Key Takeaways:
- Contracting process improvement works best when Legal translates process pain into business language.
- Strong contract workflows require role clarity, leadership support, and practical guardrails that people can actually follow.
- Legal Ops plays a critical role in making contracting processes scalable, measurable, and sustainable.
Contracting process improvement sounds simple in theory.
Create an intake form. Build an approval workflow. Define when Legal gets involved. Maybe implement a CLM.
But anyone who has worked closely with contracts knows the hard part is rarely the process map itself. The hard part is getting people to use the process, trust the process, and understand where they fit inside it.
The throughline across these questions is this: smarter contracting is not just a workflow problem. It is a people, process, systems, and governance problem.
In a recent webinar hosted by Contract Nerds 
on “Smarter Contract Operations: The Process-First Approach to Doing More With Less”, me and Natasha Guiffre shared our experience and expertise on this topic with a lively and engaged audience of legal and contracts professionals. We explored:
- How to audit and redesign your contracting process from the ground up by identifying bottlenecks, eliminating unnecessary steps, and building intake and routing systems that actually match how your business operates.
- The essential building blocks of a high-functioning contract operation: self-service templates, negotiation playbooks, and standardized workflows that reduce back-and-forth and keep deals moving without adding headcount.
- How to use AI as a process accelerator to refine your templates, sharpen your playbooks, and improve how work flows through your team, using tools you may already have access to.
With over 1,200 registrants and 600+ live attendees, this event was described as “wonderful, informative, AND fun!” Not only did we provide practical information, tips, and use cases for creating more efficient contracting processes, we also shared free templates and downloads.
Free Download: Get your free swim lane template and map out your contracting process today!Get your free swim lane template and map out your contracting process today!
During the Q&A portion, we received thoughtful questions from live attendees, including questions about the practical realities of improving contracting workflows. We were able to answer a few live, but several deserved more time than we had available. In this article, I will address the most common questions and pain points around stakeholder buy-in, process boundaries, clarifying Legal vs. Legal Ops roles, and more.
1. Getting Buy-In for a CLM Starts With Business Pain
Q: The biggest issue we have as a Fortune 100 company is getting buy-in from various stakeholders in the contracting process. What is the best way to get buy-in for a cross-functional platform like a CLM?
A: Nobody wakes up thinking, “We need a contract lifecycle management system.”
Said literally no business stakeholder ever.
What they do know is the pain they are experiencing.
Sales may feel like deals are slowing down, handoffs to Legal are unclear, or renewal documents are hard to find. Procurement may struggle with vendor visibility, expiration reporting, or knowing which contracts are coming up for renewal. Finance may need better reporting on contract value, obligations, or spend. IT, Security, or Data Privacy teams may be pulled in too late because the process does not trigger their review early enough.
That is why CLM buy-in cannot start with the tool. It has to start with the business problem.
The best way to build buy-in is to sit down with each stakeholder group and understand how the contracting process is making their work harder. Then, translate the CLM conversation into their language. For Sales, the conversation may be about deal velocity. For Procurement, it may be about renewal visibility and vendor management. For Finance, it may be about reporting. For Security, it may be about getting involved before risk has already been created.
Once you understand those pain points, they should become your legal and business requirements list. That way, if the company evaluates CLM tools, you are not shopping based on generic features. You are evaluating whether the tool actually solves the problems your stakeholders told you they have.
The goal is not to convince everyone to care about CLM. The goal is to show each stakeholder how a better contracting process helps them do their own job better.
2. Process Boundaries Need Both Leadership and Hand-Holding
Q: How do we enforce process boundaries when stakeholders refuse to buy in?
A: Enforcing process boundaries when stakeholders refuse to buy in is painful, and many Legal and Legal Ops teams feel it deeply.
In my view, process boundaries require both a bottom-up and top-down approach. If you only have one without the other, the process is much harder to sustain.
The bottom-up piece is the handholding. That means training, office hours, FAQs, one-pagers, intake instructions, and making sure people know exactly where to go, what to submit, and what happens next. If we want people to follow a process, the process has to be easy to find, easy to understand, and easy enough to use.
But the top-down piece matters just as much.
Legal Ops, attorneys, and system administrators cannot be the only people enforcing the process. They need air cover from the General Counsel, Chief Legal Officer, Head of Legal Ops, or other senior leaders who can reinforce that this is how legal work is being managed.
It also helps to normalize Legal intake as a service delivery model. We do not expect IT to complete work without a ticket. We do not expect Procurement to manage a sourcing request without the right information. Legal should not be treated differently just because people are used to sending an email or Teams message and getting an answer.
That does not mean Legal becomes cold or unhelpful. It means Legal becomes more consistent, trackable, and scalable.
If process boundaries are failing, I would look at three things: whether leadership is backing the process, whether the process is easy to follow, and whether attorneys feel empowered to redirect work back to the right channel.
3. When Everything Falls on Legal, Look at Role Clarity
Q: How does one create an environment whereby everything falls on the desk of Legal? How do we, as Legal/Legal Ops, support and empower our business units to have the confidence to engage with other stakeholders?
