Rethinking Contract Tech: From End-to-End Dream to Real Value Now

At CLOC earlier this year, a recurring theme echoed through discussions with legal ops professionals, in-house lawyers, and tech buyers: the market is shifting from chasing end-to-end dreams to prioritising value now.

For a long time, the mental model around fixing contracting workflows revolved around end-to-end Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) platforms. These systems promised comprehensive control – generation, negotiation, approval, execution, storage, and analytics – all in one. In theory, it made sense. In practice? It’s proven to be a huge lift.

CLM isn’t dead, but it’s no longer the only answer

Let’s be clear: CLM systems aren’t going away, and they aren’t failures. But they were oversold. The promise of one platform to rule all contracting needs has met the reality of not being able to solve everything,  implementation fatigue, budget constraints, and change management nightmares. For many legal teams, the time to initial value for a full CLM solution is 12-24 months, if the rollout ever finishes at all.

Gartner has estimated that corporate legal teams will capture only 30% of the potential benefit of their CLM Investments within a few years due to a lack of sufficient regard for the real end-user needs. That’s not failure, it’s misalignment. 

Toolkits over platforms 

CLOC conversations revealed a new mindset: legal teams are embracing a “toolkit” approach. Rather than waiting on a monolithic CLM system to solve across the entire contract lifecycle, teams are assembling targeted solutions that address their immediate pain points, whether that’s clause generation, contract review, obligation management, data extraction, or repository management.

This isn’t just a matter of impatience. It’s about business necessity and reality. Legal teams can’t afford to sit on their hands while waiting for enterprise-wide implementations. They need tools that deliver ROI in days or weeks, not years.

As one legal ops leader put it to me, “We’ll take good enough now over the ideal two years from now.”

Modern tools are modular, and they talk to each other

This emerging toolkit approach is viable because of two major shifts:

1. Mature point solutions exist for nearly every part of the contract lifecycle. They’re focused on the problem they solve, they’re affordable, and easy to adopt.
2. Integration has improved. Tools now have APIs and direct integrations that plug into your existing systems, tools and workflows. 

As Patricja Corey, MBA put it in a recent post: “The real win isn’t chasing some end-to-end dream. It’s building a toolkit that actually works for your team. Tools that do their job well and integrate with each other.”

LegalTech needs to deliver, fast

The broader tech industry has been on this path for years. SaaS buyers increasingly demand fast time to value (TTV), a measurable return on investment, in days or weeks, not months or years.

Legal teams, historically underserved by tech, are now following suit. According to a recent CLOC survey, workload and bandwidth are top challenges facing in-house legal teams. There isn’t time to wait when adopting solutions that promise productivity gains. The pendulum has swung from ambition to pragmatism.

What this means for LegalTech providers

Vendors must rethink their go-to-market strategies. Selling dreams doesn’t cut it anymore. Buyers want clear answers to:

• What problem does this solve today?
• How fast can I get it working?
• How easily can it integrate with what I already have and use?
• What does success look like in 30/60/90 days?

If your tech doesn’t deliver clear value in that window, you’re asking legal teams to take on more risk than they can afford.

Solve real problems, not everything

Legal teams aren’t saying they don’t want a better contracting system. They’re saying they want to solve real, specific problems right now. They’re willing to buy multiple tools, configure lightweight workflows, and compromise on perfection. Because business moves fast, and legal needs to keep up. When it comes to in-house teams, perfect is the enemy of good.

CLOC 2025 made it clear: the age of all-in-one dreams is giving way to the era of “good enough, right now”. And honestly? That’s a smarter way forward when you need to accelerate business and get sh*t done.