Fifteen years ago, I found myself in a nightmare scenario. The CEO of France’s second-largest telecom company handed me what seemed like a reasonable task: review a thousand vendor contracts to save money.
Six months later, I emerged from the company’s basement archives, having spent countless hours hunting for contracts stuffed in random cabinets, manually reviewing each one, and creating an Excel spreadsheet with 52 columns to track everything. It was a terrible job that no human should have to do. And that experience led me to create Concord.
But here’s what’s fascinating—after a decade helping companies digitise their contracts, I’ve noticed something that almost no one is talking about: finance teams, not legal departments, are increasingly taking over contract management. And AI is rapidly accelerating this shift.
Legal Departments Are Losing Control of Contracts
The reality is stark: among our 1,500+ customers, roughly 65-70% have their contracts managed by finance or operations teams, not by legal. This is especially true in companies with 50 to 1,000 employees. Why? Because CFOs have realised something that many legal teams haven’t: contracts aren’t legal puzzles—they’re financial commitments with legal wrapping.
A contract isn’t interesting because of its perfect clauses. It’s interesting because it tells you exactly how much money is coming in and out of your company for years to come. What finance leader wouldn’t want direct control over that? As one CFO bluntly told me:
“I don’t care about legal risks as much as understanding my cash flow commitments for the next 10 years.”
Think about it. Your customer contracts represent revenue. Your vendor agreements represent expenses. Your employment contracts determine your biggest cost: people. Why wouldn’t finance want to control this vital information?
AI Has Made This Shift Possible
Five years ago, finance teams couldn’t take over contracts even if they wanted to. They lacked the legal expertise to review agreements safely. Enter AI, which has completely changed the equation.
Today’s procurement contract management software can do in seconds what used to take legal teams days. It can automatically extract payment terms, detect unusual clauses, and flag problematic language without requiring a law degree. This means finance teams can now safely manage 90% of routine contracts without legal ever seeing them. On our platform, more than 90% of contracts are signed without any negotiation whatsoever. They’re just getting signed.
The world has changed. People understand they’re not going to be able to negotiate everything. If tomorrow you send a contract to Barclays or HSBC, you’re not going to negotiate that contract. Maybe someday you will if you have enough power, but most companies just don’t have the time or leverage to do this.
London’s Financial Sector Is Leading This Change
London’s financial services firms are at the forefront of this transformation. Several major banks and fintech companies in the City have already restructured their contract management, moving it from legal to finance or operations teams. Why? Because the competitive pressure is immense. When your competitors can close deals in days rather than weeks, you can’t afford to have contracts sitting in legal’s inbox.
One London-based fintech told me they reduced their contract processing time from 12 days to less than 48 hours by implementing AI and moving contract management to their operations team. Their legal department now focuses only on truly novel or high-risk agreements. This isn’t just happening in financial services. I’ve seen the same pattern across insurance, technology, retail, and professional services firms throughout the UK.
What This Means for Legal Departments
If you’re a legal professional reading this, don’t panic. This shift doesn’t mean lawyers will disappear. It means their role will change—for the better. Legal contract management software is freeing legal teams from mind-numbing review work to focus on truly strategic matters. The most forward-thinking legal departments are embracing this shift rather than fighting it.
They’re creating playbooks and templates that other departments can follow. They’re setting policies for AI systems to apply automatically. And they’re focusing their expertise on complex matters that truly require human judgment. Think about it—would you rather spend your day reviewing the same vendor agreement for the hundredth time, or working on that complex international acquisition your company is planning?
The Contract of the Future
If we handed a blank slate to AI and asked it to design an ideal contract from scratch, do you think it would create today’s dense legal documents? Not a chance. When you look at contracts today, they’re absurdly inefficient. Every contract is different. Sometimes the important parts are buried in the middle of 15 clauses, and you can’t even find them. It’s just not a smart way to work.
Within five years, I predict contracts will look completely different:
- They’ll be more like structured databases than documents—closer to financial statements than legal briefs
- They’ll use plain language instead of legalese—because AI can verify their enforceability regardless
- They’ll be self-executing—payments, renewals, and other actions will happen automatically based on contract terms
- They’ll track their own performance—alerting you when obligations aren’t being met
What This Means for UK Companies
For British businesses trying to navigate post-Brexit complexity and economic uncertainty, this transformation represents an enormous opportunity. By shifting contracts from legal cost centres to financial intelligence assets, companies can make faster decisions, reduce overhead, and gain competitive advantages.
The companies that recognise and adapt to this shift will outperform those that cling to outdated processes. It’s that simple. When I talk to UK business leaders who are still managing contracts the old way—sending Word documents back and forth via email and filing them on shared drives—I tell them they’re literally leaving money on the table.
Poor contract management costs companies approximately 9% of their annual revenue in missed savings opportunities, revenue leakage, and avoidable risks. For a £10 million business, that’s £900,000 walking out the door every year.
The Bottom Line
AI isn’t eliminating contracts or legal departments—it’s transforming them into something better. Finance teams are taking the wheel because they understand what contracts truly are: financial commitments that define your company’s future. The question isn’t whether this shift will happen—it’s already well underway. The question is whether you’ll be ahead of the curve or playing catch-up.
As someone who’s spent a decade watching this transformation unfold, I can tell you with certainty: this isn’t just another tech trend. It’s a fundamental restructuring of how companies work. And those who embrace it first will reap the greatest rewards.
Matt Lhoumeau is the Co-founder and CEO of Concord, a contract management platform used by over 1,500 companies worldwide. Prior to founding Concord, Matt worked for the second-largest telecom company in France, where he experienced firsthand the pain of manual contract management—an experience that inspired him to build Concord.
