The CLM Playbook: Lessons from a Global Rollout with Alyse Wilkinson & Otto Hanson.

Made with speech-to-text software, so a few words may be off.

0:00You're listening to the Contract Heroes Podcast, your one-stop shop for all things contract management. And now here are your hosts, Marc and Pepe. Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Contract Heroes. Today we're live at CLOC 2026 in Chicago. Joining us on today's call from WSP Global is Alyse Wilkinson and Otto Hanson of Agiloft. Now, without further ado, let's get into the episode. So let's talk about first on your experience doing the CLM implementation. I know there's a lot of aspect, a different phases, but can you take us, like, how it all started, how you were, like, looking for different vendors, and then, like, when you did decided to go with to Agiloft, what were, like, the first pain points that you wanted to attack? Sure. So it all started with an ERP design and people much smarter than me believing they had the right modules in the ERP for contract review.

1:03Once legal stepped in the door, we realized it was not the right modules, and it was not intuitive to the way we work. So making the argument and the case up the chain to those that had spent a lot of money on, "There is something out of the box that's probably much better than what you've chosen that will speak to legal, both on the direct and indirect procurement side, but also the client contracting sides, which are equally important and something the legal team looks at every single day. So if we're looking to automate our workflows, we're looking for a source of truth for our contracts, and we want to start organizing them and wanna utilize and harness the power of AI in a future-looking manner, that this is where we need to go." So the CFO literally said, "Don't be wrong." And we went on our RFP journey, which was 12 weeks. Was ver- was not very long for a company of, at the time we were fifty-five thousand, we're now at eighty-five thousand people.

1:56And, uh, we quickly whittled it down to what was highly configurable and what would work in our unique environment of being both global but local. So we chose Agiloft. Uh, we chose Agiloft for the configurability, but also for the roadmap and the AI capabilities that it already had in, uh, integrated within it, and we started our journey from there. So that was, uh, two years ago, three years ago now, and we haven't looked back from, from that point on. Wow, that's amazing. And so how did it all started? Like, did you focus, let's say, first with the headquarters? Uh, do you have-- do, do all the different subsidiaries have, like, share same workflows, or do you have to, like, start with a core and then adapt it to all the different offices? So we had two regions that had intake systems. One was built on a power platform with Microsoft, and one was built into SharePoint, Microsoft.

2:51No one had a CLM, and Latin America was in the, uh, throes of an organizational restructure where they were trying to centralize all of their functions. So CLM was quickly going to be their backbone for operationalizing their reconfigured organizational structure, especially for contract review. So we started with Latin America because they were not on the ERP at the time, which I'll circle back to in a second, and we went live with them in six months. So we were building from scratch. We were taking out-of-the-box configuration. We were trying very hard to maintain a global footprint and a global design without getting too nuanced into the regions and allowing the regions the opportunity to have a voice, to have a say, to have their space to, to breathe their opinions without a lot of them being adopted early on, if I'm honest. We took the configuration, we applied it. We said, "If there's a legal reason for us to change this configuration or there's a legislative requirement we need to build into that, let us know.

3:50But otherwise, we're just going to build. And once we build and launch in Latin America, we are then going to integrate both the procurement and the client side with our ERP." The reason for that was we had to think of our business partners, right? We've-- again, eighty-five thousand people in our company, most of them are seller doers. They need to get out there. They need to win the work. They need to put the opportunity in a system somewhere. So if they're entering all that data in one location to begin with, why get them to enter it in several other locations? So we integrated it by allowing them the opportunity to put all of the data in one system, the ERP, and they can only elevate a CLM request from there. So the two phases were required for that reason. One was ERP driven, and one was non-ERP driven. So that added complexity alongside languages and multiple countries with that rollout that we did. I have a question for you, Alyse. Before we sold the screens business to Agiloft, we worked with a lot of different customers who had tried a lot of different CLMs, and I always had this sense that, like, CLM was really hard because I'd spoken to so many people who had tried and failed or just had really rough experiences implementing CLMs, getting value out of CLMs.

