When I founded Concord nearly a decade ago, the contract management landscape was clear-cut and siloed: legal owned contracts, period. Today, that reality has been completely upended — and nowhere is the shift more visible than in AI SaaS contract management, where finance and ops teams are stepping into roles once exclusive to legal.
This radical transformation is no accident. It’s the inevitable result of AI democratizing access to contract intelligence across organizations, paired with the increasing importance of contracts in driving business outcomes, particularly in the SaaS industry, where contracts quite literally define your revenue stream.
The Great Legal Unbundling is Happening
Let me share something I heard recently from an operations leader at a fast-growing SaaS company: “I am in charge of everything CLM. And our legal counsel does more with the law itself.”
This statement would have been heresy five years ago. Now? It’s increasingly the norm, especially in small and mid-market SaaS companies, where 88% have placed contract management primarily under finance, operations, or procurement.
This unbundling of legal’s traditional domain is happening for a simple reason: contracts have evolved from static legal documents into dynamic business intelligence assets. And the teams that live or die by this intelligence—finance, sales, procurement, and operations—are no longer content to wait for legal’s blessing on every agreement.
AI: The Great Equalizer in Contract Management
What’s made this shift possible? In a word: automation.
The development of sophisticated AI has fundamentally altered who can participate in contract workflows. Tasks that once required specialized legal training—reviewing terms, flagging unusual clauses, ensuring compliance—are now largely automated. This has become the backbone of modern AI SaaS contract management, where automation empowers every function, not just legal. For more on how AI is transforming operational workflows across SaaS, explore these best practices for AI-driven process mapping.
Just last month, I spoke with Michael Bearman, Chief Legal & Safety Officer at Vecna Robotics, who told me: “I used to have to spend lots of time on this, but now I just hit ‘create document’ because the AI does a great job automatically extracting the data.” His team estimates this automation saves 10 hours weekly.
More tellingly, our data shows that 90% of NDAS and standard vendor agreements now sail through without a single edit. The days of legal teams meticulously reviewing every document are definitively over.
The Trifecta of AI SaaS Contract Management
Within SaaS organizations specifically, contract ownership is typically gravitating toward three centers of gravity:
- Finance Teams: Following the Money
Finance departments have the most obvious claim on contract management. As one CFO told me bluntly: “The source of truth is always the general ledger, at least from a CFO’s perspective, regardless of anything else.” This shift is why finance is increasingly at the center of AI SaaS contract management discussions, especially in recurring revenue models.
This practical view reflects finance’s growing impatience with disconnected contract processes. When your SaaS revenue depends on recurring subscriptions, the financial implications of mismanaged contracts become existential:
- Missed auto-renewal opt-out windows
- Inaccurate revenue recognition
- Disconnection between contracts and actual billing
- Inability to forecast revenue based on contract terms
These aren’t just administrative annoyances—they’re threats to financial stability and accurate forecasting. That’s why 63% of SaaS finance leaders we interviewed highlighted the need for contract benchmarking capabilities against industry standards as their top priority.
- Operations Teams: Optimizing the Process
For SaaS companies focused on operational efficiency, contracts represent critical workflow junctures. The operations leaders we’ve worked with are less concerned with legal perfection and more focused on:
- Reducing contract cycle times
- Standardizing approval processes
- Integrating contracts with other business systems
- Tracking performance against contractual SLAS
Christopher Tufts, an FP&A Manager at Iterable, explained to me why integration is so critical: “An integrated CLM is important so we can serve all our principal audiences from the same system.”
This systems-thinking approach is quintessentially operations-driven, aiming to eliminate the silos that plague contract processes in most organizations. This focus on structured execution reflects broader SaaS growth methodologies like EOS—see how EOS maximizes SaaS growth.
- Sales & RevOps: Accelerating the Deal Cycle
Perhaps most significantly in SaaS, sales and revenue operations teams are increasingly taking ownership of contract processes, for one simple reason: speed.
