Contract management software: a buyer's guide for 2026 (test)

What is contract management software?

Contract management software is a tool designed to automate and streamline the contract management process for businesses.

Contract management tools make it easier for legal and business teams to create, negotiate, sign, renew and report on business contracts by automating the manual work traditionally involved in a contract workflow.

Rather than switching between multiple different tools to manage contracts, contract management software enables teams to manage contracts from end to end - all in one platform. This is because all of the features they need are centralized in one workspace.

How can contract management tools solve these problems?

Contract management software offers a solution to these problems by automating routine admin and streamlining contract workflows. By adopting a tool like Juro, users benefit in the following ways:

• Agree contracts up to 10x faster, meaning fewer hours of legal's time are spent on contract admin
• Set automated approval and signing workflows, ensuring that the right stakeholders are brought into the process at the right time
• Ditch a fragmented workflow that involves lots of different tools, working from an end-to-end solution instead.

Most importantly, a contract management solution enables legal to collaborate better with the wider business. Our State of In-house report 2024 found that lawyers are 1.5x more likely to feel friction with sales when they don't have a CLM in place.

In other words, contract management tools enable legal teams to get out of the way of closing and enable other teams in the business to safely progress contracts.

Despite this, 51 per cent of respondents are yet to implement a contract management system.

Who uses contract management software?

Contract management software is used by businesses that need to scale their contract workflow without increasing headcount.

This means that fast-growing businesses with increasing contract volumes gain the most value from implementing contract management software.

1. Legal teams

Legal typically 'own' the contract process at a company. In-house legal teams use contract management software to manage their contract templates and set up rules that enable commercial teams to self-serve on contract creation.

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This reduction in legal touchpoints enabled Funnel to cut contract review volumes by almost 90 per cent, freeing the legal team to focus on strategic work instead of routine admin.

2. Sales teams

Sales hate anything that gets in the way of closing deals, so they'll often use a contract management solution to self-serve on contracts rather than waiting for legal to create them.

Most contract tools also integrates with major CRM systems. This makes it simple for sales teams to manage contracts in Salesforce, along with other tools they know and love.

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