We have begun our CLM journey - and the question of "who owns CLM" has come up.  Will you please share feedback to help me understand who owns your CLM management and the day-to-day administration of the tool and processes - Legal Ops?  IT?  Commercial/Go-To-Market Legal Team? 

Starting from a white canvas, I agree with Colin Levy that LegalOps is likely the right team to own the CLM. However, as you say you have ‘begun your CLM journey’, I’d have a dedicated PMO team responsible for implementing across the org with a venture-like ‘land and expand’ internal sales mindset, focusing first on the championing stakeholders and early adopter teams.

Eg if Procurement brought the CLM initiative to the table in desperate need to manage their supplier and distributor contracts, I’d start by having them - the early adopters - as temporary, self-sufficient owners along with the PMO team, be the first function to implement the CLM. Their drive to adopt will both sell the CLM internally and help the implementation PMO team figure out teething problems before moving on to more reluctant business units and functions.

Once CLM adoption grows within the enterprise, you can start thinking about optimizing for the ideal ‘owner’ from an operational standpoint, but until then the internal sales mindset is more important in my mind.

I appreciate this sounds messy, but core software implementations like this are major corporate transformation projects / change management efforts, which often take years and have high failure rates. I’d take a scrappy execution-driven approach first over strategising for the perfect end-state blueprint at the start only to fail two years. And we’ve all seen the dire stats on CLM implementation failure rates…

I would say legal ops should be the operational head with legal providing a supporting function and other areas like sales and finance having differentiated levels of responsibility and access within the CLM solution.