As one VP of Sales at a mid-market SaaS company told me: “When legal owned our contracts, our average deal cycle was 22 days. Since implementing AI-powered contract workflows run by RevOps, we’re down to 8 days. That’s the difference between making or missing quarterly targets.” This mirrors a key trend across SaaS: accelerating time to revenue is now a core priority for competitive edge.
In today’s competitive SaaS landscape, waiting three days for an NDA review or a week for MSA approval isn’t just inefficient—it’s existentially threatening. Companies rise and fall three times faster than they did a generation ago, and speed-to-close is a critical competitive advantage. For RevOps teams, AI SaaS contract management isn’t just about speed—it’s about enabling predictable, scalable deal execution.
$2 Trillion Worth of Contract Intelligence Going Untapped
The decentralization of contract ownership isn’t happening just because it’s technically possible—it’s happening because it’s financially imperative.
Poor contract management bleeds companies dry to the tune of $2 trillion annually worldwide. For SaaS businesses, where contracts directly tie to revenue recognition, this waste is particularly acute.
One procurement manager with over 12,000 contracts shared her frustration with me: “Better visibility would be amazing. We have more than 12,000 contracts, and their data is not sorted.” Her team found themselves unable to answer basic questions about spending patterns or renewal opportunities because that data was locked in unstructured documents.
The democratization of contract ownership is allowing teams across organizations to unlock this trapped value, each from their own perspective:
- Finance teams discover opportunities for consolidated purchasing and vendor rationalization
- Operations teams identify process bottlenecks and optimization opportunities
- Procurement teams leverage historical contract data in vendor negotiations
The New Division of Labor: What Stays with Legal?
This shift doesn’t mean legal expertise is irrelevant—just that it’s being refocused on truly complex matters. As Pepe Carr, General Counsel at Sand Technologies, observed: “If your learning model can raise their hand and say, ‘I don’t know what this is, please take a look,’ then you are off to reduce legal headcount.”
The most successful SaaS organizations are establishing clear boundaries:
- AI handles: Document review, data extraction, standard agreement generation, renewal management, and basic risk identification
- Business teams manage: Workflow routing, approvals, simple negotiations, and reporting
- Legal focuses on: Novel legal challenges, complex negotiations, regulatory strategy, and high-stakes agreements
As one CEO recently summed it up to me: “We haven’t fired our lawyers. We’ve just stopped bothering them with the boring stuff.” As these responsibilities shift, AI SaaS contract management is defining new boundaries between legal oversight and operational execution.
Five Ways AI Has Transformed Who “Owns” Contracts
To understand how AI has made this decentralization possible, let’s look at five specific capabilities that have fundamentally changed who can participate in contract processes:
- Automated Data Extraction and Classification
Before AI, identifying key terms in contracts required legal training and painstaking manual review. Modern contract intelligence platforms automatically extract critical information—parties, dates, values, service levels, and other structured data points—making it instantly available to non-legal stakeholders.
One legal operations director told me: “The AI just works. I click ‘create document’ and it does a great job automatically extracting the data.” This technology isn’t just saving time—it’s eliminating the legal bottleneck entirely for routine data capture.
- Risk Identification for Non-Legal Users
Beyond data extraction, AI systems now identify potential risks in contract language without requiring legal training. Systems flag unusual terms, deviations from standards, and potentially problematic clauses—all with user interfaces designed for business users rather than attorneys.
While final risk assessment still requires human judgment, the initial screening that once monopolized legal’s time is now automated and accessible to business users with clear, plain-language explanations of potential issues.
- Self-Service Contract Generation
The explosion of template-based, AI-assisted contract generation has perhaps done more than anything to democratize contract creation. Business users can now generate compliant contracts using pre-approved templates and clause libraries, with AI ensuring the resulting documents remain within organizational guidelines.
This capability has been transformative for sales teams in particular. As one sales operations leader told me: “My team can now generate 90% of our customer agreements without legal review. The system ensures compliance while letting us move at the speed our business requires.”
