When it comes to protecting your company’s interests, contract optimization is key. But what does it mean to optimize your contracts? And how should you go about it?
This guide shows GCs, legal‑ops leaders, and business teams how to optimize every stage of a contract – with real‑world examples and practical steps you can start using today.
What is contract optimization?
Contract optimization is the process of improving your contract management process to reduce contract risk and increase contract value.
In other words, contract optimization makes your contracts as effective and frictionless as possible. This enables you to gain more value from your contracts, either by maximizing the opportunities they present or by reducing the risks that they carry.
There are two main ways to optimize your contracts:
Improve the content within your contracts: Simplify language, strip out low-value negotiables, and tighten key contractual terms.
Improve your contract management processes: Use self-serve contract templates, automated approvals, and one browser-native workspace. This allows you to create and manage contracts from a single source of truth.
Throughout this guide, we’ll share expert insights, customer use cases, and practical examples to help you refine and sustain more efficient contract terms and workflows.
How to optimize your contracts (plus examples)
Optimizing your contracts usually requires choosing the best contract terms and negotiating terms that favor your business. However, it also involves removing bottlenecks that make the contract management process more expensive, or less efficient.
Here are a few different ways you can do this.
1. Engage stakeholders to agree optimal terms
One of the best ways to optimize contracts is to get other contract stakeholders involved in the drafting process.
If you’re lucky enough to be drafting a contract on your own paper (rather than using a third-party contract), then it’s a good idea to consult with other teams to find out what they want from the contract.
This means discussing budget restraints with finance, for example. It could also mean consulting with legal about which terms are required to reduce contractual risk. Whoever it is, if someone has certain interests in the contract, you should take the time to understand these interests and how you can protect them in the contract authoring process.
How technology can help
If you use a contract management solution, you can record key clauses in a shared playbook, creating automated templates for future contracts. Approved language lives in smartfields, while conditional logic prompts users when a clause drifts off course. Everyone works from one source of truth, which means that redlines drop and deals move faster.
However, it's worth regularly evaluating if the language you use is still up to date: "Some lawyers suffer from recycling fatigue when it comes to contract language; contracts end up phrased in a certain way because that’s how they’ve always been phrased", explains Michael Haynes, GC at Juro.
Good contract hygiene – regularly reviewing your boilerplates and templates – will ensure the language you use is always appropriate, up to date, and straight to the point.
When you optimize and update a template in Juro, it updates centrally—ensuring all future contracts use consistent, aligned terms you can trust. To see Juro's automated contract templates in action, hit the button below for a personalized demo. Otherwise, read on.
The contract negotiation phase presents another wonderful opportunity for contract optimization. At this stage of the contract lifecycle, legal and business teams can work together to make the contract terms more favorable.
But preparation isn’t just about your positions – it’s also about mindset. As contract negotiation expert Laura Frederick explained when discussing how scaleups can negotiate with larger corporations, "Having a different mindset for these negotiations is key; this isn’t about convincing them - they’ve heard every argument you’re going to make."
Rather, legal teams should use emotional intelligence and try to get them to understand your perspective.
How technology can help
Beyond preparation and mindset, another way to streamline contract negotiations is to ensure the process is efficient and free from friction. This is where a contract management system can help.
Not only does it simplify the redlining process, but it also makes it far easier to track which changes have been made in a contract, and to discuss these changes with counterparties in real-time.
This significantly helps speed up the negotiation and approvals processes. Curve, a Juro customer, has reduced the time it spends negotiating terms by 75 per cent thanks to the platform's in-browser commenting features.
Coviance has achieved a similar result by locking agreement fields:
“With Juro, we can lock contracts when we send them for signing and avoid inviting redlines on every single deal. Controlling this has allowed us to expedite contracts and reduce unnecessary back-and-forth over terms.” - Christian Reynolds, Director of Compliance, Risk & Contracts at Coviance
3. Learn from your existing contracts
One of the most neglected opportunities for contract optimization is learning from the contracts you've already executed. Every signed agreement holds valuable insights — both about what worked well and what didn’t.
And yet, every day we hear from legal leaders who are unaware of where contracts are stored and what data is captured within them.
By reviewing executed contracts, you can spot patterns in negotiations, assess how clauses performed in practice, and make informed decisions when drafting future contracts.
For example, you may discover that a particular clause is always redlined by counterparties, suggesting that it could be simplified or pre-negotiated in future templates. Perhaps you revisit it only to find you that particular clause didn’t matter to you at all.
When our General Counsel, Michael Haynes, optimized our MSA template, he found that the sales team always ended up accepting the same fallback position when negotiating MSAs, so it made sense to revise it and make that fallback the default position instead. The result? Negotiations with legal involvement were reduced by more than 50 per cent.