A: When everything falls on Legal’s desk, I usually see it as a roles and responsibilities issue.
It is not always because people are trying to avoid work. A lot of the time, Legal becomes the default owner because Legal is seen as competent, responsive, and able to navigate ambiguity. But that does not mean Legal is the right owner for every question, approval, or handoff in the contracting process.
The first step is to reset responsibilities.
Teams need to define what Legal owns, what Legal does not own, and who owns the pieces that fall outside of Legal. For example, in a vendor contract, Legal may be responsible for reviewing certain legal provisions. Procurement may own the commercial terms. IT or Security may need to review technology, AI, data, or cybersecurity provisions. Finance may need to validate spend, billing structure, or budget alignment.
Those responsibilities should not live in people’s heads. They need to be mapped.
A process map, playbook, decision tree, or intake guide can help the business understand when a contract goes to Legal, when it goes to Procurement, when IT or Security should be pulled in, and what information is needed before each handoff.
If your company has an operational excellence, business process, or internal consulting function, consider involving them. Teams with Lean, Six Sigma, Scrum, or process improvement experience can help facilitate role clarity and document the future-state process.
Legal should be involved where legal judgment is needed. Legal should not become the catch-all desk for every unclear handoff, missing approval, or undefined business responsibility.
4. Approvals and Signature Authority Are Not Always the Same
Q: What are best practices for obtaining and documenting several layers of approvals for a contract? Is a contract approval form requiring signatures one of the best options?
A: One misconception I see often is that contract approval authority and signature authority are treated as the same thing.
Sometimes they are connected, but they are not always the same.
Before designing an approval process, you need to understand whether your company treats approval authority and signature authority as a one-to-one relationship. If someone can approve the contract, does that also mean they can sign it? Or does the contract need separate business, Legal, Finance, Procurement, Security, or executive approvals before it goes to the authorized signer?
That distinction matters.
If your company uses a CLM or contract workflow tool, I would generally avoid creating a separate approval form unless there is a specific reason for it. A separate form can create extra work, duplicate records, and another document people have to track.
Ideally, the system itself should serve as the approval record. It should show who approved the contract, when they approved it, what they approved, and where the contract was in the process at that time. That becomes especially important for audit purposes.
The approval workflow should also reflect the contract type, risk level, dollar threshold, and internal approval matrix. For example, a real estate agreement or capital equipment purchase may require Procurement approval, Finance approval, Legal approval, and then CFO approval before signature. In that scenario, the CFO may be both an approver and the authorized signer, but there still may be earlier approval steps that need to happen first.
The goal is to document approvals without creating unnecessary administrative work. Your process should give you a clear record, but it should not create extra steps just for the sake of having extra steps.
5. Shared Systems Need Role-Based Permissions
Q: If you are tracking in a system that Legal and business have access to, how do you deal with privilege and confidentiality issues?
A: If Legal and the business both have access to a contract system, privilege and confidentiality need to be considered at the requirements stage, not after implementation.
One of the most important requirements is role-based permissions. Access should be based on contract type, business unit, assigned owner, approval role, folder structure, and actual need.
I think about this in two parts: the active contract workflow and the repository.
For an active contract, anyone who is part of the approval process, assigned to the matter, or required to follow the request may need access to that specific contract. But that does not mean they need access to every contract in the system.
The repository is different because people may need access for reporting, renewal management, vendor oversight, or finance tracking. Even then, access should be provisioned based on need.
Finance may need access to certain finance-related agreements or reporting fields. Procurement may need broader access to vendor contracts because they are often managing supplier relationships, renewals, and commercial terms. HR may need access to certain vendor agreements tied to HR services, but more sensitive employment-related documents may need to live somewhere else depending on confidentiality or PII concerns.
That is why it is important to decide what belongs in the CLM repository and what does not. Not every legal document necessarily belongs in the same system.
Your Legal Ops or system administrator role also becomes important here. Someone needs to own the permissioning model, folder-level access, contract-level access, and reporting access so that the system is useful without becoming overexposed.
A useful repository should not become an “everyone can see everything” environment.
6. Risk and Revenue Should Be Balanced Through Thresholds
Q: I figure my job is to reduce risk for the organization, and that’s my number one priority. Revenue makes sense, obviously, but I feel like my responsibility is to the institution, how do you balance those priorities when looking at contracts?
A: Legal’s role is absolutely to protect the institution, reduce risk, and help the business make sound decisions.
But that does not mean Legal should treat every contract the same or sacrifice every revenue opportunity in the name of catching every possible risk. The better approach is to be measured, risk-based, and clear about when deeper legal review is worth the time and when it is not.
This is one of the reasons I like threshold matrices for sales contracts.
A company might decide that if a deal is under $50,000, Legal will not negotiate it. It needs to stay on company paper, use the approved template, or the business needs to be willing to walk away. If the deal is between $50,000 and $75,000, maybe Legal will review redlines to company paper. If the deal is above $100,000, maybe Legal will consider negotiating on customer paper.
