The CLM backlash

CLM has become a dirty word.

If the loudest and most provocative voices on LinkedIn are right, whole categories of software are about to be obsolete.

The least loved, clunkiest and most legacy categories of all are first in the crosshairs when it comes to the wave of agentic, agile, disruptive companies coming to tear down the old world order.

It’s not hard to think of software categories that innovative businesses would happily do without. They have acronyms. They have Gartner Magic Quadrants. You need paid consultants just to implement them, or to transition from your old vendor.

ERP. CRM. CQC.

CLM.

A new exec arrives at your company. There are three key roles they want to hire; there’s a big reporting change they want to make; a new North Star metric; and they want to do an acronym implementation.

Cue some RFP and beauty parades with six expensive internal stakeholders (though the exec had really already picked the vendor before you started). Business case, ROI projection, internal presentation, statement of work, budget request, contract negotiation. Then implementation.

Half of CLM implementations fail

CLM implementation has a poor track record. In the G2 reports, based on reviews sourced each quarter, G2 ranks CLMs for adoption levels on a scale from 1 to 100.

Although we have never thought of ourselves as a CLM (more on that later), we are often lumped in the broad CLM category. Contract stuff, basically. We appear in those rankings as the best-adopted ‘CLM’ (there are a couple of Salesforce bolt-ons or task-agnostic automation platforms that rank there too, but honestly I’ve never heard of them). The G2 watermark prohibits me from reproducing the table here but our number out of 100 is 73.

But the mean adoption figure isn’t good. Most of the CLMs we compete with have numbers in the 50s or lower.

That means perhaps half of CLM implementations fail. And as we just saw, a lot of work goes into that implementation.

Laura Fredrick and I discussed the future of CLM and tools in this episode of the Brief Encounters podcast.

Against that backdrop, it’s easy to see why CLM is becoming a dirty word. CLM is … a lot of stuff. Set up your templates. Select your approvers. Define your workflows. Book some training. Book more training. Write an AI playbook. Write another AI playbook. Get all those integrations hooked up. Configure more AI features.

You know what’s a better offer? Try a point solution that requires no changes to how you work, costs nothing, and if the marketing is to be believed, just does magic contract stuff in Word. ChatGPT’s epochal verbal reasoning ability, applied to clauses. Let’s go.

Try a point solution that requires no changes to how you work, costs nothing, and if the marketing is to be believed, just does magic contract stuff in Word. ChatGPT’s epochal verbal reasoning ability, applied to clauses. Let’s go.

At Juro we don’t position as ‘CLM’ and never have. That’s where 150 customers have reviewed us on G2, but our offer is intelligent contracting. The key opinion we have is that the solution to inefficient legal work can’t be lawyers doing the same thing but faster. It’s about business teams self-serving on contract tasks of increasing complexity, with AI that’s controlled by lawyers.

The self-serve contracts from integrated systems; the agentic AI contract review & redlining; the data-rich intelligent repository. But more than that, it’s the service levels, the response times, the fast implementation and the commitment to product innovation. That’s more than a platform - it’s intelligent contracting.

Good for us, but does that do enough to distance us from being an acronym implementation? To answer that question we have to remember why CLM exists in the first place.

Are you ready to bet the company?

For the first few years of Juro, the competitor was almost never a CLM. It was Word, Docusign, email, Sharepoint and a spreadsheet. The problem with that setup is obvious: tool-switching, and having one source of truth.

The most basic first-wave CLMs were only repositories because … well, you need a repository. You need to be able to find all your contracts in one place, and what’s in them, for your next audit, M&A or exit event.

AI point solutions can do parts of the CLM stack dramatically better than, for example, just Word and Sharepoint. But is replacing five tools with five tools, but one of them’s AI, that much better?

Our bet is that it’s not. The upside of being able to leverage all your organisational contract data, plus all the power of AI that understands your preferred positions, plus all the integrations your business needs, plus flexible UI that makes it all seamless to your business colleagues? Well, that sounds even better.

Agents are making great strides in finding and acting on your data. But trusting them, alone, to find and use the right data correctly across a bunch of disparate systems - shared drives, local drives, emails, CRMs - still seems risky for something that can be as bet-the-company as critical contracts.

So why choose? Our bet is that with Juro you can have the agility and sheer power of AI agents, and the peace of mind that comes from an underlying system of record.

But … it’s all in the execution. In the end, customers don’t care what category you are in, they care about how you solve their problems. It’s incumbent on everyone building legal tech to show that value - or risk true obsolescence.