Sep 15, 2025

Is unclear contract ownership delaying your approvals?

Contracts don’t always slow down because of complexity or risk. Often, they stall for reasons that feel deceptively mundane: someone didn’t respond. Someone assumed someone else was on it. No one was sure who had the final say.

In the noise of daily legal operations, contract ownership can seem like a minor issue — until it isn’t.

And in a climate where lean legal teams are being asked to do more with less, unclear accountability can quietly erode both cycle time and trust across the business.

Ownership Gaps = Approval Gaps

According to the 2025 Workday Contract Intelligence Report, 76% of employees say they don’t know who owns a given contract. And 41% of legal professionals cite slow internal processes as the reason deals stall post-negotiation.

Other research from Gatekeeper found that nearly 1 in 3 organizations admit they have no assigned owner for contract execution — not for renewals, not for obligations, not even for signature routing.

These gaps don’t just slow things down. They make it harder to:

Track progress on in-flight contracts
Set clear SLAs for review and sign-off
Ensure post-signature compliance with obligations or renewals

And most importantly: they introduce ambiguity into workflows that thrive on clarity.

Ownership Isn’t About Control; It’s About Direction

Let’s be clear: ownership doesn’t mean legal has to take on more.

In fact, trying to own everything is often the root cause of overload. The better approach is assigning ownership intelligently across the lifecycle — and ensuring everyone knows their part in that system.

This means defining:

Who drafts the initial version
Who reviews for commercial and legal risk
Who approves by value/risk threshold
Who owns execution and follow-up

You don’t need dozens of new workflows. What you need is a shared, visible system that shows where each contract lives — and who’s responsible at each step.

Practical Fixes You Can Apply Today

Here are three ownership-driven adjustments we’ve seen deliver real results in lean legal teams:

1. Route by Role, Not Just Title

Job titles don’t always map to responsibility. A better method is to assign approval based on contract type and risk tier.

For example:

NDAs under a certain threshold → auto-approval by business lead
MSAs over a set value → routed to Finance and Legal in parallel
High-risk DPAs → escalate to privacy counsel

This reduces bottlenecks by ensuring the right people see the right things at the right time.

2. Use Notifications as Task Assignments, Not Just Alerts

A notification that says, “This contract was signed” is passive.

A task that says, “Follow up on data-processing obligations by Sept 15” is active.

The best CLM systems don’t just alert—they assign. In practice, that looks like:

Assigning the handoff of signed contracts to Finance
Tagging Ops to track fulfillment milestones
Routing renewal reviews to business owners 60 days out

You’re turning contract metadata into real, owned actions.

3. Make Approval SLAs Visible

It’s hard to manage what isn’t measured.

Whether you're using a CLM or still living in shared drives and inboxes, establish internal SLAs for review and approval by contract type. And then track them.

You might start simple:

Tier 1: same-day auto-approval
Tier 2: 3 business days
Tier 3: 5–7 business days + escalation

You’ll be surprised how much cycle time you can recover by simply making expectations clear.

Curious what this would look like in your workflow?

We’d love to hear how you're managing contract handoffs and approvals today — and where you see room for improvement.

👉 [Book a quick 15-min walkthrough — no slides, just solutions.]