5:04And when I've met you, I was like, "Wow, this is a person who seems to have really cracked the nut on how to get CLM right and who has really derived a tremendous amount of value and ROI for your organization with CLM." So my question is, for folks who might be listening to this podcast, a legal ops leader or other business person who's like, "Man, we could really use CLM, but I'm scared. I've talked to people who have struggled. I know it can be hard to get through implementation." Like, what would you say to that person? Stick with the vision. If you can see it happening and you know it will g- bring value, don't expect others to see the same vision. You cannot give them a system out of thin air. You have to be patient. You have to work through those change points, those pain points along the way to get to your vision. And once you get it in a place where you can release it to them, get them to use it. Don't even train them, honestly. Get them to get in, use it. Just start to push the button, see where it goes. Enter the data, see what new conditional formatting shows up.

6:05Get them to understand the look and feel of it, and then show them the data that they just created. It can take three tests for them to see value. It could take five tests for someone else to see value. But my advice would be, don't wait for it to be perfect. Don't wait for the perfect buy-in. Don't wait for the perfect system even. Just get it started, and just start to show those tangible benefits for having a system in place. And did that, starting to give the users access to the system, um, was that during UAT? Was that even before UAT? I guess, how big was the, the team of, uh, folks that was in Latin America that were a part of the initial implementation? Sure. So when we first designed it, we did a UAT with people from every region. We had two or three different people in each region who were looking at contracts or looking at workflows or receiving the emails on an ongoing basis for review. And we asked them to get into the system just to try it, just to see if it, you know, did the things they would expect a system to do.

7:04When we went live in Latin America, it was after a two-week aggressive UAT, which was basically, "Get in, try it. We don't really care what the results are, because we're gonna fix them and continually evolve," was the message, right? We're a big company. We're always evolving. We're always building the plane while we're flying it, so let's get you in there. Latin America went live with, they had seven different countries, three different languages, and about three thousand people, twenty-five legal team members, and everything went to a centralized location for triage from day one. They didn't look back. They made it mandatory from day one. They didn't even do a trial period, so they just went for it. And the best benefit for them, for their labor, the fruits of their labor, was when the COO took a visit to Latin America, and they were able to produce the dashboard to show them all of the, the contracts they'd seen. That's great. That's great. And was there, prior to the system, I guess, during the implementation, was there a legacy data migration as well? So we chose to move forward.

8:01That said, now that we're in it, everyone wants their data- Yeah... to be r- in it. So we've done one migration where we took all of our master service agreements and our framework agreements that were in the ERP, so those that existed there, and we created in... and imported on bulk, on mass, uh, contract records with all of the metadata. And we're in the process of uploading all of those physical documents now into the system so that we could relate new task orders and pur- and purchase agreements from those master service and frameworks right from the start. And, and what does the, the vision look like, right, as you look into the future? What other parts of the organization are you going kind of by region to, to roll this out to other parts of the org or something different? So once the integration with the ERP was completed, uh, we went live in Canada, US, and the UK all at the same time on February second. We ripped the Band-Aid off. Three biggest regions, about fifty-five thousand people, all at the same time.

8:55And then, uh, a month later, we followed with, uh, New Zealand, Australia, Middle East, and Sweden was just released this year, or this month rather. So now we have two regions left that are not ERP related, but are using the system, including Latin America. They'll all be onboarded in the future. In two weeks, we will be using Agiloft as our legal front door. So not only do, do we now have a front door for contract review, but we'll have one for everything else that's not contract review using the same system. The intention is that interface that people are getting used to with Agiloft is going to be the way that they communicate with the legal team moving forward. Yeah, for sure. It makes things way much easier when you have everything in a certified repository, so you could have access to all the different documentation, especially... And that's impressive. I didn't know that Latin America was also part of this, of, of this rollout because being a civil law country and a common law country is completely different, right? You have different kind of requirements.

9:53We have done some rollouts in Latin America, and, like, things that people don't even care here, like in, in Latin America, they're, like, very important, especially during the contract request, right? Like in Latin America, they always want the bylaws, they always want the powers of attorney, tax ID, you know, all these kind of requirements that maybe in some other regions, such as maybe UK or, you know, uh, the US or Canada, it's not necessary. Maybe, maybe, but it's not necessary like in, like in these other regions. And that flexibility is the one that will give you that access, right? Because you can configure, tweak the core so it can, you know, match the specific requirement for all the different regions. So that's, that's very impressive. And after you went live with the CLM, how do you start using the AI tools, right? Like, what, what, what, what were some of the main pain points that you said, "Okay, this is where I need it"? Maybe this is why people don't like me, but while we were building the plane and flying it, we decided to start building another plane and flying it.

10:56So last year, we did a twelve-week sprint on clause libraries and playbooks, and the idea was we started with client contracts, and it was, "Here is our bible. This is our client contract bible. You can put in your region-specific guidance notes, your region-specific comments back to clients to explain your position." Like, to your point, in Latin America, there's very specific details they need to include when they're reviewing contracts. And your fallback clauses and your, you know, all of those items can go in here. But essentially, all of the prompts will be the same because we want the same risk profile across the entire company. And where that came to be very important was we have global clients that expect us to review our contracts the same way in Australia as we do in Canada, as we do in Chile, as we do in the Middle East. They want exactly the same thing. Don't come to us for a limitation of liability when you know we won't give you one, right?

11:48So now we're able to leverage that through our playbook use because it's the same contract being reviewed against the previous contract or against our standards that we were successful in negotiating. So in twelve weeks, we did clause library and playbooks. We put them into Astra. We had people start to test them. Thumbs up, thumbs down, right? Real easy. Totally. Yep. And one of the benefits for, with Astra is that the surgical redlining Allows us to see the red lines in a very specific way to that specific contract rather than a, a fulsome red line of the whole clause, which everyone was terrified of. So not only are we gonna take away our relationship with the business, 'cause they're going to submit a contract through a black hole and not know who it goes to, now you're telling me a machine is going to review this, and when I press a button, the whole clause is gonna change, and our clients are gonna hate us because now we've got this completely redlined document with nothing left of what they gave us. So the surgical piece was really important to us and really drove buy-in and use from all of our p- all of our members.

12:49Um, Italy, Latin America, Middle East, they're all using it, and it's really important to us to, to leverage those playbooks and, uh, use Astra for that. It's refreshing to hear that you and your team are taking such a polite approach to your negotiating strategy. We, as you know, we give users the option to toggle between a surgical redlining approach or what we call a heavy redlining approach. And yeah, the heavy one is aggressive, but there are some circumstances where clients really wanna actually get much closer to or actual verbatim replacement of the existing language with their language, just updating for defined terms. But yeah, love the thoughtfulness of the approach that you guys are taking to negotiating. It's all about change management and buy-in, right? So whatever it takes to get them to b- we might change it to heavy tomorrow. And they might never know th- because they'll be using the playbooks.

13:41No, and one of the things that I really like about the features with Astra is that whenever you make a change, it will give you, of course, you can change it, but a comment on why you made that change, and I think that's something that every lawyer should do because there's nothing worse than when you receive a document redline and without giving you any kind of, you know, explanation of why you make those changes, right? Or, or the typical, those, like, uh, market benchmarks, right? Good practices, which is But look at it this way. In a different light, those playbooks are what will upskill and train your junior contract reviewers by giving them the same benefit. Why did this screen capture this specific clause, and what am I supposed to do with it? So instead of sitting in a contract review session with a, you know, the lead attorney on a matter, or learning over six months, they're able to learn on the job, quite literally, by running that, understanding the feedback, getting those rev- reviewer notes.

