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How Legal Teams Can Accelerate Contracting in 2025 Without Ripping Out Legacy CLM

A pragmatic playbook for speeding up contracting by fixing the first mile—intake, triage, and decisioning—using AI agents and a living knowledge layer. Keep your CLM; modernize the workflow around it.

Jarryd Strydom

September 3, 2025
Most contracting delays aren’t caused by drafting—they’re caused by friction before work even starts. The slowest steps live in the first mile: unclear intake, missing context, and ad‑hoc triage. If cycle times feel stuck despite a Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) platform, it’s because process—and institutional knowledge—sit outside the system.
Stop Blaming the Platform; Rewire the First Mile
Legacy CLM isn’t the enemy. The real problem is that policies, playbooks, and approvals live in static docs and scattered chats. Requests arrive half-baked. Legal spends hours retrieving context, applying positions, and chasing the right approver. CLM then faithfully records a slow process.
The fix isn’t a rip-and-replace. It’s layering a modern operating system on top: a knowledge layer that makes your rules executable and an AI agent that shepherds each request from intake to decision. When the first mile is clean, the rest of the journey flies—CLM becomes a record of speed, not delay.
Turn Playbooks Into Decisions, Not Docs
Most playbooks are PDFs no one opens mid-deal. In 2025, treat them as decision trees:
  • Standard vs. non-standard: What’s self-serve, what needs legal?
  • Positions and fallbacks: Preferred clause, 1st fallback, 2nd fallback, and red flags.
  • Thresholds and routes: Who approves exceptions at which risk/amount tiers.
  • Evidence and context: What facts must be present to proceed (pricing, jurisdiction, data flows, counterparties, term, renewal, DPAs, security posture).
Codify these rules in a structured format so an agent can apply them consistently. Sandstone does this natively: positions and thresholds become living logic, not static guidance. When your knowledge is actionable, you eliminate rework and inconsistency—and you can finally measure adherence.
Automate Intake-to-Approval With an AI Agent
The biggest gains come from automating the work you repeat daily. A practical agent flow for NDAs, MSAs, and routine vendor/SaaS agreements looks like this:
  1. Smart intake: The agent captures requests from email, Slack, or a portal, asks targeted follow-ups to fill gaps, and enriches data from CRM/ERP.
  2. Triage and classification: It tags request type, risk category, and required artifacts (DPA, SOW, security review) based on your rules.
  3. Playbook application: It proposes preferred language, applies fallbacks, and flags redlines that require legal review.
  4. Routing and approvals: It routes exceptions to the right approver, with context and rationale auto-included.
  5. Sync and record: It updates CLM and matter systems, logs decisions, and posts status back to the business.
Result: fewer side-channel pings, faster first response, consistent decisions, and a clean audit trail. Legal shifts from reactive triage to proactive governance.
Start Small, Measure, Then Scale
Don’t boil the ocean. Pick one high-volume, low-to-medium risk workflow (e.g., mutual NDA, standard SaaS order form, routine vendor agreement). Define what “good” looks like and measure it.
Key KPIs to track:
  • First-response time: Minutes, not days.
  • % of requests fully self-served: Aim to move standard work out of the queue.
  • Legal touch minutes per matter: Distinguish human review from agent work.
  • SLA adherence: Requests completed within agreed timelines.
  • Exception rate and reason codes: Use trends to refine playbooks.
A 30-day pilot can prove value without disrupting your stack.
Actionable next step (30-day plan):
  • Week 1: Map your current workflow and extract the real playbook—positions, fallbacks, and approval thresholds. Make gaps explicit.
  • Week 2: Configure an agent to handle intake, apply positions, and route approvals for one use case. Connect to CLM for contract record-keeping.
  • Week 3: Run in parallel on live requests; measure first-response time, touch minutes, and exception patterns.
  • Week 4: Tighten rules, expand self-serve, and publish the workflow to your business partners.

The Payoff: Speed Without Risk, CLM Without the Drag

When institutional knowledge becomes executable and intake is structured, your CLM stops reflecting chaos and starts reflecting control. Sales gets answers in minutes. Procurement sees clear routes. Security and Privacy are looped in automatically when the facts demand it. And Legal keeps the guardrails without being the bottleneck.
This is Sandstone’s design principle: strength through layers, crafted precision, and natural integration. We don’t force a new way of working; we make your way scalable. Playbooks, positions, and approvals become a living operating system that compounds knowledge with every request—so cycle time falls while confidence rises.
If you’re evaluating where to start, don’t start with a platform replacement. Start with the first mile. Make intake intelligent, make decisions repeatable, and let your CLM record the speed you’ve earned.

Optional next step: Want a templated decision tree for NDAs and vendor DPAs? Book a quick working session with Sandstone—we’ll tailor a pilot you can run in under a month.

Legal’s job is not to block risk—it’s to channel it. With a layered knowledge foundation and an agent at the front door, legal becomes the connective tissue of the business: faster, clearer, and trusted at scale.

About Jarryd Strydom

Jarryd Strydom is a contributor to the Sandstone blog.