Most "how to speed up contracting" conversations are really just tooling pitches in disguise. This one wasn't.
We ran a webinar in partnership with IHC (In-House Connect) last week with three people who've actually rebuilt contracting from the inside, not sold a fix to it: Aditi Ramachandran, who runs Legal Operations and Contracts Management at Houzz and has personally taken NDA review rates from 85% down to 12%; Patricija (Patty) Corey, Legal Operations Manager at Franklin Templeton, who's implemented enough CLM systems to have opinions about which parts make people cry; and Andy Cook, Chief Legal Officer at Perk, who runs legal for a business growing 50% year over year and has had to treat his own team like a product with customers. Akshay Verma, COO of SpotDraft moderated.
81 events deep into this series, and this one landed differently, because nobody on the panel tried to sell "speed" as a tooling problem. Every one of them, independently, arrived at the same starting point: fix the process, earn the tool, and stop pretending legal review is the reason deals move slowly.
Here's the uncomfortable thesis that ran through the whole hour: contracting isn't slow because legal is slow. It's slow because nobody designed it to be fast.
Below are the six things worth stealing.
Patty's method is almost embarrassingly simple: she doesn't touch a process until she's talked to every single person who touches the contract, IT, data security, sales, legal, whoever. Not to collect complaints, but because everyone's telling the truth from where they sit. Sales says legal is the bottleneck. Legal says it's actually InfoSec sitting on a data security review for six days. Both are right. Neither has the whole picture.
Then she process-maps it. Current state, future state, in that order. No tooling conversation until this is done.
Steal this: if you've never mapped where your own contract actually stalls, by team, not by vibes, you're optimizing blind.
Andy's framing: a lot of what looks like "legal is slow" is actually issues that happened upstream showing up late. Patty went further, she called it pre-contract friction: all the "do we have a template for this," "who needs to sign this," "do I need an NDA" questions that get asked and re-asked in Slack threads that nobody can search later.
Her fix isn't more legal headcount. It's a genuinely good intake form and an FAQ doc that earns its keep, literally, every question on that form has to justify why it's there. If nobody's using the answer for routing, reporting, or risk, cut the question.
This was the panel's closest thing to consensus outrage. Andy: if you're still doing unilateral NDAs in 2026, "take a hard look in the mirror." Aditi cut NDA legal review at a previous company from 85% to 12%, the remaining 12% being financial or IP-sensitive deals, just by locking a pre-approved template behind a public workflow link that team leads could self-serve.
The trust objection that came up in our audience poll ("we don't have a defined no-touch track, and we're not confident it's possible") got directly challenged: if the template is pre-approved and locked down so counterparties can't redline it, where exactly is the risk? Usually it's not the template, it's an ungoverned process letting people mark things up they shouldn't.
Patty's line will stick with us: a CLM system is not a magic wan, it's a mirror. It doesn't fix broken process; it exposes it. Buy the tool before you've mapped process and you'll spend the implementation rebuilding the same mess inside new software. She's turned around multiple failed CLM rollouts for exactly this reason, teams bought the tool for the dopamine hit of "we did something," then discovered they still hadn't decided who owns what.
Process first. Tool second. The tool is what lets good process scale, it's not a substitute for having one.
Andy's reframe: stop calling it "legal tech." A tool that improves business velocity is just tech, legal happens to be the one requesting it. If you're making the case to a CFO, don't lead with "this makes legal's life easier." Lead with what it does for the team whose forecast it protects, whose renewal it saves, whose deal it closes faster.
Aditi's version of this in practice: she goes group by group, finance, sales, product, and shows each one exactly what the CLM system does for them specifically. Finance gets automated SOX-control approvals instead of chasing an attorney for an email. That's not a legal pitch. That's a finance pitch that happens to run through legal's system.
And go in humble on your first procurement. You will get things wrong the first time you buy a tool. Build that into how you position it, so a rough first year doesn't torch your credibility for round two.
Patty pushed back hard on cycle time as a single north star. "It took 14 days" tells you nothing about whether those 14 days sat with legal, with security, with the counterparty, or with a business team that hadn't responded to an email. If your CLM can't report status by stakeholder, that's a gap to flag before you buy it, not after.
Her other metric, arguably the more human one: renewals nobody was tracking. At Houzz, services were getting cut off because nobody had a renewal report. Once that report existed and people saw it wasn't "legal checking up on you" but something that protected their budget, adoption jumped, people started asking for it.
Andy closed with something that had nothing to do with tooling: your job is not supposed to suck. Lawyers who wear "I have higher standards than everyone else" as a badge are often just describing friction they've normalized. If your team is turning the same contract for the hundredth time with your eyes closed, that's not rigor, that's a process nobody's fixed yet.
The through-line from all three panelists, in different words: contract velocity isn't a legal metric. It's what happens when legal stops being the department everyone routes around and starts being infrastructure nobody notices, because it just works.
Process first. Context always. Tooling once you've earned it.