14:44And that's why I say everything is great when you use a tool, but be intentional about the information you're putting into the tool to get the right outputs. And we've been really successful with Astra in putting the right recipe together to pull out the right responses to not only guide our clients, but guide all of our attorneys as they onboard, or those new contract reviewers that may be more junior that need to be upskilled pretty quick on our risk profile when we review our contracts. That's amazing to be, like, really early adopters of this type of technology, and auto one for you. Now, since you're in charge of the AI part, like, I wanna see, like, what's your vision? Because this, this thing is going really fast, and it's, a- and, and it's really cool that there are customers willing to put the efforts and getting their hands dirty, like playing and testing, right, with these new kind of tools. I know there's a very recent release, but if you can tell us right now, like, uh, short term will be like couple of weeks or months, but let's say for next year, like, how do you envision the new capabilities?

15:45Yeah, great question, Pepe. So w- we think the world is moving towards a world where companies can do a lot more autonomous negotiation of contracts. But in order for that to work, we have to give our customers really, really precise and highly configurable governance and guardrails that they can implement and monitor and update and manage at enterprise scale. And that's actually really hard to do because contracts are complicated. There's a lot of if-then complexity, fact pattern variations. Uh, there's a lot of variation with facts that happen outside of the contract. So to build a system that enables a company like this to get to a place where they might actually be able to get even closer to something resembling more autonomous contracting, we're really focusing right now on giving our customers very, very sophisticated tools to program and codify what their rules and policies and preferences are when it comes to reviewing and negotiating contracts. I think that's... It's great, right? And I, I, I d- I do agree with you that I think that that's where the industry is going and, and where people also kind of want it to, to go in that direction.

17:02I guess, you know, I'm curious, what... Has the team discussed what the next phase of the project will look like? Are there other areas that still need to be involved in, in getting them live, or are, is the team going to start to roll out new functionality? W- what, what does the future hold for the organization? There's three different builds going on right now within Agiloft. Uh, all of them have some kind of AI attached to them. Uh, with Astra it will be this is the only way we review contracts in a first pass. Uh, we have big projects in procurement and in our client contracts, that Astra will come in very handy using their, their project space so that we can upload multiple contracts, review against them. Other use cases for us are simply M&A due diligence. We are a highly acquisitive company, so the M&A process and reviewing contracts, you take a handful and that's your sample size. This gives us so much more power to review more contracts against our standards and make sure that those contracts that we're ingesting and, you know, having novated to our company, we're id- we're identifying those risks, where someone would physically have to do that contract by contract before.

18:11So that's a, another use case that's definitely growing. Um, the obligation management, so pulling out obligations out of all of our contracts. That is the organic growth that every company probably would like to have today in this geopolitical environment we sit in, right, where you can only control so much. Loss of funds, loss of money, loss of anything related to your net revenue at the end of the day is something really important to keep, and if obligation management can be extracted through AI, and then we can follow it and we can automate that, that is a big part of our next journey. And I will say the last thing is contract summaries. Generating those summaries against our policies for the person signing it to show them what is remaining in that contract, how well the legal team did reviewing those contracts from a, a non-standard position to something more standard and more aligned with our risk profile. That's great.

19:04I mean, it's, uh, sounds like there's a, a multiple mountains being climbed inside of the organization, so that's extremely impressive. But we really appreciate both of you coming on and, you know, giving us a look under the hood and what the last couple of years have been like. But seems like an, it's an exciting time over there and, and that, that, uh, the projects are, are being successful and, and, you know, Astra and Agiloft are, are being used properly. Big part of the journey. Great. Thank you for having me. Sure thing. And thanks everybody for listening to another episode of Contract Heroes. Thanks for having us, guys. This episode of the Contract Heroes is sponsored by Koho Consulting. Koho helps organizations of all shapes and sizes find, implement, and manage their chosen CLM tool. Whether your project is buy or sell side led, Koho can help you navigate the waters of the CLM space to make sure that you're getting a product that's going to fit like a glove for years to come. If you'd like to learn more about Koho, visit their website at k-o-h-o consulting dot com.