CCBJ: Tell us a little about yourself and your background.
Karen Meyer: I’ve been CEO of Contract Logix since February 2022. Prior to joining the company, I led Upland Software’s Global Customer Success organization where I was responsible for the Commercial and Customer Engagement teams of more than a dozen products. I have more than 20 years of SaaS experience building organizations to scale and driving growth, and I have always loved helping people and solving technical problems. My role at Contract Logix allows me to do both. Not to mention, most of my career has centered around managing contracts with customers, partners, and suppliers to run many teams and product lines.
What kinds of problems does Contract Logix solve?
Contracts are a business’ lifeblood. They can tell you so much about an organization’s health, trajectory, profitability and business relationships, but many companies are not able to handle their contracts effectively. And it’s not for lack of trying. Getting a handle on your contract lifecycle management (CLM) can be extremely hard, but the risk of mismanagement can be anything from overlooked penalties to lost revenue, lost savings, noncompliance, and overall brand damage.
Contract Logix, founded in 2006, is one of the longest-tenured contract management software companies in the market, with some of the original pioneers of the industry on staff. We offer a complete CLM platform and help in-house legal, legal operations, finance, IT, procurement and sales professionals across dozens of industries, including highly regulated industries such as pharma, healthcare and energy, to manage their end-to-end contract lifecycle and the processes around contract management. In addition to helping organizations achieve tremendous operational consistencies and efficiencies through better contracting processes, we help them get visibility into where their risk is, so they have the information needed to mitigate it. Risk management lays the foundation for ongoing improvements to our customers’ overall CLM strategies.
The CLM market is growing. What makes the company unique?
At Contract Logix, we are true contract lifecycle management specialists. We live and breathe CLM. A lot of vendors in the legal tech space are so focused on selling that they don’t understand how to guide customers to success after they buy the software. Our tenure in the industry and singular focus means that we work with tens of thousands of users on CLM implementations, so when a customer asks us how to ‘do’ contract management, we can share credible knowledge.
Our product is great, but our implementation and change
management expertise is even better. We’re big believers in quality over quantity and one of our main goals is to help customers successfully achieve fast time-to-value and broad user adoption with the software so they can
uncover and mitigate legal and financial risk quickly and gain efficiencies in their organizations. Once a customer
has ‘gone live’ with Contract Logix, we continue to serve as trusted advisors – helping them continuously improve,
delivering new capabilities they can use to optimize their
processes and introducing them to partnerships that will
help our customers manage contracts in a way that is fast,
accurate, and efficient. This has been a real contributor to the
company’s growth.
We’d love to hear more about your momentum. Why do you think you’re growing so much?
Contract Logix’s team has decades of SaaS-based software
experience across multiple markets, and our Product
Management and Technology teams thrive on innovation,
customer feedback, and the company’s own legacy. To
date, we’ve used that experience and knowledge to build an
intelligent, data-driven, and intuitive contract management
platform that customers love.
What was truly exciting in 2023, and so far in 2024, is that
our customers seem more ready than ever to embrace the
next levels of change. There are more and more organizations
prioritizing CLM improvement projects and our customers
are on board! In 2024 already, we’ve seen notable growth in areas of contract automation, analytics and digital
transformation to mitigate business risk, increase compliance
and get actionable insights from the wealth of data in
contracts. This includes:
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80 Percent increase in automated workflows for contract reviews, approvals and obligation tracking
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154 Percent increase in the number of dashboards and reports to track contract and process performance
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72 Percent increase in contract requests
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28 Percent increase in real-time collaboration and negotiation
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108 Percent increase in contracts executed via E-Signature
You mentioned highly regulated industries. Can you talk about your work in some of those industries?
Yes, we work closely with organizations in healthcare, pharmaceuticals, biotech, energy and transportation and logistics just to name a few. While they may not seem similar on the surface, all are extremely regulated – both internally with certain requirements set by stakeholders within their organizations, as well as external compliance requirements set by regulatory agencies. Think HIPAA and Medicare in healthcare, the Clean Air Act or EPA in energy, or the FDA for pharma.
Contract management solutions like Contract Logix serve as critical tools to mitigate risk and ensure internal, industry, and regulatory compliance, automating operations and reducing the risk of error-prone manual processes. In highly regulated industries, this is particularly impactful as the stakes are significantly higher.
For example, automated compliance checks and alerts can notify stakeholders about potential violations in real-time, enabling corrective action and avoiding costly penalties. CLM can also protect intellectual property by ensuring documents are stored in a secure, centralized repository, mitigating the risk of unauthorized access and data breaches.
Contract management software can help demonstrate governance, risk and compliance maturity to investors, showcasing a robust framework for managing regulatory requirements. Automatic audit trails are valuable when seeking FDA approval or just having to quickly respond to ad hoc audit requirements, as maintaining meticulous records and demonstrating adherence to regulatory standards is essential.
Version control features ensure that all stakeholders are working with the most up-to-date documents, reducing the risk of discrepancies and ensuring consistency. Automated alerts and reminders about contract renewals, deadlines and compliance requirements help organizations stay proactive and avoid lapses in obligations.
Can you share any customer success stories?
I could brag about our customers all day. We learn so much from them, but our latest crop of Digital Contract Transformation Awards winners really went above and beyond in transforming their CLM processes and strategies, as well as delivering excellent results to their internal and external customers.
