A survey by ContractPodAi, the AI-powered contract lifecycle management platform, has found that 62% of companies are still using Excel, SharePoint or email to manage their business’s contract data.

ContractPodAi gathered responses from 50 large corporate legal departments, that each manage more than 10,000 active contracts, and asked them about how they dealt with this complex mass of legal data that enabled their businesses to keep operating, and which enabled General Counsel (GC) to know their risks and obligations.

As you can see, one of the key findings from this representative sample suggests that many GCs are using a rather ad hoc approach to contract data. This may well leave important data lost from human view and/or disconnected from other aspects of contract management the inhouse function may be using.

And as to leaving contract data spread across your and your colleagues’ email……that’s a recipe for the loss of oodles of important information.

The report, Down the Road with AI Based Contract Management and Corporate Legal Hazards also found some more positive insights:

74% want metrics and analytics to better evaluate contract portfolio performance,

and 64% want ‘ready to use’ contract management tools that don’t require extensive preparation.

The second point is an interesting one. After all, it’s all very well a company owning some fancy new doc management/CLM system, but all that info has to get in there in a ‘clean’ digital format and then be made sense of – and that is not usually a simple ‘push button’ project.

Perhaps this is the reason why so many GCs, of what appear to be large companies, have not picked up the ball on this one? I.e. they’re too busy to get started and some solutions have a high barrier to meaningful use.

Below is a snapshot of some of the other findings: