Fifteen years ago, I was working for the second-biggest telecom company in France when the CEO tasked me with renegotiating a thousand vendor contracts. Sounds impressive, right? It wasn’t.
I spent six months just finding contracts in file cabinets. Then months reading them one by one, building an Excel spreadsheet with 52 columns. Then more months sending Word documents back and forth to hundreds of people.
It was a terrible job. No one should be doing this manually. Yet in 2025, 90% of companies still have nothing in place for contract management.
What’s fascinating, though, is how the landscape is transforming. The signs are everywhere: 90% of contracts now pass without a single edit. 65-70% of our customers at Concord don’t even have a legal team anymore.
Contracts aren’t legal documents
Here’s the truth too many people miss: a contract isn’t primarily a legal document. It’s a business process.
Think about it. Whether you buy something, sell something, or hire someone, there’s always a contract in the middle. It’s how money moves in and out of your company.
The legal is part of it, but it’s not what a contract is about.
This explains the most significant shift I’ve observed over ten years at Concord: CFOs—not legal teams—increasingly own contract processes.
Why? Because finance leaders are evolving like CIOs did years ago. Remember when IT leaders just “helped plug in computers?” Now they’re strategic partners. The same transformation is happening with finance leaders.
A recent study found the legal process outsourcing market will grow at a staggering 24.1% annually, reaching $132.6 billion by 2033. This isn’t surprising when you consider that poor contract management costs businesses 9% of their yearly revenue according to World Commerce and Contracting research.
The AI acceleration
AI didn’t create this trend of legal teams stepping back from contracts—it’s just making it happen faster.
When we started Concord, contracts were “legal’s problem.” Today, our contract management software handles thousands of agreements where finance and operations teams—not lawyers—are the primary users.
AI gives everyone access to legal knowledge they didn’t have before. Today, you can upload your contract to AI systems and get a first review to understand if there’s a problem—something a lawyer would have done in the past.
You’ll still need lawyers for complex negotiations, but how often does that really happen in your company?
- Your customer contracts? Probably templatized.
- Your vendor agreements? Probably templatized by your vendor.
- Your HR documents? Absolutely templatized.
In fact, data shows that AI can examine past case laws and outcomes to predict risk and compliance issues, while automating routine tasks that once consumed legal departments’ time.
What does this mean for finance leaders?
For CFOs, this shift creates massive opportunities. When you fully understand your contractual commitments, you can build forecasting based on actual commitments rather than historical patterns.
Think about how you do forecasting now. You look at your expenses from last year and project growth. But what if you could know exactly what money is coming in and going out based on your contract data?
That’s what we’re building at Concord—tools that give finance leaders total visibility into contractual commitments. Our contract lifecycle management software helps extract financial data automatically, so you know precisely what’s happening with your cash flow.
The future is already here
In ten years from now, in 2035, I’m convinced that companies with fewer than 500 employees will not have legal people whatsoever in-house. We already see this trend with companies of 100-200 employees.
When you look at contracts today, they’re extremely inefficient. Every contract is different. Sometimes the important parts are buried in the middle of 15 clauses.
What could the future look like? Think about term sheets. A simple table that tells you exactly what the terms of the contract are. That’s what contracts will increasingly resemble—a standardized, templatized way of showing data.
Our contract automation software helps companies move in this direction by standardizing and templating agreements while extracting key data automatically.
And long-term—ten years from now—there won’t really be contracts as we know them. They’ll exist, but no human will review them. AI and computers will negotiate between companies and automate everything.
What should you do now?
If you’re still managing contracts like it’s 2010, you’re leaving money on the table. But don’t try to revolutionize everything overnight.
When implementing contract analytics software, start small. Find the contracts causing the most pain for your teams—maybe it’s sales contracts taking too long for approval or vendor agreements bottlenecking growth.
Build something that solves that specific problem first. Make those teams happy, and they’ll tell the rest of the company. That’s how adoption spreads.
And remember—when you get a new CLM system, focus first on the contracts of tomorrow, not yesterday. The biggest pain in contract management is in the process itself, not the historical documents.
I failed at my first contract management company. With Concord, we learned from those mistakes. The key lesson? Trust your gut and write your manifesto—know exactly why you’re doing what you’re doing.
Because in the end, contracts aren’t about legal perfection. They’re about getting business done.
Matt Lhoumeau is co-founder and CEO of Concord, a contract management platform trusted by over 1,500 companies worldwide. After experiencing the pain of manual contract management firsthand while working for a major telecom company, he built Concord to make sure no one will have to go through what he did 15 years ago.