The exact thresholds will vary by company, but the principle matters: the process should match the risk, value, and complexity of the deal.
This also gives Sales something practical to work with. Instead of Legal simply saying “no,” Legal can say, “At this deal size, we cannot justify negotiating third-party paper. But if the deal value increases, or if certain business conditions are met, we can revisit the level of review.”
It also helps Sales understand when a deal may not be worth the internal effort. If a low-dollar deal requires heavy negotiation, custom terms, multiple approvals, and a long legal review cycle, the company may need to ask whether the revenue justifies the operational cost and risk.
The real balance is not risk versus revenue. It is knowing when the risk, value, and effort justify the level of legal involvement.
7. Procedures Can Be Low-Touch, But Not No-Owner
Q: How can you make a procedure work independently without needing a full-time person to overview?
A: A procedure can be low-touch, but it should not be no-owner.
You can absolutely design processes that reduce manual oversight: FAQs, intake instructions, automated routing, self-service NDAs, playbooks, templates, and thresholds. But someone still needs to monitor whether the process is working.
Are people submitting the right information? Are contracts being routed correctly? Are self-service templates being used appropriately? Are certain contract types getting stuck? Are people bypassing intake?
That is where Legal Ops becomes strategic.
Legal Ops is not just there to create the procedure and walk away. Legal Ops helps monitor adoption, identify friction, train users, update workflows, review data, and make sure the process still reflects how the business actually operates.
There are definitely areas where you can create a low-touch or no-touch experience for the business. Self-service NDAs are a great example. Certain lower-risk contracts may be handled through templates or thresholds. But even those processes need someone reviewing performance over time.
The goal is not to create a process that never needs a person. The goal is to create a process that does not depend on one person manually pushing every contract forward.
8. Prioritization Should Not Be Based on Who Yells the Loudest
Q: Which specific processes have worked well for you and your clients for solving the prioritization bottleneck?
A: Prioritization bottlenecks often happen when every contract is treated as equally urgent.
For sales contracts, deal thresholds can be one of the most practical tools. They help Legal and the business decide what deserves heavier review, what can move through self-service, and what should be handled through a lighter process.
For example, if one contract is $60,000 on company paper with redlines and another is $100,000 on customer paper, the business may decide the higher-value deal needs to move first. Deal thresholds help make that decision less emotional and more operational.
Contract type tiers can also help. A low-risk NDA, standard order form, or renewal on existing terms should not sit in the same queue as a strategic partnership agreement, high-value customer contract, data-heavy vendor agreement, or complex outsourcing deal.
Intake should also capture the right risk and business triggers upfront. That might include deal value, contract type, customer paper versus company paper, close date, renewal deadline, data privacy concerns, cybersecurity review, AI usage, international issues, or non-standard terms.
The goal is to move away from “whoever is loudest gets reviewed first” and toward a triage model.
A strong intake process should help Legal quickly sort work into categories: self-service, business-owned, standard legal review, specialist review, or escalation. It should also help identify whether the request is complete. If key information is missing, the contract should not be treated as ready for legal review.
Prioritization becomes much easier when the process itself tells you what is routine, what is risky, what is revenue-sensitive, and what truly needs escalation.
Interesting data point: According to a poll taken during this webinar, most contract requests land in a legal inbox or shared email.
This data point tells us that most teams are still operating without a formal intake system, which makes the prioritization problem almost impossible to solve. You can’t triage what you can’t see, and an inbox gives you no visibility into volume, urgency, contract type, or risk level. It’s hard to build a smarter process on top of a shared email thread.
The good news is that once you map even just one contract process into a structured intake system, you’ll start to gain the visibility you need to prioritize effectively. Prioritization is ultimately a workflow and process problem, and it’s one that no tool, nor AI alone can solve for you. This is the hard Legal Ops work, the kind that often goes unnoticed, but once it’s visible, it makes everyone’s job easier.
Smarter Contracting is Not Just a Workflow Problem
Smarter contracting processes are not built by technology alone.
They are built through clearer roles, better handoffs, practical governance, leadership support, and processes people can actually follow.
A CLM, intake form, approval workflow, or playbook can help. But the real value comes from designing the process around how the business actually works and where Legal truly needs to be involved.
That is where Legal Ops plays such an important role.
Legal Ops sits between the business need, the legal risk, the technology, and the human behavior required to make the process work. And in many organizations, that is the difference between a contracting process that exists on paper and one that actually works.
You’ve got this.
Continued Learning Opportunities
- You can now access the full 60-minute webinar recording, which comes with the presentation deck, example screenshots and redlines, and bonus materials.
- Join the next Contract Nerds webinar live and get CLE or CPE credit! They host one webinar a month. Follow on LinkedIn to stay updated.
- Stay tuned for more practical legal ops tips and strategies from the trenches in my column Beyond the Fine Print, right here with Contract Nerds.
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