The End of
Contract Chaos

Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) is a software solution that helps organizations automate contract processes from creation through execution, compliance tracking, and renewal. CLM centralizes contract authoring, approval routing, negotiation, e-signature integration, obligation tracking, and renewal management in one system.

Organizations using CLM automatically generate contracts from pre-approved templates, eliminating manual drafting. They can track contract status in real time, from creation to expiration, with automated alerts for contractual obligations, renewals, and compliance deadlines.

According to Deloitte’s ROI of Contract Excellence report, organizations experience an average of 8.6% contract value erosion, which CLM helps prevent.

Zeal is a CLM platform built to support industries with high volumes of legal documentation and complex compliance needs, including staffing, entertainment, finance, hospitality, and nonprofit organizations. Unlike generic CLM platforms, Zeal combines advanced technology with:

• Dedicated Support: Receive implementation assistance and ongoing support from Zeal’s team of experts, not just a help desk ticket system. The platform is designed to accelerate your contract operations.
• Platform Customization: Benefit from tailored workflows, features, and integrations that align with your business and industry processes. Zeal adapts to your operations, not the other way around.
• Industry Expertise: Access legal operations consulting and contract analysis from specialists who understand your sector’s unique requirements and challenges.

Successful contract management is not solely a product of process adherence; it is heavily dependent on the human elements of leadership and management.

This combination of specialized software and expert support enables faster deployment, better contract outcomes, and greater visibility than other CLM solutions.

CLM delivers measurable financial, operational, and strategic advantages:

Financial Benefits:

Organizations recover an average of 8.6% in contract value, which is typically lost to poor management, representing millions in revenue leakage losses from missed renewals, unauthorized discounts, and invoice errors. CLM implementations show approximately 125% ROI in year one, reaching up to 300% total ROI over three years.

Operational Efficiency:

Contract cycle times decrease by 40% through automation, with drafting and review time reduced by up to 80%. Teams handle significantly higher contract volumes without additional headcount, thanks to CLM’s elimination of manual tasks such as metadata entry and approval routing.

Risk Management and Compliance:

Centralized contract repositories create a single source of truth, eliminating scattered files and version confusion. AI-powered systems flag risky clauses during negotiation and identify compliance gaps before they result in violations or fines.

Strategic Value: Contract analytics provide visibility into vendor performance trends, upcoming obligations, and renewal forecasts, transforming contracts from administrative documents into strategic business intelligence. Legal teams shift from reactive document processing to proactive value creation.

Without CLM, organizations face significant financial and operational risks from manual contract management. According to Deloitte, organizations experience an average of 8.6% erosion in contract value. For a company with $50 million in annual contract value, 8.6% erosion represents $4.3 million in recoverable value.

Meanwhile, manual processes lead to various operational failures, with 25% of in-house lawyers reporting that they store contracts in desk drawers, making critical documents difficult to locate.

Beyond financial losses, organizations risk missed renewal deadlines, ambiguous contract language, value leakage from unenforced terms and scope creep, and the inability to track obligations in real time.

CLM tackles these and many more issues by centralizing contracts in a searchable repository, automating workflows and renewal alerts, and providing real-time visibility into contract performance through analytics and reporting. These benefits transform contracts from an administrative necessity into strategic advantages.

Zeal provides contract management solutions across many industries, with specialization in five sectors that have high contract volumes and complex compliance requirements:

• Entertainment: Companies in this sector track talent options, rights agreements, and multi-party contracts across projects. Zeal automates contract option management and renewal tracking, ensuring deadlines are met. Our legal operations specialists conduct contract data audits to identify copyright violations, double-billing, and other revenue-impacting issues.
• Staffing: Staffing agencies manage hundreds of contracts monthly across candidates, clients, and service agreements. Legal synchronization between staffing departments is essential, which is why our ATS integrations allow teams to auto-populate candidate and sales contracts from their own data, connecting all teams through a unified workflow. Zeal’s JobDiva integration eliminates manual data entry and reduces time-to-hire by 40%. Zeal is trusted by 5 of the 7 top U.S. staffing firms.
• Finance: Banks and financial institutions require secure compliance tracking tools for vendor and third-party contracts, loan agreements, and service contracts. Zeal provides SOC 2 Type II-certified security and automated compliance reporting, ensuring regulatory requirements are met through a comprehensive audit trail.
• Hospitality: For hotels, restaurants, and other hospitality operators, Zeal centralizes contract management with location-specific workflows and franchise agreement templates, streamlining front- and back-office operations across multiple locations.
• Nonprofit: Grant-funded organizations track donor agreements, fiscal sponsorship contracts, and grant compliance requirements using enterprise-level tools designed for nonprofit accessibility.

