focus on data, not documents. Your contracts contain your future cash flows, renewal dates, and compliance obligations. But if that data is locked in PDFs and Word docs, it's worthless. Modern contract platforms extract and analyze this data automatically.
The average contract review takes 92 minutes. With AI-powered contract management, that drops to under 10 minutes for standard agreements.
I believe that by 2035, companies under 500 employees won't have in-house legal teams at all. They'll use AI for routine contract work and outside counsel for complex negotiations—which, remember, only happen 10% of the time.
This isn't about replacing lawyers. It's about letting business people do business. When I spent those six months in filing cabinets, I wasn't doing legal work—I was doing data entry. That's what needs to die, not the legal profession.
The companies that understand this shift—from legal documents to business processes, from negotiation to templatization, from manual to AI-powered—will thrive. The rest will still be sending Word documents back and forth, wondering why everything takes so long.
Don't be like 2010 me. The tools exist today to manage contracts 10x faster and extract 10x more value from them. The only question is whether you'll embrace them or keep doing things the old way.
Because trust me, those filing cabinets aren't getting any smaller.
Matt Lhoumeau is CEO and co-founder of Concord, a contract management platform serving over 1,500 companies.
