by Matt Lhoumeau, CEO and co-founder of Concord
I noticed something fascinating 15 years ago when I was tasked with renegotiating a thousand vendor contracts for a major telecom company in France.
I spent six miserable months digging through file cabinets, hunting down paper contracts, manually building spreadsheets, and sending hundreds of Word documents back and forth.
What shocked me wasn’t just the tedium – it was realizing that a $5 billion company was managing its contractual relationships like it was 1975.
Fast forward to today, and I’m seeing a seismic shift that few people are talking about: CFOs – not Legal – are becoming the new owners of contract processes in most companies.
The death of legal-centric contracts
When we started Concord ten years ago, contracts were “Legal’s problem.” Today, 65-70% of our customers don’t even have a legal team.
Why this shift? Because a contract isn’t primarily a legal document. It’s a business process. It’s how money moves in and out of your company.
Think about it: whether you buy something, sell something, or hire someone, there’s always a contract in the middle. And who better to manage these processes than operations and finance teams?
The numbers tell the story:
- 90% of contracts we see have zero negotiation – they’re standardized templates
- Most companies have eliminated or drastically reduced legal review for standard agreements
- AI can now handle basic contract review that once required legal expertise
The CFO transformation
CFOs are evolving like CIOs did years ago. Remember when IT leaders just “helped plug in computers?” Now they’re strategic partners. The same transformation is happening with finance leaders.
Look at what a contract is actually for:
- It documents financial commitments
- It establishes payment terms
- It governs how money flows
- It creates financial obligations
So why wouldn’t finance teams manage this process?
I was with a customer in Texas recently – a 300-person construction company that’s been around for 70 years. Very traditional business. They don’t have a legal team anymore. They’ve outsourced everything. Their CFO oversees all contract processes.
This isn’t unusual. It’s becoming the norm.
What does this mean for your business?
For Legal: Your value is strategy and high-stakes guidance – not reviewing the fifteenth revision of a standard agreement.
For Finance & Operations: Your contracts are becoming goldmines of business intelligence, showing exactly where every dollar goes and optimizing vendor relationships.
For CEOs: Your contracts are no longer buried in legal files – they’re integrated with your financial forecasting.
With contract management software, CFOs can now:
- Build forecasts based on actual commitments, not just historical patterns. You’ll know exactly how much money is coming in and out month by month based on your contractual obligations.
- Fight for every dollar. Good CFOs negotiate each vendor agreement to maximize value.
- Remove bottlenecks by identifying which contracts consistently get stuck in review.
- Avoid expensive surprises like missed renewal dates – something that’s happened to every CFO I’ve ever met.
This isn’t about replacing legal teams
Legal teams aren’t going away, but they’re focusing on work that actually requires their expertise.
Think about contracts in your company:
- Your customer agreements are probably templated
- Your vendor agreements are often dictated by the vendor
- Your HR documents are standardized
The legal aspects are important, but they’re just one part of a business process – a business process that finance and operations teams are increasingly owning.
With AI accelerating this trend, we’ll see even more companies shifting contract ownership to finance and operations teams.
The numbers don’t lie
Research confirms what we’re seeing with our own customers. According to industry research, contract lifecycle management (CLM) is growing at 12.4% annually and projected to reach $3.46 billion by 2034. That’s because companies recognize that poor contract management costs businesses 9% of their annual revenue on average.
The rise of AI in contract management isn’t slowing down either. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 50% of CLM platforms will integrate AI-driven analytics to enhance productivity.
What’s next
As AI gets better, I believe that within 10 years – by 2035 – companies with fewer than 500 employees won’t have dedicated legal people in-house at all.
We’re already seeing this with companies in the 100-200 employee range. They outsource legal for specific important topics, but everything else is managed internally by people without legal backgrounds.
This isn’t about eliminating legal expertise – it’s about deploying it more strategically while letting operations and finance teams handle routine contract processes with automated contract management systems.
The future isn’t what you think
I believe we’ll see contracts themselves change dramatically. They’re currently extremely inefficient – every contract is different, important parts are buried in dense language, and the format hasn’t evolved in centuries.
If AI were to design contracts from scratch, they’d look nothing like what we use today. I think we’ll eventually see more standardized, structured formats – like term sheets – that clearly display the important information.
The bottom line: contracts aren’t legal documents anymore. They’re business processes that belong in the hands of the people who manage your business operations and finances.
The companies that understand this shift will be the ones that turn contracts from roadblocks into rocket fuel.
Matt Lhoumeau is the CEO and co-founder of Concord, the leading provider of AI-powered Agreement Intelligence solutions. With over a decade of experience transforming how businesses manage contracts, Matt helps finance leaders unlock strategic value from their agreements and turn contracts from cost centers into profit drivers.