A business stakeholder asks a simple question: "Where are we with the supplier contract?" The answer requires checking three email threads, a shared drive that hasn't been organized since 2021 and the institutional memory of whoever happened to negotiate the deal.
That's exactly what Contract Lifecycle Management is designed to fix. And for legal teams already working inside iManage, the most practical route is a CLM built natively on the platform they use every day, which is the approach Co-Flo CLM takes.
But most CLM platforms mirror sales or procurement workflows. They treat a contract as a document to move from draft to signed, then consider the job done. Legal operates differently. A contract is a bundle of risk positions, negotiation history and ongoing obligations that will live for years after the ink dries. Legal needs to know what fallback clauses were used, which non-standard terms were accepted and why, and what the agreement requires of the business on an ongoing basis.
Here are five things a CLM should do if it's going to work for legal.
Contract requests arrive from sales, procurement, HR and business development, often with missing information, forcing lawyers to email back and forth before any work begins. A well-structured intake process with consistent fields capturing contract type, counterparty, key dates and risk level removes that friction before the first draft is opened.
This matters beyond efficiency. Structured data captured at intake is what makes everything downstream possible: routing contracts to the right reviewer, tracking cycle time by contract type and surfacing reporting that tells legal leadership where the backlog is building. Without it, CLM is just a fancier filing cabinet.
One of the most common CLM implementation mistakes is replicating existing approval trees, even when those trees no longer reflect how the business makes decisions.
A more useful approach is risk-based tiering. A standard NDA with a familiar counterparty doesn't need the same review path as a high-value commercial agreement with unusual indemnification terms. Conditional workflows that escalate only when the risk profile warrants it keep routine contracts moving and reserve senior attention for the matters that genuinely require it. This also addresses a persistent frustration in in-house legal: time spent on low-complexity, high-volume agreements when the queue is already full.
Getting a contract signed is not the end of legal's responsibility. It's the point at which financial risk begins.
Research from World Commerce & Contracting puts average value erosion from poor contract management at nearly 9% of annual revenue.¹ That figure doesn't come from bad deals. It comes from agreements that were sound at signing and then stopped being managed:
auto-renewals nobody flagged
discount clauses that expired unnoticed
volume commitments that went untracked.
Post-signature obligation management is the part of Contract Lifecycle Management that most teams underinvest in. Key dates, renewal windows, compliance milestones and performance triggers need to be tracked automatically, not left to individuals monitoring spreadsheets.
Legal's internal visibility is only half the picture. Business teams that commission contracts need to see where things stand without having to ask.
The contracts-disappear-into-legal complaint is common in organizations where CLM hasn't been implemented with stakeholder experience in mind. Status dashboards showing what's in review, what's awaiting counterparty response and what's coming up for renewal translate legal work-in-progress into a language the business understands. When business teams can check status themselves, it reduces the interruptions that pull lawyers away from substantive work.
A properly configured CLM should function as a data source for legal leadership, not just a workflow tool. Intake volume by contract type, time-to-first-review, total cycle time, renewal pipeline and backlog by matter owner. These are questions a General Counsel should be able to answer on demand. In most organizations, they can't, because the data is distributed across email, shared drives and individuals' memories.
When CLM captures structured data consistently from intake through to renewal, it creates the foundation for continuous improvement: adjusting workflows, reallocating resources and making the case to the business that legal is a measurable, accountable function.
Legal teams have been slow to adopt CLM for a practical reason: moving a contract estate built up over years into a standalone platform is disruptive and often incomplete.
Co-Flo CLM addresses this by building Contract Lifecycle Management directly on iManage. Contracts, matters, approvals and obligation tracking all sit within the document environment legal teams already use. No migration. No parallel systems. The contracts stay where they are, and the CLM layer adds the structure around them.
That's the difference between a CLM that asks legal to change how it works and one designed around how legal already works.
If you want to see how Co-Flo CLM works in practice for in-house legal teams, the Co-Flo CLM solution overview is a good starting point, or download the CLM for Legal datasheet for a detailed breakdown of capabilities.
¹ World Commerce & Contracting, 2025. Contract Management Whitepaper.