Fifteen years ago, I found myself in the basement of the second-largest telecom company in France, surrounded by dusty file cabinets. My task? Find and review a thousand vendor contracts to save the company money. Six months of my life disappeared into that paper labyrinth—a painful experience that ultimately inspired me to start Concord and join the contract management software revolution.
But as I’ve built this company over the past decade, I’ve witnessed something fascinating: contracts are no longer the domain of legal departments. They’re increasingly managed by finance teams—and this shift is transforming how businesses operate.
The Great Migration: Why Finance is Taking Over
When we started Concord ten years ago, legal teams were the guardians of contracts. Today, among our 1,500+ customer, approximately 65-70% their contracts managed by finance team, not legal. This is especially true in small to mid-market companies with 50 to 1,000 employees.
Why this dramatic shift? It comes down to a fundamental realization: a contract isn’t a legal document. A contract is business process – most central business process in any company. Whether you’re buying something, selling something, or hiring someone, there’s always a contract in the middle.
Finance teams are practical. They care less about perfect legal language and more about the financial implications. Some recent conversations with CFOs revealed fascinating insights:
“I don’t care about legal risks as much as I care about understanding my cash flow commitments for the next 10 years,” one CFO told me. Another explained, “Every contract represents money in or out. Why wouldn’t finance manage that?”
The numbers tell an even more compelling story. More than 90% of contracts signed on our platform have zero negotiation. They’re just getting signed. People understand they need to go fast and don’t want to lose a month in a negotiation cycle.
AI: The Great Accelerator
This migration from legal to finance departments was happening before AI burst onto the scene. But AI has poured rocket fuel on the trend.
What’s interesting about AI isn’t that it’s fundamentally changing things—it’s just accelerating what we’ve already seen.
Finance teams using contract lifecycle management software with AI capabilities can now:
- Extract financial commitments automatically: Instead of manually reading contracts to find payment terms, renewal dates, and financial obligations, AI does it instantly.
- Forecast based on contracts, not guesswork: Rather than using last year’s numbers plus a growth percentage, CFOs can now forecast based on actual contractual commitments.
- Identify hidden risks and opportunities: AI can spot unfavorable terms, inconsistencies between contracts, or opportunities for consolidation that would take humans weeks to find.
- Standardize without legal review: Templates can be AI-reviewed and standardized without requiring legal to manually check every agreement.
This automation is crucial because poor contract management causes approximately 9% of annual revenue loss in the average company. For a £10 million business, that’s £900,000 walking out the door—enough to make any CFO take notice.
The Contract of the Future
If we forget everything that humans have done for centuries and asked AI to create a contract from scratch, do you think it would look anything like today’s dense legal documents? I don’t think so.
Today’s contracts are incredibly inefficient. Every contract is different. Sometimes, the important parts are buried in the middle of 15 clauses, and you don’t really see them.
Within five years, I believe contracts will look dramatically different:
- They’ll be structured data, not documents: Contracts will be more like term sheets—clearly organized tables of commitments, not walls of text.
- They’ll be financial intelligence tools: Finance teams will query their contract database the way they query their financial systems today.
- They’ll be self-managing: Systems will automatically track obligations, flag upcoming deadlines, and even suggest actions based on contract terms.
- They’ll negotiate themselves: AI systems representing buyers and sellers will eventually handle routine negotiations automatically.
What This Means for Business Leaders
If you’re a business leader reading this, especially if you’re in the C-suite, this shift has profound implications:
- Ask where your contracts live today: If the answer is “in a shared drive” or “scattered across departments,” you’re leaking value.
- Consider moving contract ownership to finance: They’re already incentivized to track financial commitments and maximize value.
- Use AI to turn contracts into intelligence: Don’t just digitize your contracts—transform them into structured data that drives business decisions.
- Rethink your legal team’s focus: Free them from administrative contract review to focus on strategic matters that truly need their expertise.
The future of business isn’t about who manages which documents—it’s about extracting maximum value from every relationship. And increasingly, finance teams armed with AI are leading that charge.
The question is not whether shift will happen—it’s already underway. The question is whether your organization will be ahead of the curve or playing catch-up.
Matt Lhoumeau is Co-founder and CEO of Concord, a contract management platform used by 1,500 companies worldwide. Prior to founding Concord, Matt worked for second-largest telecom company in France, where he experienced firsthand pain of manual contract management—an experience that inspired him build Concord.
