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Annual costs spent on contract review work that AI could automate more efficiently
Required for legal teams to complete initial contract analysis before negotiations could begin
Stuck in 'negotiation' stage dating back to 2016 due to missing metadata and expired agreements
General Counsel
Manual contract review created relationship friction with suppliers and customers. Legal teams spent days on initial analysis before negotiations could begin, preventing responsive support during peak periods when 95-99 monthly contract requests flooded the system. The situation worsened when one region underwent internal audit in February 2025, receiving a critical finding: complete absence of contract lifecycle management flagged as a major compliance gap.
Meanwhile, other entities managed contracts through fragmented systems—Brighter, JIRA, TeamSpace, and spreadsheets—creating audit risk and preventing consistent processes across jurisdictions. Headquarters lacked centralized repositories entirely, with contracts scattered across individual drives. Contract data hygiene issues compounded operational challenges, with users consistently failing to enter expiry dates and leaving hundreds of agreements active despite termination months or years earlier.
The organization also faced revenue leakage from unexercised contract rights. Uplift clauses for price increases based on RPI and exchange rates went untracked, while procurement missed vendor discount opportunities buried in contract terms. Senior leadership mandated 25% legal cost reductions, creating pressure to demonstrate efficiency while maintaining compliance standards across all entities.
The organization selected Leah contract lifecycle management platform to centralize contract operations and establish audit-ready processes. The platform provided native PDF handling and OCR capabilities that automatically convert third-party contracts to editable Word documents for redlining and analysis—essential functionality for managing incoming agreements from suppliers and customers.
The CLM solution offered cross-functional request workflows enabling business users beyond legal to access the system, creating transparency across procurement, sales, and supply chain teams. Modular architecture allowed the organization to implement core CLM first, then add AI-powered contract review, discovery, and negotiation capabilities as needs evolved rather than forcing bundled purchases.
The platform enabled relationship mapping for framework agreements and master service agreements, maintaining clear parent-child contract hierarchies that streamlined audit preparation. Integration capabilities with DocuSign, Salesforce, Coupa, SharePoint, and Office 365 connected contract management to existing enterprise workflows. Template governance functionality locked down 75 precedents with version control, ensuring standardization while preventing scattered templates across decentralized systems.
The solution's ability to designate evergreen contracts addressed tracking gaps for call-off agreements with no expiration dates. Automated metadata extraction capabilities promised to eliminate manual data entry failures that had created the backlog of expired contracts remaining active in the system.
The organization's implementation began in 2016 with a CEO mandate requiring all contracts be managed in Leah across all departments—establishing the platform as strategic infrastructure rather than optional software. The directive reflected the importance of centralized contract management to global operations facing increasing audit and compliance requirements.
Initial deployment operated on-premises behind firewalls before cloud migration as IT security teams built trust in the vendor's compliance frameworks. The team built mature workflows and templates for all major contract types: selective distribution agreements managing 2,500+ volume, new account applications, supplier contracts, customer agreements, framework contracts, real estate, and IT licensing.
Weekly business reviews with the customer success team provided usage analytics that enabled internal teams to demonstrate CLM value to stakeholders and identify optimization opportunities. Support responsiveness became a differentiator, with tickets resolved within 24 hours and sub-one-hour response times during critical periods.
The implementation established the organization as a proof of concept for contract management maturity. Internal auditors conducting reviews in early 2025 designated the CLM implementation as "best practice" and actively recommended replication across all entities globally. This third-party validation provided credibility that grassroots advocacy alone could not achieve.
Meanwhile, headquarters ran a competitive evaluation and selected a competitor for global legal AI strategy. However, the competitor implementation stalled 4-5 months in with major limitations discovered post-purchase: inability to handle third-party PDF contracts without expensive add-ons, restriction to legal team only with no cross-functional workflows, delayed plugin availability, and broken conditional logic generating poor user feedback.
General Counsel
The organization achieved 76% reduction in contract processing time, decreasing average cycles from 21.1 days in September 2024 to 5.1 days by May 2025 while maintaining volume of 89 monthly contracts. Contract review time dropped from 4-5 days to minutes for AI analysis plus hours for lawyer validation—representing approximately 90% time reduction that freed legal teams to focus on commercial judgment rather than routine clause identification.
The audit validation created momentum across the organization. Where one region failed its internal audit for lacking contract lifecycle management, the implementing entity passed with auditor praise. The contrast drove organic demand from peer legal teams who witnessed operational efficiency and audit readiness.
Six regions—across multiple European countries—now actively request the same CLM capabilities after seeing results. Legal teams across these jurisdictions recognize the compliance gap and efficiency disadvantage they face without centralized contract management. Leadership in other regions, who previously experienced the platform firsthand, advocates strongly for AI-enabled contract support to address operational challenges.
The platform's integrated CLM+AI architecture positioned the implementing entity with significant competitive advantage over entities attempting to implement AI without contract repositories. While competitors' deployments required years of discovery to locate scattered contracts before analysis could begin, this organization could immediately feed all centralized contracts to AI systems for instant value.
Leadership positioned successful CLM implementation as essential operational infrastructure for supply chain management—recognition that protected the platform during 25% legal budget cuts when other initiatives faced elimination. The CFO committed to taking proven solutions to the enterprise board for global consideration, positioning the regional team as innovation leaders within the organization.
Manual cleanup work previously estimated at weeks can now be completed in seconds with AI-powered metadata extraction. The organization identified concrete future value opportunities: systematic tracking of revenue optimization clauses, automated renewal reminders, procurement cost savings through vendor discount management, and contract intelligence that transforms agreements from static documents into active business assets.
