I’ve worked in the contract management space for 10+ years. CLM used to mean something to people. But today, it’s just another buzzword that makes people's eyes glaze over.

Why did that happen?

Traditional CLM promised everything. But all it delivered was complexity.

Six-month implementations. Professional services that cost more than the software. Training manuals thicker than phone books. And after all that, 90% of companies still don’t have a functional CLM solution that actually delivers measurable ROI.

The vendors convinced everyone that contract management had to be “advanced.” That you needed enterprise-grade complexity for basic contract workflows.

Those were lies. Now everyone’s waking up and seeing the emperor has no clothes.

Most companies never needed 47 customized approval workflows. They just need answers to simple questions, like “How many vendor agreements are renewing next quarter?” They need to stop losing money because someone missed a deadline.

None of that requires traditional CLM - just a system that can answer simple questions from actual humans.

Because today, Legal doesn’t own contracts at most companies anymore. 70% of our customers don’t have an in-house legal team at all. 90% of contracts never get negotiated or redlined in the first place.

And they’re owned by Ops and Finance, not Legal. Those teams don’t care about CLM. They want software that works like ChatGPT and Google Docs, not like some clunky enterprise suite from 2005.

Effortless. Fast. Effective.

Maybe it's time to stop calling it CLM altogether.

What do you think? Has the industry overcomplicated something that should be straightforward?