Contract Lifecycle Management continues to be a fast-growing legal industry sector, but do you know what it is?
This post is intended to provide a brief overview of what this sector is about. In this post, I will:
- State a few underlying principles of CLM.
- Answer some frequently asked questions about what CLM is.
- Provide some additional resources for further review.
Contracts are legal documents and, appropriately, are the domain of the legal function.
Managing contracts, however, is a cross-functional exercise involving several functions including finance, legal, sales, and in larger companies, procurement.
Jason Smith puts it this way:
“There's a difference between managing the contract lifecycle (the process) and the contract (the document). The contract document is a legal artifact... the process is a business lifecycle. Once you understand this, the cross-functional concept becomes easier to address.”