Our winner was American Choice Healthcare (ACH), a Florida- based Accountable Care Organization. This is a group of doctors, hospitals and other healthcare providers, who come together voluntarily to give coordinated high-quality care to the Medicare patients. Given the complexity and scope of their operations, they manage a significant number of contracts to ensure efficient and effective healthcare delivery. Before working with us, their contracts were maintained in an unwieldy paper filing system, and preparing and sending customized contracts for signature was a lengthy and inefficient process.
With Contract Logix, the ACH team reduced the amount of time to draft and execute a contract from days to minutes, and the time to complete the lifecycle management process from weeks to days. The ACH team can generate custom reports for Leadership in hours instead of days, without needing to burden other departments. Also in healthcare, Bayshore HealthCare, a Canadian home and community care service provider, reduced the number of emails the Contract team received by 60 percent by centralizing contracts and implementing a streamlined contract request process.
Vitara Biomedical, a Philadelphia-based company developing a therapeutic platform to improve the quality of life for premature infants, also worked with us to successfully centralize contracts and contract requests. By using templates for popular contracts like NDAs (with up-to-date compliant language) and automating the request workflow, the time it takes to review a contract went from 5 days to less than 24 hours, an 80 percent improvement in time spent.
We also work with companies like New Columbia Solar, a Washington, D.C.-based solar company that finances, designs, installs and maintains solar energy systems. Utilizing the Contract Logix solution, the New Columbia team has significantly improved the time its Accounting and Legal team spends locating and reviewing contracts, reduced missed milestones, increased visibility into contract status and allowed the company, for the first time, to report on contract metrics.
Of these success stories cross multiple industries, what ties them together? What similarities do you see?
I think a lot of organizations struggle with getting started utilizing contract lifecycle management software, regardless of whether they are a Fortune 500 company or a smaller business. My colleague, Tim Donaghy, Contract Logix’s CTO, outlined for CCBJ how a lot of organizations try to do too much too soon and run into problems. It’s important to clearly define the problem(s) you want to solve such as getting visibility into what you’ve agreed to in your contracts, putting a centralized request process in place, or maybe it’s all about needing to speed up signatures and approvals.
These problems, and their different priorities, are critical to define BEFORE you roll out software. Technology is great, automation is great, but projects fail because the roll out initiatives were planned poorly. Working with a CLM specialist like Contract Logix, where the vast majority of what we do includes helping our customers ask the right questions up front, and implementing projects, can really help.
A common thread in these customer success stories is the importance of having a clear vision, direction and goal to avoid distractions. By implementing a focused approach, these organizations achieved substantial operational improvements and efficiencies. Transitioning from cumbersome paper-based systems to streamlined digital solutions allowed them to significantly reduce the time needed to draft, execute and manage contracts. This focus also enabled them to generate custom reports quickly, cut down on unnecessary communication and enhance overall workflow automation. Moreover, centralizing contract management increased visibility into contract status, minimized missed milestones and facilitated better reporting on contract metrics. These successes underscore the value of a strategic approach to contract management in driving productivity and achieving business objectives.
Lastly, we know that Legal teams are always understaffed and under high pressure to deliver. Our most successful, highest achieving customers are the ones whose Legal teams are unified with and supported by others inside of their organizations to really move the CLM needle. Good contracting processes have become top priorities for companies and those who have recognized contracting isn’t Legal’s ‘problem’ or ‘opportunity’ alone to improve have done best. We are thrilled to see Legal teams get way more support than in the past from Finance, Procurement and IT teams.
Do you have any legal or CLM predictions for the remainder of 2024?
Despite advancements in legal tech, we’re still seeing that a staggering 90 percent of prospects we talk to are managing contracts manually. This suggests there’s still a huge potential for digital transformation in the CLM space.
Companies are beginning to realize the inefficiencies and risk associated with manual contract management, and they’re actively seeking solutions to automate these processes. The clock is ticking loudly from what we can tell – organizations must solve their contracting problems with fit-for-purpose technology and partners.
One significant trend we’re seeing, in addition to automation, is the growing emphasis on contract analytics and collaboration. Businesses are looking for ways to streamline their contract lifecycle, gain deeper, actionable insights from their contract data and enhance collaboration. This is where a comprehensive CLM system comes into play, offering tools that not only automate routine tasks but also provide robust analytics to drive better decision-making.
As for Contract Logix, we will continue our laser focus on
CLM and specialist approach. We ensure that our clients
are not just a number-tailoring our solutions to meet their
specific needs and providing a personalized experience that
helps them achieve their unique contract management goals.
Of course, AI is another trend to watch in the CLM space.
Our AI-Powered Data Extraction tool allows organizations to automatically import and create contract records, saving time and reducing risk associated with manual data entry. This technology enables bulk uploading of contracts, automatically extracting key information like parties, dates, terms and clauses. Organizations can then verify and approve the extracted data on their own timeline to ensure accuracy before finalizing the contract records in their system. By leveraging AI for contract data extraction, businesses can free up countless hours previously spent on tedious manual entry and focus more on strategic contract management and analysis. And this has just been the beginning – assistance with real language analysis of incoming contracts and gaining efficiencies in redlining and negotiation processes through AI technologies are where we see organizations focused and ready to adopt next.
All in all, I think the remainder of 2024 will continue to see a push towards digital contract transformation. Companies that embrace automation, leverage advanced analytics, and adopt AI-driven tools will be well-positioned to improve efficiency, reduce risk and drive better business outcomes. But if you’re still managing contracts manually, now is the perfect time to explore these innovative solutions.
Published July 11, 2024.
