A billing software company breaks silos and streamlines NDAs with Conga CLM and Discovery AI 

Challenge

As a growth catalyst for its customers, the company’s legal team processes hundreds of contracts at any given time, many consisting of different clauses and falling under different jurisdictions. As the business grew through market expansion and new acquisitions, so did the complexities the legal team had to navigate to maintain the high standards customers have come to expect.  

One of the organization’s biggest challenges was its siloed structure between business units. While each department had its own well-established workflows, cross-departmental collaboration was often limited and inefficient due to disjointed processes. Another challenge was the inconsistent data capture, which prevented the legal team from tracking how long contracts were taking, how many versions were created, or what was causing delays.  

Recognizing that contract management needed to become a strategic enabler, not a bottleneck, the company committed to a new, unified legal operations model. The goal was simple: establish a single, company-wide process for drafting and negotiating contracts, and equip the legal team with the tools and data needed to work faster, more consistently, and with less risk.

After evaluating several contract management platforms, the business implemented Conga CLM for Salesforce with the CLM Word plug-in to centralize contract storage, bring reporting under one roof and allow legal to work in their preferred tools. But to truly scale, they needed more than visibility—they needed intelligence.  

The next phase of their transformation focused on applying AI and machine learning to automate low-risk processes, surface insights, and unlock new levels of efficiency across the full contract lifecycle. 

Solution

Once the team settled into their new workflows with Conga CLM, they implemented Discovery AI—Conga's powerful AI add-on that helps businesses extract data and insights—to streamline legal review and improve visibility into their contract lifecycle management. The decision to layer AI-powered insights into their contract management workflows aligned closely with a core guiding principle, encouraging bold thinking, inventive solutions, and a collaborative mindset unafraid to challenge the status quo.

The company first applied Discovery AI to their managed service agreements (MSAs) and general terms and conditions. However, the business didn’t get the efficiency gains it expected since not all attorneys had access to Conga. Things quickly changed when the team started using Discovery AI for handling its Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs). They worked with Conga to map the NDA agreement type to a predefined set of four terms—i.e., smart clauses—that reflect different risks identified within the NDAs. As Conga’s AI ingested these third-party documents, it could scan for those clauses and flag them as red or green based on their risk level.  

This automation was a game-changer. Instead of having to approve the entire NDA upfront, a contract manager in the legal department was now flagged only if any of the four clauses existed in the NDA, making the contract process much faster. If no risky clauses were present, the NDA could bypass legal review entirely and be executed the same day. This targeted AI-driven approach reduced NDA review time by 75%, delivering tangible gains in productivity.

The business has since applied a similar strategy to its pre-legal Purchase Orders (POs) and Statements of Work (SOWs), enabling sales and other teams to handle these limited-purpose agreements independently, provided they fell below a defined dollar threshold.  

Results

Since implementing these changes, there have been significant improvements across every type of contract the teams manage.

Since adopting Conga CLM, the legal department has been able to further the company’s goals of eliminating silos and driving consistent contract processes—not only within their own department, but across the whole business. Now, any legal resource can pick up another person’s work and know the entire history by reviewing the Conga record. Conga’s AI allows managers to review documents within Word while also viewing risk scoring and relevant insights, enabling contract managers to review documents faster and focus on more strategic tasks.  

The legal department recently adopted Conga CLM’s Smart Search feature, which enables natural-language searches within documents, helping them save even more time during the document review process.  

Today, the business can monitor time to execution across contract types and quickly spot what’s working—and what’s not. When one SOW took eight days to sign instead of the usual one, the team traced the delay to a record being assigned to someone on leave instead of a shared queue. With consistent reporting in Conga, issues like this are easy to catch and correct, enabling the legal team to apply lessons learned and continuously improve processes across the business.