Features usually vary by product, but the essential features a CLM should include are:

• Contract Repository and Search: A centralized storage with full-text search, version control, and role-based access controls to replace scattered files and email chains.
• Automated Workflows: Contract intake forms, approval routing, e-signature, and automated renewal alerts that eliminate manual tracking.
• Templates and Clause Libraries: Pre-approved contract templates and standardized clauses that ensure consistency and reduce legal review time.
• Collaboration Tools:Real-time redlining, commenting, and negotiation tracking with complete  audit trails showing every change.
• Analytics and Reporting:Dashboards tracking contract cycle times, upcoming renewals, and compliance obligations to prevent missed deadlines.
• Integration Capabilities: Connections to CRM (Salesforce), ATS (for staffing), ERP systems, and productivity tools (Microsoft Office, Slack) to eliminate duplicate data entry.
• AI tools: Advanced platforms also offer AI-powered metadata extraction and risk analysis to identify problematic clauses during negotiation.

Systems and naming can vary by industry, with the stages more closely mirroring the requirements of the contract process. However, contract management typically unfolds in three phases:

• Pre-Award (Planning): Organizations define their needs, research potential vendors, and create solicitation documents such as RFPs. They evaluate proposals, compare pricing, and select the supplier most likely to deliver successfully.
• Award (Negotiation): Both parties negotiate terms, redline contract language, and address concerns around pricing, deadlines, and responsibilities. Stakeholders from legal, finance, and operations review the agreement before final signatures.
• Post-Award (Performance): Once signed, contract managers track whether both sides meet their obligations, deliverables, payment schedules, quality standards, and deadlines. They handle changes when needed, monitor vendor performance, and manage renewals or closeouts when contracts end.

CLM software automates routine tasks across these phases by generating drafts from templates, routing approvals to the right people, sending renewal alerts, and tracking obligations so nothing gets missed.

Document management systems organize files in folder structures, storing contracts alongside presentations, spreadsheets, and other documents. These tools help teams find and share files, but treat every document the same way. The difference between these systems and CLM tools is significant in terms of document repository capabilities.

CLM software takes a different approach, being data-centric rather than folder-based. Instead of simply storing contract files, CLM extracts and structures contract data, including parties, dates, obligations, and renewal terms, and creates relationships between contracts that enable automation.

This structural difference allows CLM, unlike other repository tools, to automate contract-specific tasks. These include generating contracts from templates, routing approvals based on contract value, tracking obligations, sending renewal alerts before deadlines, and connecting contract terms to business systems such as CRM and ERP.

DocuSign provides e-signature capabilities, the step in which parties sign contracts. However, an e-signature is just one phase of the contract lifecycle. CLM software manages the entire process, creating contracts from templates, routing drafts for internal approvals, collaborating on redlines during negotiation, integrating e-signature for execution, tracking contractual obligations after signing, monitoring renewal deadlines, and analyzing contract performance across your portfolio.

DocuSign answers “How do we sign this contract?” CLM answers “How do we create, negotiate, track, and renew this contract?” Many organizations prefer a complete solution that is more accessible, a CLM platform that either includes a built-in e-signature or integrates directly with e-signature platforms. This ensures contracts are managed end-to-end, not just executed and forgotten.

DocuSign CLM, Icertis, and Agiloft are enterprise CLM platforms designed for large legal departments that manage contracts across all business functions.

We take a different approach, as we specialize in five industries with high contract volumes, staffing, entertainment, finance, hospitality, and nonprofits,and combine CLM software with legal operations consulting.

Zeal has three key differentiators:​

• Industry Specialization: Pre-built workflows for staffing (ATS integration), entertainment (option management), finance (regulatory compliance), hospitality (multi-location franchise agreements), and nonprofits (grant management and fiscal sponsorship).
• Software + Services: Dedicated implementation support, custom templates,  and legal ops consulting, not self-service software.
• Proven Vertical Outcomes: Staffing agencies reduce time-to-hire by 40%, nonprofits achieve 100% grant compliance, and are trusted by 5 of the top 7 U.S. staffing firms.

Choose Zeal if you’re in one of our five specialized industries and want industry expertise, not generic enterprise software. Choose enterprise CLM if you need horizontal functionality across all departments.