The Buyer's Guide to Contract Management: 5 Questions to Ask
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Webinar Recap & Key Takeaways
Contract management buyers have never had more choice. Every platform promises AI, automation and a polished demo, and legal teams are often asked to compare long feature lists before they've agreed on what they actually need. The result is a familiar story: a tool Legal bought, the business quietly ignores, and nobody can prove it was worth the investment.
This panel, hosted by SpotDraft in partnership with MangoCloud, brought together Mpho Chitapi, Group Legal Technology Head at Nedbank, and Naomi Thompson, Founder of Catalynt, with Sabrina Pervez, Head of GTM, EMEA at SpotDraft, moderating. Rather than walking through features, the panel focused on the questions buyers should ask before they sit through their first demo, drawing on experience from inside a complex, multi-jurisdictional bank and from advising in-house teams through vendor selection and implementation.
The session covered five questions: what problem the team is actually trying to fix, who outside Legal needs to use the platform, what happens to the contracts already scattered across shared drives, inboxes and the occasional cupboard, what the technology and its AI can genuinely do, and how to know 12 months after go-live whether the investment paid off.
Session highlights:
06:34 Naomi Thompson names the biggest mistake buyers make: looking at what tools are on the market before asking what problem they’re trying to solve.
10:08 Mpho Chitapi advises mapping the contract journey end to end, finding the friction points and setting measurable outcomes before testing tools.
13:33 Poll results show ease of use as the top priority, followed by AI capabilities and integrations, with no votes for implementation speed.
15:30 Naomi Thompson explains why Legal sits lower on the stakeholder list than expected: sales and procurement request contracts to close deals.
29:50 Naomi Thompson flags legacy contract migration as a make-or-break factor and urges teams to build their business case with Finance early.
36:28 Mpho Chitapi lists data questions to ask vendors, from encryption and storage to exit management and what happens if an AI model is pulled.
39:56 The panel tackles AI claims, urging buyers to stop asking “do you have AI?” and start asking “what can that AI actually do for my team?”
51:36 Naomi Thompson defines success as real usage: if you threatened to take the tool away, people across the business should push back.
"Technology is really not about the tool and about the platform, but it's about the people... If you go to your business and say we're not going to renew this anymore, you ideally want people to go, no, do not take this away from me, because my life was made fundamentally better by using it." - Naomi Thompson, Founder, Catalynt
Watch the webinar now!
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