This form of retrospective analysis turns your contract repository into a learning engine for continuous improvement.
By tagging key clauses with smartfields and storing contracts in a structured format, teams can run reports across thousands of agreements to spot trends. For example, you could filter to see how often a specific indemnity clause was accepted as-is, or how long deals with a certain governing law took to close.
Contract analytics dashboards within tools also highlight common friction points in negotiation, including where bottlenecks most often occur during the contract lifecycle.
With this data in hand, legal and commercial teams can work together to proactively adjust templates and guidance, ensuring contracts become increasingly efficient over time.
“We really value the data Juro provides, and we find it extremely helpful for forecasting contract workload throughout the year, particularly in the run up to our biggest events.” - Faisal Al-Alamy, General Counsel at MDLBEAST.
4. Automate routine contracts
Not every contract needs the same level of legal scrutiny. For high-volume, low-risk agreements like NDAs, order forms, or renewals, automation can drastically improve efficiency without compromising compliance.
Self-serve contract automation empowers commercial teams (like sales or HR) to create contracts themselves using pre-approved templates, reducing legal bottlenecks. This not only frees up the legal team’s time for more strategic work but also accelerates deal cycles when it matters most.
How technology can help
Contract management platforms like Juro allow users to generate contracts by filling out a simple questionnaire, auto-populating templates with the correct information and clauses.
With smartfields, conditional logic, and role-based permissions, legal maintains control while business users gain speed and autonomy.
According to Juro’s customer stories, automating contracts can reduce time-to-sign by over 70 per cent, helping businesses close deals and onboard partners faster.
“Nobody wants the legal or operations team to be a bottleneck to new business and growth. With Juro, there’s no reason for us to be. The team can go from conversation to contract in a couple of minutes. Previously it took days.” - Jessica Zwaan, COO at Talentful
Benefits of contract optimization
As we have just explained, there are plenty of ways to optimize your contracts. But what are the benefits of investing the time in doing so?
Faster time-to-sign
Trimming negotiable clauses and automating approvals shortens the path from draft to signature. For example, recruitment firm Talentful cut time-to-sign by 70 per cent after rolling out a lean template and letting sales self-serve agreements in one workspace.
When legal is no longer a bottleneck, customers get contracts sooner and revenue lands quicker. Modern CLM technology like Juro route low-risk edits straight to e-signature, so deals don't stall just before the final step.
Reduce contract risk
Contract optimization isn't just about speed – it's about managing risk, too. The more terms you negotiate, the more contractual risk you invite. According to Michael Haynes, Juro's GC, it's important to lock fallback positions early and give business teams clear guidance on what they can and can't agree to.
Optimizing your negotiation workflows helps avoid accidental exposure to financial or regulatory risks, while smart approval routing ensures only material changes reach legal.
Cut unnecessary costs
Manual contract processes drain time and money. This is where contract optimization can make a real impact. Streamlining contract workflows ensures that low-value admin work – like chasing approvals, reformatting documents, or tracking versions – happens automatically.
Dynamic templates, automated approval workflows, and smart reminders all help to cut hidden costs and free teams to focus on higher-value work.
“Juro’s definitely given us a return on investment; it enables sales to sell, and my team to focus on important work, instead of low-level contract admin.” - Harj Gill, Group GC, LiiV
By reducing routine tasks through automation and self-serve templates, businesses can redeploy legal, sales, and finance resources where they matter most.
Preserve your commercial relationships
Contract friction can significantly strain key business relationships. By optimizing your contracts, you will ensure that negotiations feel fair, efficient, and transparent from the start. Clear language demonstrates that you are being upfront about your intentions.
Fast turnarounds preserve momentum during the negotiation process and show you genuinely want to come to an agreement. In turn, this builds long-term trust and creates a smooth experience for all parties.
In short: optimized contracts help businesses protect their reputation, speed up deal cycles, and strengthen the partnerships they rely on to grow. It's a win on all fronts!
Optimize contracts with Juro
Juro helps legal and business teams optimize every stage of the contract lifecycle — without juggling multiple tools or manual processes.
From drafting to renewal, Juro streamlines workflows, reduces risk, and accelerates deal cycles in one browser-based workspace. Collaborate in real time with in-contract redlining, commenting, and version tracking — no Word docs or email chains.
Ready to optimize your contracts and unlock more value? Fill in the form below to see how Juro can help.
Sofia Tyson is the Senior Content Manager at Juro, where she has spent years as a legal content strategist and writer, specializing in legal tech and contract management.
Sofia has a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) from the University of Leeds School of Law where she studied the intersection of law and technology in detail and received the Hughes Discretionary Award for outstanding performance. Following her degree, Sofia's legal research on GDPR consent requirements was published in established law journals and hosted on HeinOnline, and she has spent the last five years researching and writing about contract processes and technology.
