Why Your Contract Process Is Rigged Against Speed

Every company signs contracts. But not every company manages contracts well.

As companies scale, contracting evolves in bursts: new templates appear, workflows get patched together in shared drives, review responsibilities shift with staffing changes. Eventually, the contracting function hits a ceiling.

Delays slow deals. Risk becomes harder to track. Renewals slip through the cracks.

This is when organizations start talking about “contract management maturity.”

But maturity isn’t a switch you flip. It’s a progression.

Lucy Bassli, founder of InnoLaw Group and former Assistant General Counsel of Contracting and Legal Operations at Microsoft, has spent years helping legal teams improve contracting one step at a time. Akshay Verma, who built world-class legal operations teams at Meta and Coinbase and now serves as COO at contract management platform SpotDraft, sees what maturity looks like when CLM is deeply embedded across business workflows and legal operations are operating at scale.

Together, they outline what it really takes to achieve both maturity and speed in contracting.

Maturity is a progression, not a purchase

Lucy: I can tell you with certainty that at the early stage, contract management is ad hoc. Documents live in shared drives. Legal reviews everything. At the intermediate stage, workflows, templates, and repositories start to emerge. At the advanced stage, contracting becomes a strategic business enabler, integrating with sales, procurement, and finance systems. Here’s what I’ve watched happen too many times: teams jump directly to technology because it feels like the fastest path to maturity. But without grounding in processes like roles, escalation paths, and decision-making authority, even the best CLM system merely adds to the inefficiency. With one team I worked with, it wasn’t until we created a simple approval matrix, literally a one-page table that defined who signs what, that the CLM actually started producing value. No team becomes advanced overnight. It’s a consistent progression.

Akshay: The first thing I had to understand when building legal ops at Meta and Coinbase was: how do you know if you’re actually making progress? One way to differentiate between fledgling contracting methods and mature contract management is to see if the legal team is measuring what matters. Are they tying those metrics to business outcomes? Cycle time, volume of contracts handled without legal review, and renewal management compliance are indicators of maturity. Mature contracting operations quantify how legal contributes to revenue, speed, and risk mitigation. When legal becomes measurable, it becomes strategic.

Small improvements compound into transformation

Lucy: I’ve seen legal teams feel the pressure to fix everything at once, especially when leadership becomes aware of the contracting inefficiencies. This is a trap. Start with where you are, not where you wish you were. Legal teams get overwhelmed and miss a simple truth: sustainable change comes from picking small, high-impact targets and improving those areas first. Standardizing a single contract type can save dozens of hours each month. Adding a clause library makes reviews more consistent. Introducing intake forms reduces chaos. These are baby steps, but each one compounds. Progress is often invisible at first and then unmistakable later.

Akshay: The question is never “Do we have a process?” It is “Does the business experience the process the same way every time?” Because here’s the thing: if the business needed a consistent experience across the board, you would need to make incremental improvements in the contract workflow. This means business would use templates for low-risk contracts. They would have easy access to metadata that’s buried in contracts. It’s these small operational shifts that open the door for the bigger, enterprise-level upgrades. You can’t skip the fundamentals and expect scale to work.

Integration is where maturity lives

Lucy: Let me be direct about something: contracting cannot mature in a silo. At advanced maturity, a CLM is not a legal tool. It’s a business system integrated with the CRM for sales cycle visibility, with procurement systems for vendor onboarding, and with finance systems for renewal forecasting and revenue timing. Sales, Procurement, Finance, and Operations must all understand the contracting framework, escalation rules, and risk principles for maturity to stick. Without this cross-functional alignment, you’re building a tool that only legal uses while the business works around it.

Akshay: At the enterprise stage, contracting maturity shows up in integrations. Repeatable workflows, business self-service where appropriate, and systematic data capture can only take you so far. Over the years, I’ve seen contract approval timelines being linked directly to quarterly revenue forecasts, meaning leaders saw the business impact of contracting speed in real time. Vendor reviews used to take weeks due to overlapping risk concerns. By creating a shared risk scoring model inside the CLM, low-risk vendors were auto-approved, medium-risk vendors went to Procurement, and high-risk escalations reached Legal. This method alone dropped cycle times by 40%. Now at SpotDraft, I see legal teams automate negotiated clause deviations, connect renewal data into ARR reporting, and enable business self-serve on partner agreements. That’s what scale looks like.
Speed comes from strategic focus

Lucy reminds us that contracting maturity is built through small, deliberate improvements, the kind that compound quietly until they reshape the entire contracting experience. Akshay’s experience shows that these incremental shifts are what ultimately unlock scale and, just as importantly, speed. But here’s what most teams miss: the goal isn’t to remove legal from the process. It’s to involve legal only where it matters. Legal should review fewer contracts, but more high-risk ones, while the business confidently self-serves within clear, well-designed guardrails. When legal focuses its time on high-risk, high-impact decisions and the business can move quickly on everything else, that’s when contracting begins to drive speed. The future belongs to legal teams who build for speed with intention.