Picture this. A CEO gets hit with a disruption - tariffs, a supplier failing, a customer pushing back. They ask what sounds like the simplest question in the world: which of our contracts are affected?
The contracts exist. They're all there, somewhere - procurement files, sales agreements, shared drives, email threads, a dozen different systems nobody fully trusts. The contracts exist. The answer doesn't.
That's the opening scene of a new report from World Commerce & Contracting and SpotDraft, and it's the story every in-house lawyer already knows in their bones. At the launch webinar, Sally Guyer, CEO, World Commerce & Contracting, Sabrina Pervez, (Regional Sales Director – EMEA, SpotDraft), and Cleo Becker (CLO, Dott) walked through why this keeps happening and why AI, contrary to what everyone assumed, isn't the thing that's going to fix it on its own.
For years, a messy contract repository was a background annoyance. Someone would dig, it would take a few days, life went on. Then AI happened, and it quietly reset everyone's expectations. Business leaders are now used to asking a question and getting an answer in seconds, so when legal goes quiet for days, or weeks, that gap stops being tolerable. It becomes a credibility problem.
Here's the part worth sitting with: pointing a powerful AI tool at scattered, inconsistent data doesn't produce clarity. It produces confusion, just faster. AI didn't cause the mess. It exposed exactly how bad the mess already was.
The numbers back this up. Contract data lives across an average of 24 different systems. Around a third of the workforce touches the contracting lifecycle somewhere along the way. Over 80% say their contracts are too rigid to adapt when something changes. Over 70% have no portfolio-level view of which revenue or spend depends on which contracts. The information isn't missing. It's just unusable.
This is the framing that anchors the whole report: stop treating contracts as legal records, start treating them as operating instructions. A filing cabinet stores documents. An instrument panel tells you what's happening right now and helps you act on it.
In calm conditions, you barely notice the difference. When a tariff hits or a supplier misses delivery, the difference is everything. A contract should be able to tell you, on the spot: do we have a price adjustment clause here? Is there a substitution clause? What's the escalation route? If it can't answer that fast, your contract portfolio isn't an asset; it's a dormant liability sitting on the balance sheet doing nothing until the day it matters most.
And there's a sequencing point that's easy to skip past: AI only works when the data underneath is structured, visible, and usable first. One line from the session nailed it, dropping a high-performance engine into a car with no steering wheel, bad brakes, and a cracked windscreen. Design first. AI second. Not the other way around.
This might be the single most damning stat in the whole report. Only 16% of respondents believe they're actually focused on the right topics during negotiation.
Too much time goes into defensive clauses - liability caps, indemnities, the stuff that only matters if things go badly wrong. Meanwhile the terms that actually matter when markets move - price adjustment, change of control, business continuity, escalation routes; get treated as secondary. 70% said their contracts didn't even contain relevant content for when change actually happened. Over 80% said the terms that dominate disputes are irrelevant to actually resolving them.
The uncomfortable read: it's not that negotiations are slow. It's that they produce contracts poorly built for the two moments that matter most - change, and disagreement.
Legal ease is famously incomprehensible, that's not new. What's new, and worse, is that even the people who understand it don't think it delivers the outcome it's supposed to. Less than 0.7% of contracts ever reach litigation, and yet most are still drafted as if litigation is the primary audience.
One quote from the report says it plainly: my contracts are a graveyard of past bad experiences. Every clause is a scar from something that once went wrong, stacked on top of the last one, none of it written with the actual user, the business, in mind.
The fix isn't dumbing contracts down. It's making the existing rigor usable. You can have both legal accuracy and something a non-lawyer can actually act on under pressure. That's not a trade-off, it's a design problem nobody's solved yet.
WCC's own research (dating back to a 2018 study with UC Irvine) found that legal teams default to a preventionist role, seeing their job as stopping bad things from happening to the organization. Not wrong, exactly. But left unchecked, it becomes the only lens, and it produces contracts negotiated for the divorce instead of the marriage.
The shift the report argues for: legal's job isn't just to prevent bad outcomes, it's to actively help create good ones. That's a genuinely different starting question when you sit down to negotiate.
Cleo Becker, CLO at Dott, gave the clearest picture of how this plays out in practice. A few things stood out:
The report lays out three possible structures, and the honest conclusion is: it depends.
Cleo's own answer was unambiguous: legal shouldn't own it, but should absolutely be part of it. In practice at DOT, it's layered, legal owns the commercial-term risk inside the contract, finance owns the economic reality of the deal, and decisions get made together on risk versus reward. If anything, she suggested, what's missing isn't an owner, it's someone orchestrating across all the people who already own a piece of it.
One of the sharpest distinctions Cleo drew: legal is accountable for giving accurate advice, on time. Legal is not, and should never be, the decision-maker. If the advice was wrong and something goes wrong downstream, that's on legal. But whether to actually take the deal — that's a business decision, made by whoever owns the risk-versus-reward call. Keeping that line clean is, in her experience, what keeps legal out of the "blocker" reputation in the first place — especially when legal gets pulled into decisions before they're made instead of the day before something has to close.
Nothing in this report is an argument for legal to work faster. It's an argument for legal to stop building contracts for a courtroom 0.7% of them will ever see, and start building them for the business moment that actually happens constantly: something changes, and someone needs an answer in minutes, not weeks.
Design the data first. Add AI second. Decide, deliberately, whether legal wants to lead commercial intelligence, enable it, or hand it to someone else because the one option nobody in this conversation thought was acceptable was doing nothing and letting the CEO stay grumpy.
