From an outgrown CLM to a contracting system built for the wider business

When Dominika Partelova joined Edgewell Personal Care as Group Data Protection Officer and Legal Director, the business had been using a contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform for almost three years. It was chosen when the legal team was smaller and contract volumes were lower, and for that stage the CLM did what it needed to do. As the company grew, the demands on that CLM did too.

The clearest constraints were in the backend. Dominika needed to introduce more templates, more workflows and localized versions of contracts for the different languages and legislation Edgewell operates within, but the platform wasn’t built for that level of complexity: “Once you put more than three or four templates into the same workflow, the workflow would break. So if I wanted a template with seven different NDAs, it was impossible to achieve.”

Teams outside legal felt the constraints too. Stakeholders had to log into a separate platform and complete lengthy questionnaires, so many carried on managing contracts by email. Requests and the repository sat in the same place, there was no expired-contract status and limited metadata options capped what the team could report on. And as Data Protection Officer, Dominika needed tighter control over who could see what.

When it came to replacing their CLM, Dominika wanted a selection process as rigorous as the decision deserved. Dominika’s legal operations team built a three-phase process and ran it across two rounds of tender, assessing more than 25 vendors sourced from CLOC (Corporate Legal Operations Consortium) and ACC (Association of Corporate Counsel) legal operations lists. Phase one was a deliberately fast 30-minute demo against hard minimum requirements, phase two consisted of longer sessions with legal users, and phase three included just two vendors, one being Summize, and a proof of concept (POC) process.

What separated Summize at the POC stage was how much Dominika could do herself and the transparency Summize provided her. She built her own workflow and templates, she understood the software’s limitations and roadmap timings, and was already sold on several of the features which were switched during the POC itself – such as multi-language support, including Chinese and Japanese, and reporting capabilities.

But the deciding factor was where the product met Dominika and her team: “It was really the Word and Outlook integrations. Nobody else showed us anything as powerful as being in my inbox and communicating with legal from there.”

Summize gave Edgewell the opportunity to build its contracting processes around how different teams actually work, rather than around the tool.

The Outlook integration was central: stakeholders raise requests, receive updates and upload new versions without leaving their inboxes. The Word integration gave the legal team and more experienced procurement users a familiar environment for redlining and version control. Teams who touch contracts occasionally get the simplest possible route; teams who negotiate daily get the full experience.

Because the POC had been hands-on, implementation started with momentum. Edgewell’s first workflow – an NDA process with seven template variations across multiple languages – was ready to go live when the POC ended, which was a meaningful change due to how much difficulty complex templates had caused previously.

Migration ran alongside the build of the first workflows. The previous platform couldn't export in bulk, so Dominika moved more than 2,000 existing contracts across in stages, tidying up naming and dates along the way, and Summize's implementation team uploaded them into the new system with their metadata intact.

Implementation was also the moment to rethink what gets captured at intake. Working with procurement and other stakeholders, Dominika defined custom metadata fields by contract type and workflow, so the information needed for future reporting is collected as part of the request rather than reconstructed afterwards.

Security was also designed in from the first onboarding session rather than later on. The team mapped the folder structure upfront: open access for NDAs, separate areas for Procurement and Sales, legal-only folders and the ability to open a single folder to a named group for a confidential project. Because controls sit at workflow level as well as folder level, access can follow the contract type as closely as it follows the team.

Beyond legal, procurement, sales, finance and insurance teams now use Summize, each capturing the contract data relevant to them. Adoption has been supported with champion users testing and improving workflows before go-live, training sessions run for less frequent users and a monthly “Summize tips” newsletter to keep the entire business up to date and engaged.

The success of moving to Summize’s CLM software is clearly shown in both the speed and scale of contracting.

In the first three months after launch, Edgewell processed more than 400 requests through Summize – a volume equivalent to the number of contracts it had previously signed in an entire year.

Straightforward NDAs can now be completed in around 10 minutes. Users can upload new versions directly from Outlook, while the Word integration and system record provide full version history and an audit trail.  

The improved experience has also changed how much support users need. Rather than relying on Legal or returning to email, stakeholders can increasingly manage their own contract activity after using the system a few times.

Reporting has moved in the same direction. Summize’s analytics dashboard now gives stakeholders access to information that previously had to be extracted and manipulated manually, including who made requests, how they were handled and how long they took to reach signature.  

The next phase for Edgewell is to build on that foundation with Summize’s AI layer – Summize Intelligence Agents (SIA). Dominika is currently building out the legal playbooks before combining them with operational positions from procurement and sales. The aim is to give business teams clearer guidance on what they can accept themselves, allowing them to handle appropriate first-pass reviews while Legal focuses on higher-risk work.