Before joining Juro, Sofia gained hands-on experience through short work placements at leading international law firms, including Allen & Overy. She also completed the Sutton Trust’s Pathways to Law and Pathways to Law Plus programs over the course of five years, building a deep understanding of the legal landscape and completing pro-bono legal volunteering.
Sofia is passionate about making the legal profession more accessible, and she has appeared in several publications discussing alternative legal careers.
When it comes to protecting your company’s interests, contract optimization is key. But what does it mean to optimize your contracts? And how should you go about it?
This guide shows GCs, legal‑ops leaders, and business teams how to optimize every stage of a contract – with real‑world examples and practical steps you can start using today.
What is contract optimization?
Contract optimization is the process of improving your contract management process to reduce contract risk and increase contract value.
In other words, contract optimization makes your contracts as effective and frictionless as possible. This enables you to gain more value from your contracts, either by maximizing the opportunities they present or by reducing the risks that they carry.
There are two main ways to optimize your contracts:
Improve the content within your contracts: Simplify language, strip out low-value negotiables, and tighten key contractual terms.
Improve your contract management processes: Use self-serve contract templates, automated approvals, and one browser-native workspace. This allows you to create and manage contracts from a single source of truth.
Throughout this guide, we’ll share expert insights, customer use cases, and practical examples to help you refine and sustain more efficient contract terms and workflows.
How to optimize your contracts (plus examples)
Optimizing your contracts usually requires choosing the best contract terms and negotiating terms that favor your business. However, it also involves removing bottlenecks that make the contract management process more expensive, or less efficient.
Here are a few different ways you can do this.
1. Engage stakeholders to agree optimal terms
One of the best ways to optimize contracts is to get other contract stakeholders involved in the drafting process.
If you’re lucky enough to be drafting a contract on your own paper (rather than using a third-party contract), then it’s a good idea to consult with other teams to find out what they want from the contract.
This means discussing budget restraints with finance, for example. It could also mean consulting with legal about which terms are required to reduce contractual risk. Whoever it is, if someone has certain interests in the contract, you should take the time to understand these interests and how you can protect them in the contract authoring process.
How technology can help
If you use a contract management solution, you can record key clauses in a shared playbook, creating automated templates for future contracts. Approved language lives in smartfields, while conditional logic prompts users when a clause drifts off course. Everyone works from one source of truth, which means that redlines drop and deals move faster.
However, it's worth regularly evaluating if the language you use is still up to date: "Some lawyers suffer from recycling fatigue when it comes to contract language; contracts end up phrased in a certain way because that’s how they’ve always been phrased", explains Michael Haynes, GC at Juro.
Good contract hygiene – regularly reviewing your boilerplates and templates – will ensure the language you use is always appropriate, up to date, and straight to the point.
When you optimize and update a template in Juro, it updates centrally—ensuring all future contracts use consistent, aligned terms you can trust. To see Juro's automated contract templates in action, hit the button below for a personalized demo. Otherwise, read on.
2. Streamline negotiation and approvals
The contract negotiation phase presents another wonderful opportunity for contract optimization. At this stage of the contract lifecycle, legal and business teams can work together to make the contract terms more favorable.
But preparation isn’t just about your positions – it’s also about mindset. As contract negotiation expert Laura Frederick explained when discussing how scaleups can negotiate with larger corporations, "Having a different mindset for these negotiations is key; this isn’t about convincing them - they’ve heard every argument you’re going to make."
Rather, legal teams should use emotional intelligence and try to get them to understand your perspective.
How technology can help
Beyond preparation and mindset, another way to streamline contract negotiations is to ensure the process is efficient and free from friction. This is where a contract management system can help.
Not only does it simplify the redlining process, but it also makes it far easier to track which changes have been made in a contract, and to discuss these changes with counterparties in real-time.
This significantly helps speed up the negotiation and approvals processes. Curve, a Juro customer, has reduced the time it spends negotiating terms by 75 per cent thanks to the platform's in-browser commenting features.
Coviance has achieved a similar result by locking agreement fields:
“With Juro, we can lock contracts when we send them for signing and avoid inviting redlines on every single deal. Controlling this has allowed us to expedite contracts and reduce unnecessary back-and-forth over terms.” - Christian Reynolds, Director of Compliance, Risk & Contracts at Coviance
3. Learn from your existing contracts
One of the most neglected opportunities for contract optimization is learning from the contracts you've already executed. Every signed agreement holds valuable insights — both about what worked well and what didn’t.
And yet, every day we hear from legal leaders who are unaware of where contracts are stored and what data is captured within them.
By reviewing executed contracts, you can spot patterns in negotiations, assess how clauses performed in practice, and make informed decisions when drafting future contracts.
