Contracts Are Grown, Not Signed: Collaboration and Ownership Decide the Outcome
My first contract review as a junior lawyer intrigued me: the tricks and loops a contract could contain, and the negotiations over words to give them meaning and produce an intended outcome. I still enjoy finding the meeting of minds a contract can bring.
These days I see lawyers using co-pilot and other AI tools to review contracts and prepare them for negotiation. The output is fluent and fast, yet something is consistently off: positions that feel commercially tone-deaf, language no reasonable counterparty would accept, and redlines that miss what the organisation actually cares about.
It saddens me that many accept this. AI has a place, but not at the expense of the context and human collaboration good outcomes require. AI does not produce the intended contractual outcome. Humans do, and humans own the results.
New research shows how unclear contract ownership quietly harms enterprise-wide performance. Workday’s 2026 Contract Intelligence Index Report surveyed nearly 7,000 legal and enterprise professionals across 10 countries. Almost 80% said no more than a few people in their organisation know who owns contracts, let alone manages them.
Contracts are the life garden
Contracts govern nearly every important business relationship, drive revenue, and provide the core context for powering productivity.
I have spent years helping organisations draft, review and extract value from their contracts. I tell clients that contract lawyers are lovers, not fighters: we pour over every detail to capture the intention, so the words become the seeds of a happy union and a garden of ongoing outcomes.
But somehow, we forget the garden after the seed has been sown.
Without the collaborative journey of building, negotiating and understanding the value a contract brings, there is little ability to create ownership.
The lack of clear ownership creates a performance gap and an intelligence divide across organisations. Productivity and outcomes are compromised, and organisations fail to maximise value where there is no clear line of accountability for managing a contract.
Contract ownership is an end-to-end responsibility
Contract ownership is an end-to-end responsibility: collaborative engagement in approving terms and maintaining an authoritative record. After terms are agreed, it extends to monitoring obligations and acting whenever a deadline, risk, or opportunity arises to ensure the intended outcome is met.
Those responsibilities span the organisation. Business areas rely on customer terms, pricing, service commitments, and renewal dates. Procurement and Finance need visibility into supplier obligations, payment terms, and automatic renewals. HR manages agreements for employees, contingent workers, benefits, and service providers. Operations must understand delivery requirements and performance expectations.
When ownership is unclear, an organisation can execute an agreement flawlessly yet be unprepared to manage it long-term. A contract built collaboratively is one people feel they own, and ownership makes it manageable long after signature. Individually the breakdowns look minor, an unexpected charge, a missed deadline, a delayed renewal, and surface as a sales, procurement, or HR problem. Across thousands of agreements, they become a hidden, recurring drag on the business.
A contract is a living thing
Contracts move through a series of handoffs. A business team initiates an agreement, legal reviews or negotiates it, an executive or functional leader approves it, and another person or system stores the final version. After signature, responsibility may return to the originating team or move elsewhere.
Good contracts are not created in isolation. The strongest agreements come from collaborative drafting, where legal, the business, procurement and finance work from shared templates, agreed positions, and common playbooks so commercial intent, risk appetite, and operational reality are captured together from the first draft. The contract becomes a shared plan rather than a document handed down.
Each handoff creates an opportunity for accountability and context to weaken. The Workday research identifies four points where ownership commonly breaks down across organisations worldwide:
Contract approvals: A third (33%) of legal respondents said they are not included in contract approval cycles. Approvals also frequently occur through email, instant messages, virtual calls, and other informal channels with limited continuity and auditability.
Contract storage: More than half of respondents said their organisations lack a centralised, fully integrated contract management system. Contracts remain scattered across paper records (23%), on personal hard drives (22%), and in email inboxes (20%).
Contract management: Only 26% of respondents said contract obligations are tracked consistently, leaving many organisations without reliable visibility into what has been promised, fulfilled, or missed.
Contract enforceability: Nearly two-thirds (63%) of legal respondents said they are responsible for enforcing contracts, including agreements they never approved.
These gaps compound as a contract moves through its lifecycle. Missing approval context makes terms harder to interpret, fragmented storage limits access, and inconsistent tracking lets obligations go unnoticed. When a dispute surfaces, legal teams may inherit the consequences of an agreement they had limited ability to influence.
Responsibility will always move across functions; that is not the problem. Effective contract management requires explicit ownership at every stage, with each obligation connected to someone who has the information and authority to act.
Collaborative workflows ensure contract remain alive
Realising business impact requires shared accountability throughout the contract lifecycle, from creation to the outcomes it is meant to deliver. Rather than assigning contracts to a single owner, enterprise leaders need a collaborative workflow that makes clear, at every stage:
Who has authority to approve each type of agreement
Where the authoritative version of every contract resides
Who owns post-signature obligations, deadlines, and decisions
Which functions need access to specific contractual information
How renewals, risks, and unmet commitments are surfaced
When legal participates, from review through enforcement, and what role AI plays in contract intelligence
These decisions create the foundation for contract intelligence, the ability to extract, organise, and apply information from agreements across the business.
True AI-enabled contract intelligence depends on connecting each insight to a defined workflow, decision, and owner. A renewal alert only creates value when it reaches someone with authority to evaluate the agreement before the deadline.
Organisations that get it right see the impact quickly, with nearly 9 in 10 respondents from the Workday research reporting returns within a year.
AI can improve contract intelligence
AI is only as valuable as the business context it can access. When contracts are connected, governed, and actionable, they become a source of enterprise intelligence, far more than legal documents, helping organisations anticipate risk, protect value, and turn commitments already made into faster, more confident decisions.
Turning contracts into enterprise value
The Workday research underscores that contract accountability is an enterprise priority. Clear ownership helps legal and business teams manage commitments consistently, surface risks and opportunities earlier, and unlock the full value of AI.
Ongoing clarity means connecting every agreement, obligation, and deadline to a defined owner and workflow. Legal gains visibility to give proactive guidance, while business teams act on the commitments within their functions.
Contract intelligence turns the information within agreements into business value felt across the enterprise. Shared accountability puts that intelligence in the hands of people who can act, helping the enterprise protect revenue, control costs, and capture more value from every agreement. Systems and AI take you only as far as your habits allow: culture eats contracts for breakfast if you let it.
The solution is as much about culture as technology
My passion now is working with clients to build workflow into a collaborative tech solution so business, procurement, finance, HR and legal collaborate on one authoritative record rather than trading versions over email.
Our solution connects every obligation, deadline and renewal to a named contributor and maps in legislative and policy requirements to produce consistently compliant contracts. Playbooks are built in, so all outputs meet organisational requirements.
Only once the solution is working can AI be layered on top. Grounded in shared context to surface risks and opportunities and route them to people who can act, contract management becomes a garden tended together, and the arrangement struck at signature delivers the outcome promised.