In-House Leaders Can Turn Contract Data Into Growth Insight

Every quarter, a company’s leadership meets to review revenue numbers, debate pipeline forecasts and discuss which markets to target next. These conversations are sharp, well resourced and genuinely high stakes. They almost always lack one crucial element — and no one in the room realizes it is missing.

Buried inside the company’s legal contracts is a dataset that no one in those conversations systematically reads: the final, negotiated commercial commitments. These determine whether growth is scalable or brittle, whether revenue is durable or built on concessions that erode margins, and whether strategic flexibility remains or quietly slips away in forgotten terms.

Research in 2023 by World Commerce & Contracting and Deloitte Legal, drawing from more than 1,200 organizations, shows that the average enterprise loses 8.6% of contract value due to poor contract management — a figure exceeding 20% for worst performers when pre- and post-signature erosion are combined.[1] For a company generating $500 million in annual revenue, that means a $43 million problem is hiding in plain sight — not in a competitor’s strategy, but in your own filing cabinet.

Procurement does not have this information; it only captures approved spend, not final executed terms, negotiated exceptions or the resulting economic constraints. Finance does not have it either; it tracks realized revenue, not the underlying contractual structures and concessions that drove it. This intelligence exists in one place: Legal. Yet, in most organizations, it remains there — untranslated and unused — while every other function decides without it.

A Profession at an Inflection Point

The legal profession has spent years making the case for a seat at the strategic table, and by most measures, we are getting it. A 2024 survey of 289 general counsel and in-house legal leaders by OpenText and Corporate Counsel Business Journal found that 87% agreed the general counsel role is shifting from traditional legal adviser to strategic C-suite partner.

The Association of Corporate Counsel’s 2026 chief legal officers survey — its 27th annual edition, spanning 1,049 chief legal officers across 43 countries — documents the expansion of CLO responsibilities into artificial intelligence governance, regulatory strategy and enterprise risk management, and reports that 36% of legal departments now actively implement generative AI.[2] A 2025 global study of 500 CLOs and general counsel commissioned by Axiom notes that today’s legal leaders speak the language of law and business equally fluently, operating as enterprise change agents rather than just managing legal departments.[3]

That is real progress. Yet there remains a gap between the title and the tool kit. In-house legal teams face mounting pressure to prove their strategic value, while a persistent lack of metrics stands in the way. The answer is not increased headcount or larger outside counsel budgets. It is learning to interpret and utilize the data legal teams already hold.

The Three Questions Only Legal Can Answer

After nearly two decades as a general counsel and senior legal leader across gaming, financial services and fintech, I have come to believe something that took me longer than it should have to fully articulate: The most important role legal can play in a growth company is not risk mitigation; it is intelligence generation.

Contract data can answer three questions that no other enterprise dataset can, and the answers change how the business understands what it is actually building.

The Legal Intelligence Framework

These are not abstract legal questions. They determine whether growth creates lasting value or unravels when the business scales, divests or acquires.

Research from UnitedLex is clear: Contract intelligence should not be viewed as a standalone niche solution for legal departments, but as a cross-enterprise asset enabling sales, procurement and finance to make better data-driven decisions.[4]

What This Looks Like in Practice

In 2025, I advised on more than 450 complex commercial agreements — strategic partnerships, enterprise software-as-a-service platforms, AI vendor contracts, and cloud infrastructure deals across domestic and international markets. What matters is not the volume, but the infrastructure to read those agreements as a dataset. Measuring them alongside a large sample of repository contracts, and integrating risk assessments, service-level agreements and vendor performance data, surfaces patterns that no single agreement could show.

Which deal structures consistently protected margins? Which concessions created long-term drag? Which terms appeared repeatedly in relationships that later required renegotiation? The answers are there, and they yield strategic insight into the quality, durability and economic structure of the company’s commercial relationships that no finance dashboard or procurement report has ever provided.