- Proactive Obligation Management
Managing contract obligations—renewals, deliverables, milestones, and compliance requirements—was traditionally a legal responsibility by default. Now, AI systems proactively identify these obligations and route them directly to the appropriate functional owners.
With 88% of businesses highlighting renewal management as a critical pain point, this capability has enormous financial value, particularly for SaaS companies where renewal revenue is foundational to growth.
- Natural Language Processing for Non-Lawyers
Perhaps most fundamentally, advances in natural language processing have made contracts more accessible to non-legal readers. Modern systems can:
- Translate legalese into plain business language
- Summarize lengthy agreements into digestible bullet points
- Highlight key business terms without the surrounding legal framework
- Compare documents to identify substantive differences beyond superficial wording changes
These capabilities effectively bridge the expertise gap that previously made legal departments the necessary gatekeepers of contract processes.
The Emerging Contract Ownership Models in SaaS
Based on hundreds of implementations with SaaS companies, I’ve observed four distinct contract ownership models emerging in the post-legal monopoly era:
- The Hub-and-Spoke Model (Most Common)
- Legal serves as the “hub” defining standards, templates, and approval thresholds
- Business units act as “spokes” with significant autonomy within defined parameters
- AI systems enforce the guardrails while enabling business velocity
- Used by 65% of mid-market SaaS companies in our research
- The Center of Excellence Model
- A dedicated contract operations team (usually within ops or finance) owns the entire process
- This team includes both legal and business expertise
- All contracts funnel through this specialized group
- Common in larger SaaS enterprises with high contract volumes
- The Fully Decentralized Model
- Business units own their contracts end-to-end
- Legal serves purely as escalation path for exceptions
- Heavy reliance on templates and automation
- Popular with fast-growing SaaS startups prioritizing speed
- The AI-First Model (Emerging)
- AI systems handle initial contract creation, review, and approval routing
- Human involvement (legal or business) only when exceptions are flagged
- Continuous learning improves autonomous handling over time
- Pioneered by digital-native SaaS companies with high standardization
The Implementation Roadmap: How to Make the Transition
For SaaS leaders looking to evolve toward a more decentralized contract ownership model, successful transitions typically follow three phases:
Phase 1: Foundation (Months 0-3)
- Conduct a comprehensive contract audit and inventory
- Establish clear ownership boundaries between legal and business teams
- Implement basic standardization of contract types and templates
- Begin collecting baseline metrics on cycle times and touchpoints
Phase 2: Automation & Integration (Months 3-9)
- Deploy AI-powered contract intelligence tools with appropriate guardrails
- Integrate contract systems with core business platforms (CRM, ERP, etc.)
- Develop role-based permissions and approval workflows
- Train business users on self-service capabilities
Phase 3: Intelligence & Optimization (Months 9+)
- Leverage contract data for business intelligence and forecasting
- Implement continuous improvement based on performance metrics
- Expand autonomous handling of routine contracts
- Refine the division of responsibilities based on early learnings
The Future: Collaborative Intelligence, Business-Led
The decentralization of contract ownership doesn’t mean legal expertise is becoming irrelevant—quite the opposite. It means legal teams can focus on truly complex matters while business users handle routine agreements with AI assistance.
As we move forward, I see contract management evolving into a collaborative intelligence model where:
- Business teams own the process and outcomes
- AI handles routine analysis and administration
- Legal provides specialized expertise when needed
For forward-thinking SaaS leaders, the message is clear: adopting AI SaaS contract management has evolved from a legal necessity into a strategic business process. The question isn’t whether business teams should lead contract management, but how quickly you can make the transition while maintaining appropriate governance.
Those who successfully navigate this shift aren’t just changing ownership—they’re transforming contracts from roadblocks into rocket fuel for business growth.
Matt Lhoumeau is the CEO and co-founder of Concord, a leading provider of Agreement Intelligence solutions. Concord empowers growing businesses to make smarter operational decisions by unlocking actionable insights from contracts and is trusted by over 1,500 companies worldwide.
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