The future of contract life cycle management may look a lot like a two-strike ball game. Some corporate legal departments rushed to adopt CLM tools when the pandemic pushed businesses into remote work, but poor tool selection or a failure to establish the right procedures and personnel may have already doomed many of those initial efforts to the ash heap. 

“I think that there will be a lot of second attempts that we’re going to see. There will be kind of discarding of first attempts and then trying a second. I think it’s the second that probably will stick because of the lessons learned from the first, which is unfortunate because it will be wasted time and money,” said Lucy Bassli, principal at InnoLaw Group and the author of “CLM Simplified: Efficient Contracting for Law Departments.”