The challenge

A major pharmaceutical company with 12 business units across Europe and North America was managing contracts through a patchwork of local processes that had never been centralised.

The company managed approximately 4,500 active contracts at any given time across supplier agreements, clinical trial agreements, licensing deals, distribution contracts, consulting engagements, real estate leases and inter-company agreements. New contracts were initiated at around 120 per month.

Each business unit had its own contracting process. Some used a legacy document management system. Others used shared drives. Two business units had procured standalone CLM tools that were not integrated with anything else. Templates varied by business unit. Clause language was inconsistent. Approval routes were locally defined and not aligned to the company's delegation of authority.

No single contract repository. There was no central place to find an executed contract. Contract searches could take days.

No clause governance. Each business unit used its own template library. The legal team had published approved clause positions but had no mechanism to enforce them. Deviations were common and usually undiscovered until a dispute arose or an audit was conducted.

Contract turnaround measured in weeks. The average time from contract request to execution was 34 business days. Delays accumulated across the lifecycle: legal review queues, approval routing by email, counterparty negotiation managed through Word documents shared by email, execution requiring wet signatures in some jurisdictions.

No visibility of contractual obligations. Obligation tracking was managed in spreadsheets by individual business units, or not managed at all. The company had missed renewal deadlines on three material supplier contracts in the previous twelve months.

Disconnection from procurement and finance. Procurement sometimes onboarded suppliers before contracts were executed. Finance processed invoices against purchase orders that referenced contracts they could not locate.

The Chief Legal Officer and the Chief Procurement Officer jointly engaged Jalubro to design and implement an enterprise CLM solution.

What Jalubro delivered

Phase 1: Discovery and CLM strategy (10 weeks)

Jalubro deployed three consultants to conduct detailed discovery across all 12 business units. The findings confirmed: 12 different intake processes, 9 different template libraries, 7 different approval routing models, no standardised clause governance and no obligation tracking beyond local spreadsheets.

Jalubro produced a CLM strategy including a vendor-neutral platform assessment, evaluating four CLM platforms against multi-entity support, clause governance, workflow flexibility, regulatory compliance features, integration depth and scalability. Jalubro facilitated the vendor selection process and supported commercial negotiations.

Phase 2: Operating model design (6 weeks, parallel to vendor selection)

Contract categorisation and workflow design. Jalubro defined a contract taxonomy categorising every contract type by risk level, value threshold and regulatory sensitivity. Each category was mapped to a specific workflow with defined approval routes, review requirements and escalation triggers.

Clause library and governance framework. Jalubro consolidated nine existing template libraries into a single, enterprise-wide clause library. For each key risk area, the library defined three positions: preferred, acceptable fallback and hard floor. The clause library was designed to be enforced within the CLM, not published as guidance that lawyers could ignore.

Obligation framework. Jalubro designed automatic extraction of key dates and commitments: renewal dates, termination notice periods, price review triggers, regulatory reporting deadlines and milestone payments. Each obligation was assigned an owner, a reminder schedule and an escalation path.

Delegation of authority mapping. Contract approvals were configured to enforce the delegation dynamically: a contract's value, type and risk category determined the approval route at the point the approval was requested, not at the point the contract was configured.

Phase 3: Platform implementation (7 months)

Implementation was delivered in three waves organised by business unit complexity. Wave 1 covered the four largest business units, representing approximately 60% of contract volume. Wave 2 covered five mid-size units. Wave 3 covered the three smallest units plus inter-company agreements.

Template migration and standardisation. Over 340 contract templates were consolidated into 78 standardised templates with dynamic clause insertion based on contract type, jurisdiction and counterparty category.

Integration with the ERP. When a contract is executed, financial commitment data flows automatically into the ERP, eliminating manual re-keying and ensuring finance visibility from the point of execution.

Integration with procurement. When a supplier contract is executed, the CLM triggers supplier onboarding or update in the procurement system, ensuring the contract is in place before supplier activity begins.

HighQ collaboration layer. Deal rooms for complex negotiations were configured with structured workspaces, version control, redline tracking and secure external sharing, fully integrated with the CLM workflow.

Phase 4: Adoption and managed services (ongoing)

Role-based training was delivered across all 12 business units, tailored by user type: contract requestors, legal reviewers, approvers and administrators. Adoption was measured through a framework tracking platform usage, workflow completion rates, clause library compliance and obligation tracking coverage.

Managed services provide ongoing template management, clause library updates, workflow optimisation and user support. Quarterly reviews assess adoption data and identify opportunities for further automation.

The results

What made the difference