Contract management checklist: your ultimate guide to evaluating software

We all know how important contracts are to how a business operates. But when the volumes are growing, the turnaround times matter more than ever and legal is increasingly expected to provide visibility, consistency and commercial support across the organization, having the right software in place to juggle it all becomes not just a nice-to-have, but a must-have.

But how do you cut through vendor chaos and focus on what actually matters when evaluating contract software? Read on for the full contract management checklist.

What should contract software achieve for in-house legal?

Ultimately, contract software should deliver better outcomes for both legal and the wider business, not just more functionality. For in-house legal teams, that means reducing manual, administrative work, increasing visibility across the contracts and accelerating contract cycles without increasing risk.

The right software should also support closer collaboration between legal and commercial teams, by replacing informal processes with consistent workflows that can easily scale as the organization grows.  

Contract management checklist: what should you look for?

When you’re looking into the world of contract software, it’s easy to get lost in feature lists. A more practical way of assessing products is to follow the contract journey and ask “does this software genuinely make each stage easier, faster and safer for legal and the wider business?”

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Intake: bringing structure to contract requests

Contract intake is often where inefficiencies first start to appear. Without structure, legal teams spend time chasing missing information, manually prioritizing requests and managing expectations across the business.

At a minimum, contract creation and request software should introduce a consistent way for requests to enter legal, with enough flexibility to support different contract types and risk profiles. When evaluating intake capabilities, look for whether the platform enables you to:

• Standardize how work enters legal with configurable workflows tailored to different contract type or business function.

• Reduce manual triage by automatically assigning requests to the right lawyer or team.

• Apply the right oversight early through built-in approvals based on risk, value or deviation from standard terms – with AI helping to flag potential risk indicators where necessary.

• Avoid follow-up and rework by using AI to summarize requests and highlight missing or inconsistent information at submission.

• Maintain visibility and accountability with a clear audit trail from request to completion.

Contract drafting and review: supporting how lawyers actually work

Once a contract is in progress, the software should support established legal workflows rather than forcing change. Lawyers should be able to draft, review and negotiate contracts without leaving familiar tools or losing control over language.

Strong contract review software combines flexible templates with robust review functionality. Templates should be easy for legal to maintain, allow conditional or optional clauses and prevent unauthorized changes by other business users. When looking at drafting and review capabilities, think about whether the platform enables you to:

• Work in familiar tools by supporting redlining and collaboration directly in Microsoft Word.

• Maintain control and traceability with version control that clearly records changes, comments and approvals.

• Identify risk quickly, through draft comparison that highlights deviations from standard or previously approved terms.

• Apply legal standards consistently by surfacing playbook-aligned guidance during review, including suggested fallback language where appropriate.

• Reduce time spent on routine review tasks by using AI to highlight non-standard clauses, propose alternative wording or generate summaries for stakeholders, without obscuring how conclusions are reached.

Approvals: removing bottlenecks without losing oversight

Approvals are a common source of delay, especially when they rely on manual chasing or informal sign-off. Contract software should make approvals predictable and auditable by applying rules consistently. In practice, this means approvals should trigger automatically based on defined criteria, notify the right stakeholders at the right time, and record decisions without more effort from legal. The goal isn’t fewer approvals, but fewer unnecessary interruptions.

“Approvals work best when they’re applied proportionately. A low-risk NDA that follows approved language should be able to move quickly, while higher-value or non-standard agreements are automatically escalated to the right approver. That way, routine contracts don’t slow the business down, and legal still has oversight where it matters.”
‍Bailey Gifford, Product Marketing Manager, Summize

Repository and search: a reliable single source of truth

After signing, contracts often lose visibility. Documents end up spread across shared drives, inboxes or legacy systems, making it difficult to answer basic questions or manage ongoing risks. A core capability of any contract lifecycle platform is a centralized contract repository that allows legal and the business to find what they need quickly. When assessing repository and search capabilities, look for whether the platform allows you to:

• Find contracts quickly and confidently through intuitive search across contract text as well as structured metadata.

• Surface key dates and obligations without manual tagging, using AI to extract renewal dates and syncing them to your calendar, termination rights and other critical information.  

• Answer business questions more efficiently by supporting natural-language search that retrieves relevant contracts or data points.  

• Understand contract relationships over time by linking amendments, renewals and related agreements.  

This turns the repository into a working legal asset, not just a storage location. Find out more about what a contract repository could do for you here.

Obligations, reporting and analytics: reducing risk over time

Sometimes, the real value of contract software appears after signature. Without contract analytics and structured tracking, missed renewals and unmanaged obligations create unavoidable risk. In fact, according to WorldCC, contract leakage costs businesses up to 9% of their annual revenue.

Contract analysis software should provide visibility across your contract portfolio, enabling legal teams to track key dates, monitor workloads and report on trends. Reporting should be accessible without heavy configuration and flexible enough to support legal, finance and commercial stakeholders.

Analytics shifts legal from reactive contract management to proactive risk and performance oversight.

How do you choose the right vendor when everyone claims to do everything?

Once you reach the evaluation stage, many contract software platforms start to look similar. Vendors often claim to support every use case, but success rarely depends on the longest feature list. The real challenge is identifying the vendor qualities that will deliver real value for your organization. Sometimes, it’s worth looking at what hasn’t worked before – as one legal leader at Matillion put it:

“It’s not always a great experience with CLM vendors. We’ve used several, and they either feel too complicated or make the legal team manage every step of the process, which slows down company growth. We wanted something more collaborative, where sales could manage their contract process with legal oversight.”
‍Kimberley Trull, General Counsel, Matillion

When comparing vendors, focus on these points:

Map capabilities to real pain points

Prioritization becomes easier when each capability is tied to a concrete business problem. Rather than evaluating features in isolation, consider whether they address issues like missed renewals, limited visibility into obligations, or slow turnaround times. If a feature doesn’t clearly solve a known pain point, it’ll be difficult to justify its complexity or cost when securing stakeholder buy-in.

Look for design that works for non-legal users

A strong indicator of vendor quality is how intentionally the platform is designed for users outside of Legal. Well-designed tools use plain language, logical workflows, and clear prompts to guide business users without oversimplifying legal nuance.

This extends to where and how users interact with the system: platforms that integrate with existing tools like email, collaboration or CRM systems require less change management and are easier to adopt. For legal teams, this means fewer ongoing questions, support requests, and workarounds that bypass the system entirely.

“A lot of CLMs promise adoption success, but when it comes to launch it’s a huge struggle to get teams to move into a new platform. Since launching Summize, I see users hop in daily, self-serve and rarely run into issues. The interface is easy to figure out and we’ve had only positive feedback.”
‍Marie Widmer, Legal Ops Manager, Sigma Computing

With 50% of legal tech implementations failing (Gartner) partly due to change management difficulties across the wider business, looking at how adoption will work is key. The easier it is for users to engage with contracts in their existing workflows, the less legal will need to intervene to drive usage.

Consider how guidance and support are delivered

Finally, look at how the platform helps users understand what to do next. Solutions that rely on legal teams to constantly explain processes create long-term dependency.

Strong vendors prioritize partnership, accessible chatbots trained solely on your contracts and data, and guidance embedded directly into workflows, so non-lawyers know what they can do, when legal input is required and how progress is tracked.

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Choosing contract software is as much about focus as functionality. Grounding your evaluation in real workflows, adoption and long-term fit means you’ll be able to make more confident decisions about where to invest.