For example, you may discover that a particular clause is always redlined by counterparties, suggesting that it could be simplified or pre-negotiated in future templates. Perhaps you revisit it only to find you that particular clause didn’t matter to you at all.
When our General Counsel, Michael Haynes, optimized our MSA template, he found that the sales team always ended up accepting the same fallback position when negotiating MSAs, so it made sense to revise it and make that fallback the default position instead. The result? Negotiations with legal involvement were reduced by more than 50 per cent.
This form of retrospective analysis turns your contract repository into a learning engine for continuous improvement.
By tagging key clauses with smartfields and storing contracts in a structured format, teams can run reports across thousands of agreements to spot trends. For example, you could filter to see how often a specific indemnity clause was accepted as-is, or how long deals with a certain governing law took to close.
Contract analytics dashboards within tools also highlight common friction points in negotiation, including where bottlenecks most often occur during the contract lifecycle.
With this data in hand, legal and commercial teams can work together to proactively adjust templates and guidance, ensuring contracts become increasingly efficient over time.
“We really value the data Juro provides, and we find it extremely helpful for forecasting contract workload throughout the year, particularly in the run up to our biggest events.” - Faisal Al-Alamy, General Counsel at MDLBEAST.
4. Automate routine contracts
Not every contract needs the same level of legal scrutiny. For high-volume, low-risk agreements like NDAs, order forms, or renewals, automation can drastically improve efficiency without compromising compliance.
Self-serve contract automation empowers commercial teams (like sales or HR) to create contracts themselves using pre-approved templates, reducing legal bottlenecks. This not only frees up the legal team’s time for more strategic work but also accelerates deal cycles when it matters most.
How technology can help
Contract management platforms like Juro allow users to generate contracts by filling out a simple questionnaire, auto-populating templates with the correct information and clauses.
With smartfields, conditional logic, and role-based permissions, legal maintains control while business users gain speed and autonomy.
According to Juro’s customer stories, automating contracts can reduce time-to-sign by over 70 per cent, helping businesses close deals and onboard partners faster.
“Nobody wants the legal or operations team to be a bottleneck to new business and growth. With Juro, there’s no reason for us to be. The team can go from conversation to contract in a couple of minutes. Previously it took days.” - Jessica Zwaan, COO at Talentful
Benefits of contract optimization
As we have just explained, there are plenty of ways to optimize your contracts. But what are the benefits of investing the time in doing so?
Faster time-to-sign
Trimming negotiable clauses and automating approvals shortens the path from draft to signature. For example, recruitment firm Talentful cut time-to-sign by 70 per cent after rolling out a lean template and letting sales self-serve agreements in one workspace.
When legal is no longer a bottleneck, customers get contracts sooner and revenue lands quicker. Modern CLM technology like Juro route low-risk edits straight to e-signature, so deals don't stall just before the final step.
Reduce contract risk
Contract optimization isn't just about speed – it's about managing risk, too. The more terms you negotiate, the more contractual risk you invite. According to Michael Haynes, Juro's GC, it's important to lock fallback positions early and give business teams clear guidance on what they can and can't agree to.
Optimizing your negotiation workflows helps avoid accidental exposure to financial or regulatory risks, while smart approval routing ensures only material changes reach legal.
Cut unnecessary costs
Manual contract processes drain time and money. This is where contract optimization can make a real impact. Streamlining contract workflows ensures that low-value admin work – like chasing approvals, reformatting documents, or tracking versions – happens automatically.
Dynamic templates, automated approval workflows, and smart reminders all help to cut hidden costs and free teams to focus on higher-value work.
“Juro’s definitely given us a return on investment; it enables sales to sell, and my team to focus on important work, instead of low-level contract admin.” - Harj Gill, Group GC, LiiV
By reducing routine tasks through automation and self-serve templates, businesses can redeploy legal, sales, and finance resources where they matter most.
Preserve your commercial relationships
Contract friction can significantly strain key business relationships. By optimizing your contracts, you will ensure that negotiations feel fair, efficient, and transparent from the start. Clear language demonstrates that you are being upfront about your intentions.
Fast turnarounds preserve momentum during the negotiation process and show you genuinely want to come to an agreement. In turn, this builds long-term trust and creates a smooth experience for all parties.
In short: optimized contracts help businesses protect their reputation, speed up deal cycles, and strengthen the partnerships they rely on to grow. It's a win on all fronts!
Optimize contracts with Juro
Juro helps legal and business teams optimize every stage of the contract lifecycle — without juggling multiple tools or manual processes.
From drafting to renewal, Juro streamlines workflows, reduces risk, and accelerates deal cycles in one browser-based workspace. Collaborate in real time with in-contract redlining, commenting, and version tracking — no Word docs or email chains.
Ready to optimize your contracts and unlock more value? Fill in the form below to see how Juro can help.
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