Kimberly Trull: how I built a business case for CLM

Written by Kimberly Trull, General Counsel at Matillion and Chair of Summize’s Power Counsel.

When I joined cloud-native data integration platform Matillion in 2023, we already had a contract lifecycle management (CLM) system in place. But it wasn’t working the way I needed it to. It had become more like a digital filing cabinet. We didn’t always know what was in there, things weren’t where they should be and it wasn’t connected to the tools the business uses, especially Salesforce.

So I then had to go back to the drawing board – I knew I needed to switch CLMs and that would require a strong business case. So whether you’re looking for your first CLM or looking to switch, here’s my advice on convincing the rest of the business of your need.

It’s really easy to get caught up in feature lists and demos, but I found the best place to start was with where the biggest problems were.

1. Start with the problem you’re trying to solve

A strong business case for CLM starts with the business problem, puts a number on the time lost to contract admin and shows what that time could be used for instead.

Don’t start with features or a particular product. Start with where your contract process is creating friction. For us at Matillion, that meant asking:

• Could sales self-serve without needing legal?
• Could people find agreements themselves?
• Could my team easily see what someone else had been working on?
• Could we manage contracts without creating more admin work for the team?

The answer to all of those was no. We also needed a system that worked with the tools we already used: Salesforce, Slack, Gmail and, for legal, Word. I didn’t want a tool that locked Word down so comments looked strange or redlines got harder. That’s more friction, not less.

AI readiness mattered too. This was 2023, before AI was standard in CLM, so I wanted a system that could support and scale at the pace we’re used to at Matillion.

Ultimately, those were all part of the bigger question: will this help us work faster and give the business a scalable way to manage contracts?

2. Look at where your legal team’s time is actually going

The hardest part of building a legal tech business case is that we rarely measure the work we’re trying to improve. We know we’re answering questions about contracts, people are searching for things and there’s back-and-forth with sales when a request isn’t clear.  

But I didn’t have a spreadsheet showing how many hours that added up to. What I did have was a clear sense of what was taking up my team’s time. People were asking us:

• Do we have an NDA with this customer?
• Where is this particular contract?
• Is this the latest version?
• Can we use this agreement?
• What type of contract do we need?
• How does this contract work?

Those questions sound small, but they add up. A sales rep at a customer site who needed to know whether we had an NDA would email us, wait, then chase on Slack. And finding the contract is often only the first step. Then you need to know if it’s still active, if it’s the right version or what the terms mean. “Does this exist?” and “How does this work?” sound like very different questions, but once you get through the back and forth, they take almost the same amount of time.

While it’s not easy to put solid numbers behind those questions, my biggest piece of advice is that you don’t need perfect data to get started. Spend an hour or two going through the emails, Slack messages and other requests coming into legal, pick out the repeat questions and estimate how long each one takes.

Then translates your findings into numbers your finance team will recognize. Finance wants to see a return on investment, and the simplest math is your salary broken down to an hourly rate, multiplied by the hours you spend on that admin. You’re not undervaluing legal’s work by doing this. You’re building a business case on speed and strategy.

So instead of saying, “We need a CLM,” you can say, “This is how much time we spend on these tasks today, and this is the legal work we should be doing instead.”

3. Don’t only measure the impact on legal

Contract management touches sales, procurement and finance too. If those teams spend time searching for contracts, chasing approvals or tracking renewals, that’s part of the cost.

One of the clearest examples for us has been auto-renewals. Instead of relying on manual tracking, we pull a report on what’s coming up and decide whether to give notice, renegotiate or look for an alternative.

That isn’t legal’s job in every organization. It might sit with procurement or with individual budget owners. Either way, nobody should have to remember whether they need to give 30 or 60 days’ notice, and taking that off their plate is how legal becomes a strategic partner to the business. The same data shows trends, too. If someone asks how our vendor payment terms have changed, I can pull it from our contracts instead of reading through every one.

4. Use the CLM evaluation to test the product and the vendor

Once we knew what we needed to fix, we spoke to a lot of CLM providers, narrowed the list to three and ran an intense proof of concept. My team built a detailed spreadsheet of questions that went beyond day one. We only contracted in English, for example, but we wanted to know a system could handle other languages.

We also looked beyond the product: how easy the vendor was to work with, how difficult their terms were and how quickly we’d see a return on investment. I wanted vendors to show me the hours we’d save, not just basic stats like contract turnaround time.

The evaluation is where you test whether a system will actually solve the problems you’ve identified.

5. Measure the ROI after implementation

We didn’t have baseline data when we built our business case. So when I was asked to take part in research by Nucleus Research, an independent firm that assesses the ROI of technology deployments, we went back and compared how we worked before and after implementing Summize’s CLM software.

We looked at things like how many requests legal received about finding or understanding contracts, how long customer paper took compared with our own and how much back and forth it took to get a contract request from sales.

Nucleus calculated a 4,062% return on investment over three years, with a payback period of 0.3 months, and with these results, we went on to win a 2025 Nucleus Research ROI Award. I know what you’re thinking – it sounds too good to be true. I asked Nucleus to show me the math, and when they walked me through the hours we’d been spending on all of the small admin and contract process tasks, it made sense.

Most of that work had never felt like a measurable cost. It was just part of the day-to-day.

The real business case is about what legal can do with the time

Start with the work you already know is taking up your legal team’s time, and then ask what happens if you remove some of it.

For me, the answer is that we get time back, and then we can spend that time on the work that actually requires our expertise. We can support the business more strategically, help deals move faster and make better use of the information sitting inside our contracts.  

It’s less about asking the business to invest in another piece of software, and more about showing what the business gains when legal spends less time managing contracts and more time using them.

Hear more from Kimberly on implementing legal tech by following her on LinkedIn, or read the Summize guide to building a business case for your next legal tech investment.