One pattern consistently surfaces in this work: A gap exists between what the business believes contracts say and what they actually say.

Map termination notice windows across many agreements and compare them to vendor performance data. Concentration risks thought to be managed turn out to be structural. Negotiating leverage that seemed clear turns out to be contractually unsupported. And some opportunities — blocked exclusives or locked pricing — offer more flexibility than expected, because nobody has read the actual language recently. The intelligence was always there, living in the contracts, invisible to everyone but legal.

Legal’s highest value isn’t just protecting a company from risk but actively building the foundation for sustainable and strategic growth. Legal teams that develop infrastructure for contract intelligence empower organizations to confidently pursue bold initiatives.

Where AI Raises Both the Opportunity and the Stakes

Generative AI has changed the economics of this conversation. Previously, a team of lawyers would spend weeks extracting and synthesizing data from hundreds of agreements; now, this can happen in hours.

The global legal AI market was valued at $2.1 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $7.4 billion by 2035, growing at a 13.1% annual rate, with contract life cycle management currently accounting for approximately 31% of legal AI revenue, according to a 2025 report from Future Market Insights.[5] Thomson Reuters’ 2025 Generative AI in Professional Services Report — based on a survey of 1,702 global professionals — found that 26% of legal organizations now use generative AI, nearly double the 14% reported in 2024.[6]

There is an important distinction worth drawing. Legal departments using AI primarily to speed up existing work are capturing efficiency gains — real and valuable. Legal departments using AI to synthesize contract data across hundreds or thousands of agreements, identify structural patterns and surface insights no human team could produce at scale are building something qualitatively different: a genuinely differentiated strategic capability.

The Association of Corporate Counsel’s 2025 survey of 284 CLOs, general counsel and legal operations professionals found that 96% agreed generative AI can help legal leaders better prove their strategic value to the business.[7] The technology is ready. The prerequisite — a legal function structured to generate that value in the first place — is the harder problem, and the more important one.

What Leadership Needs to Do Differently

Two structural changes are within reach of most organizations.

First, reframe legal contract data as an enterprise asset, not a departmental record. Integrate contract analytics with finance, procurement and strategy workflows — not to let legal dominate, but to ensure the intelligence in executed agreements informs those functions. The global contract life cycle management market, valued at $1.8 billion in 2026 and projected to reach $5.4 billion by 2036 at a 12% annual growth rate according to Future Market Insights, signals that more enterprises now recognize this opportunity.[8]

The second change is to involve legal before decisions are made, not after. The most valuable general counsel do not just review final term sheets; they are present when deal structures are formed. They surface contractual constraints before market entries go public, and they identify provisions that could disrupt an acquisition long before it becomes a crisis. Early involvement is not just better — in legal intelligence, early is the entire point.

The question worth asking is not whether your legal team is managing risk well — most legal teams do. The question worth asking is whether your legal team is generating the intelligence that makes the business smarter about what it is actually building, and whether what it is building will hold at scale.

That answer lives in the contracts. It always has.

The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of his employer, its clients, or Portfolio Media Inc., or any of its or their respective affiliates. This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal advice.

Sources

1. World Commerce & Contracting and Deloitte. (June 2023). The ROI of Contracting Excellence. Data collected from 1,236 organizations between April 2021 and December 2022. Available at worldcc.com.
2. Association of Corporate Counsel. 2026 ACC Chief Legal Officers Survey.
3. Axiom. Legal departments accelerating shift to value-based budgeting.
4. UnitedLex. (2025). Evaluating Contract Intelligence Solutions in 2025.
5. Future Market Insights. (2025). Legal AI Market: Global Market Analysis Report, 2025–2035.
6. Thomson Reuters Institute. (April 2025). 2025 Generative AI in Professional Services Report.
7. Association of Corporate Counsel and Everlaw. (November 17, 2025). The Role of Generative AI in Proving Corporate Law Department Value.
8. Future Market Insights. Contract Lifecycle Management Market.