Fifteen years ago, I was working at France’s second-largest telecom company. The CEO handed me what I thought was an easy assignment: comb through an Excel spreadsheet and renegotiate thousands of contracts with our vendors.
This turned out to be the most miserable six months of my life. I spent long nights digging through file cabinets for paper contracts, building huge spreadsheets in Excel, and emailing hundreds of attachments back and forth to get revisions finalized.
The crazy part is that this wasn’t 1979. This was 2009.
The experience gave me a completely new perspective on contract management. I understood for the first time how broken it was. And I made it my personal mission to fix it.
Contracts aren’t legal documents. They’re business processes.
When I talk to most companies about contracts, they think “Legal.” And it makes sense! Contracts have been Legal’s domain for decades. But today, CFOs are taking over as the new contract leaders.
Our numbers prove it: 70% of our customers at Concord don’t have a legal team anymore. Not even a paralegal. Contracts are completely owned by the office of the CFO.
Why has this happened?
1. It’s common sense for the Finance team to own contracts
Contracts dictate how money moves into and out of your company. They provide the framework that tells you who’s allowed to spend and collect which amounts, and when.
That means the logical group of people to own contracts is not Legal, but the Finance team.
As a head of operations at one of our customers told me recently, “I am in charge of everything contract management related. And our legal counsel does more with the law itself.”
This would’ve been surprising to hear back in 2010. But today, it’s reality.
2. AI has democratized legal knowledge
Fifteen years ago, you would’ve needed a lawyer to flag problems in a contract. But today, AI can give anyone that context instantly.
You only need a lawyer in very complex contractual circumstances, or if a contract enters prolonged negotiation — which is increasingly rare. Our data shows that a full 90% of our customers’ contracts never get negotiated at all. Not even a single redline. Nothing.
So if that’s the case, then how do Finance and Legal work together?
The Finance/Legal relationship is evolving like IT did a decade ago
Remember back when IT was just that bunch of people who “fixed your computer?” How times have changed! Today, CIOs sit at the table with the rest of the C Suite, making strategic decisions. They’re not just fixers anymore. They’re leaders.
This same evolution is happening with CFOs as we speak. They’re no longer just accountants — they’re strategists, too. With modern contract lifecycle management software, they’re helping make key decisions about how money flows into and out of their companies.
Today, we see CFOs using contract data to:
- Build forecast based on the commitments in their company’s contracts
- Pinpoint roadblocks that are slowing down revenue
- Auto-flag renewal dates to prevent surprise expenses
- Track and manage financial obligations across thousands of contracts
This isn’t a hypothetical future — it’s what we see right now, across our 1,500+ customers.
So what’s next?
Legal’s role is radically changing
If we started from scratch today and asked AI to design a way for businesses to formalize their relationships, do you really think the solution would be a bunch of 30-page legal documents that no one wants to read?
Obviously not. And that’s not what contracts are going to be like in 10 years, either.
By 2035, contracts are going to be term sheets — just tables that clearly show what each party is agreeing to. No more digging through terms to look for paragraph 4, subsection C. Just interactive interfaces where you can look up who’s obligated to do what, when.
In fact, you can put this prediction in an envelope right now: By 2035, companies with fewer than 500 employees will not have a Legal team involved with contracts at all.
We’re seeing the start of this trend already, as 67% of legal teams are reallocating budgets from lawyers to contract lifecycle management software tools.
That doesn’t mean Legal’s out of a job, though. It means their role is evolving:
- They’ll talk to the Finance to plan budget allocation.
- They’ll work with Procurement to select vendors.
- They’ll advise HR on employment policies.
- They’ll sit in board meetings and shape negotiations.
This is where Legal’s true value lies: In being strategic partners for the company as a whole — not babysitting a bunch of supplier agreements.
What does this mean for you?
If you’re still running to Legal for every contract revision, I’ve got bad news for you: your competitors are already breaking through this bottleneck.
The good news is that modern contract management software can get you up to speed in as little as a few days — maybe less, depending on how quickly your team onboards.
Here are some questions to ask yourself today:
- How long does it take you to find a contract? Minutes? Hours? Longer?
- Do you have a single location to see all your upcoming contract renewal dates?
- Do you spend a lot of time manually emailing contract revisions back and forth?
- Do you know the total amount of your next round of contract renewals?
If you’re spending a lot of time hunting down contracts and emailing revisions, and you don’t have a clear overview of your spend and renewals, it’s time to get a contract management tool — and activate the full value of your Legal team in strategic decision making.
The Big Picture
Contracts aren’t boring legal documents — they’re frameworks for relationships. And your Legal team deserves to be treated as strategic assets, not pencil-pushers.
Forward-thinking companies are already shifting contract ownership from Legal to Ops and Finance. Legal is handling more high-level negotiations, while Finance and Ops use contract analytics software to identify cost savings and revenue opportunities.
This is a lot more than just a tech upgrade. It’s a complete overhaul of who owns contracts.
And it’s an evolution worth celebrating, because it means contracts can finally fulfill their true purpose: enabling relationships, not slowing business down.
