Are we mourning CLM?

By Tom Dunlop, CEO and Founder of Summize.
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Over the past few weeks, discussions have emerged declaring the death of CLM, and so naturally I would want to weigh in on the debate.

Spoiler alert – CLM is alive and well, it’s just evolving.
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The rise of AI

It’s not just Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) that has entered this type of “it’s dead” conversation recently… I’ve heard how SaaS is being replaced by AI agents, SEO replaced by large language models. But for me this isn’t “out with the old and in the with the new”. CLM has been quietly deploying AI for over a decade and was one of the first categories to mass adopt AI principles...the agentic AI model is just the next generation of SaaS.

To me, what’s dying is the bloated, one-size-fits-none model of the CLM platform that promised transformation and delivered shelfware.

It’s the complexity, the siloed systems and the top-down platform rollouts that no one actually wants to use. Afterall, CLM isn’t just about managing documents. It’s about activating them; making them accessible and useful to the whole business.

So it’s time for a new era of CLM; one based on the cumulative experience the industry has been building in AI for years, powered by agentic models and most importantly, used and adopted by the business, not just by legal.
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If contracts are the System of Record, CLM should be the System of Engagement

Contracts are the ultimate system of record. They define what the business owes, owns, promises, and protects. But here’s the catch: a record is only as valuable as your ability to use it. And for most companies, these records are invisible - buried in PDFs, inboxes, and SharePoint folders.

The next generation of CLM doesn’t just store contracts. It activates them. It brings their data into the tools your team already uses. It turns redlines into insight. It turns requests into trackable tasks and workflows. It makes contracts searchable and actionable - without logging into yet another standalone platform.

It’s only CLM that can join up the dots and offer the full end-to-end management of a contract via one singular experience.
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CLM adoption is King

Over the last year, the market has been flooded with point tools to solve some of the common contract pains – an AI tool to review contracts, another to store them, another to extract data. Sure, they can deliver quick wins for one-off interactions, and standalone AI tools solve one slice of the problem. But contract chaos is a systems issue - and that takes structure and scale, not just speed.

We know that for CLM to be truly successful and adopted across the whole business, it has to be embedded within the tools and workflows teams already rely on. While Summize is a full end-to-end CLM, we have always prioritized engagement and usage from the whole business by living within the tools you already know and love, such as Outlook, HubSpot, Teams, Word, Slack.

The right CLM offers that fully integrated, embedded approach for all areas of the business to connect the dots across all processes and systems, from a contract’s generation, right up until its expiration or renewal.
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Legal is upping their game

Finally, legal teams and leaders are upping their game.

The Summize Legal Disruptors report and interview findings show how in-house legal teams are actively rethinking their traditional roles. Lawyers don’t want to be spending their time manually reviewing low value contracts or being seen as a bottleneck in a deal cycle - this isn’t what we went to law school for. We want to be focusing on real lawyering, doing the strategic thinking, applying our expertise, and influencing business decisions with real value.

But that only happens when you have the right tools at your disposal to free-up your time effectively, while providing you with the useful data insights to make key business decisions. Point tools or standalone AI just won’t cut it alone!
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CLM isn’t dead. It’s finally becoming useful.

The current market figures tell us all we need to know. In 2024, the CLM market was around $1.84 billion. It is predicted that this will rise to $2.17 billion in 2025 alone, and to $4.16 billion over the next 10 years. This doesn’t sound like the death of CLM to me.

Let’s stop selling overnight transformation and start delivering contract clarity. Let’s meet teams where they are, solve what’s urgent, reduce the overwhelm of intake, speed up contract review and make stored contracts useful.

Because the work isn’t done when a contract is signed. That’s when the real risk begins. And that’s exactly why CLM matters more than ever.