Why I fired Microsoft from my contract process
Back in 2009, I was working at the worst job of my entire life.
I had a personal assignment from my boss, the CEO of a €5 billion French telecom company: Review and renegotiate all the company’s contracts.
Sounds like a dream project, right?
Not if you have you work with Microsoft Word, it’s not.
I spent six months digging through filing cabinets, looking for old contract versions. Then I spent six more months sending hundreds of MS Word documents back and forth as email attachments.
When it was all over, I swore I’d never use MS Word for contract management again. I’d build something better.
And I did! I built Concord: A platform that makes contract management effortless for thousands of customers every day.
Why exactly did I decide MS Word was the enemy of effortless contract management?
Think about it. What happens when you use MS Word for contracts?
- You have to email static files back and forth like it’s 1999
- You have to keep track of who has which version of every contract
- Your legal time wastes billable hours fixing sloppy formatting
- Every file ends up in a different folder on someone’s laptop or Google Drive
- You have no way to search the information in all your contracts!
It’s completely insane that we’re building AI systems that can write entire novels, yet we’re still managing billions of dollars with MS Word – a tool designed to write college essays.
So when we built Concord, the first thing I did was fire Microsoft from our contract process.
Here’s how Concord handles contracting:
- Every contract is a living online document
- Version control is automatically tracked in each live contract
- Formatting is automatically applied to new versions
- Every contract lives in one location
- Our AI automatically extracts key terms and makes them searchable
The decision to fire Microsoft Word from our contract process was one of the best decisions I ever made. It saved us thousands of hours. And it saves our customers millions of dollars every year.
Are you still managing contracts like it’s 1999? And if so, why?
Matt Lhoumeau is the CEO and co-founder of Concord, a leading provider of Agreement Intelligence solutions. Concord empowers growing businesses to make smarter operational decisions by unlocking actionable insights from contracts, and is trusted by over 1,500 companies worldwide.
