A strong answer. “Three weeks is a symptom and it's almost never three weeks of lawyering. So the first week I'd spend measuring, not fixing — take the last fifty contracts and timestamp each stage: intake to assignment, assignment to first redline, redline to counterparty, counterparty back to us, back to us to signature.

In every legal team I've seen this in, the answer is the same shape: the actual review is two days and the rest is queue time and waiting on the counterparty. Which means buying a CLM would have fixed the two days and not the nineteen.

Then I'd attack the queue. Most of it is that everything goes to a lawyer regardless of size and risk. So: a tiered intake — standard-form deals under a threshold with no redlines get self-service and never touch legal; mid-tier gets a playbook where sales can accept pre-approved fallback positions themselves; only genuinely non-standard work gets a lawyer. That typically removes half the volume, which fixes the queue without hiring.

And I'd build the fallback playbook with the lawyers rather than for them — three positions per clause, preferred, acceptable, escalate. That's the artefact that actually changes cycle time, and it's cheap.

Then a CLM, once I know what the workflow should be, because implementing a CLM before you've fixed the process encodes the broken one for three years.

And I'd publish the cycle time monthly by stage. The moment sales can see that eight of the nineteen days are the counterparty's, the conversation changes completely.”