7 Legal CLM Myths Every Legal Ops Team Should Stop Believing in 2025

Setting the Record Straight

Legacy CLM platforms promised an end-to-end fix for contract chaos. Yet many teams are still buried in intake emails, juggling Jira tickets, or patching together spreadsheets to track work that never becomes a contract.  

Analysts estimate that roughly half of first-time CLM rollouts miss expectations. Your own experience may tell the same story: the build took forever, the tool felt heavy, adoption stalled, and the ROI never surfaced.

The shift is already happening. Legal teams are moving toward modular, “CLM-lite” stacks that give them control over intake, triage, workflow automation, and reporting without forcing every process through a monolithic platform. In that context, misinformation about what Checkbox can or cannot do is more than a nuisance. It slows evaluation, muddies internal conversations, and keeps teams stuck in tools that do not fit.

Let’s clear the air.

What Does CLM Really Mean in 2025?

CLM was designed to be a robust, end-to-end solution that would make contract work more efficient for legal teams. But the modern in-house legal team, and the role it serves within the business, has evolved. And the capabilities of CLM have changed with it. What we refer to as CLM now depends on new factors. And that’s because CLM today can look different than what legal teams might have used before.  

For our purposes, we’re going to put CLM software into three categories: the high-level definition of CLM, legacy (or traditional) CLM, and what we’ve dubbed “CLM-lite.”  

Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM)

Software designed to manage the contract lifecycle from request through renewal. Core capabilities typically include authoring and templates, negotiation workflows, e-signature, repository and search, clause and obligation tracking, and renewal management.

Legacy CLM

Older or monolithic “all-in-one” CLM platforms optimized for contract documents and repositories. These tools often require significant implementation time, customization, and IT or vendor services. They excel at negotiation and storage but usually leave upstream request capture, cross-functional triage, and non-contract legal work outside the system, which can slow adoption and time to value.

CLM-Lite

A modular, workflow-first approach that delivers the contract-adjacent processes most teams need without the weight of a full repository and deep negotiation stack. Typical scope includes request intake, triage, template generation, internal approvals, execution via e-signature, and reporting. CLM-lite integrates with an existing CLM when deeper negotiation or long-term storage is required, or it can stand on its own when those needs are limited. The emphasis is speed to value, legal-owned configuration, and fit to real-world workflows.

Why Distinguish Between Them?

Legacy CLM focuses on the contract document lifecycle (draft, negotiate, store) and often leaves request capture, triage, and other non-contract work outside the system. CLM-lite covers those operational gaps and integrates with CLM when deeper negotiation or repository needs arise. Naming the difference helps you scope the right solution, set realistic timelines, and understand the myths* we tackle next.

*Disclaimer: Myth-busting may involve some shameless self-promotion.

Myth 1: “CLM covers every legal workflow we have”

Reality: Most CLMs are contract-centric by design. They are not built to triage or route requests or approvals outside of contract needs. That work still lands in inboxes, Slack, Jira, or ad hoc forms. When legal visibility depends on those scattered touchpoints, the function stays reactive and opaque.

What to do instead: Separate the contract problem from the operational problem. Map the full range of legal requests and identify what truly needs deep contract features versus what needs fast intake, smart routing, and tracking.

How Checkbox helps: Checkbox centralizes intake for any legal request, automates triage, routes approvals, and tracks everything through to completion. Contracts are just one of many request types that can run through the same hub.

Myth 2: “Checkbox only builds forms, not real workflows”

Reality: A form is only the front door. The heavy lifting happens after submission: conditional paths, automatic escalations, sequential or parallel approvals, task assignments, SLA timers, reminders, and dashboards. Checkbox does all of that. Forms are simply how you collect structured data up front.

What to do instead: Evaluate any tool on what happens after submission. Ask: Can it branch logic? Can I set different approvers based on region, spend, or risk? Can I auto-generate a matter record and report on cycle times?

How Checkbox helps: You design the entire journey: request intake → automated triage → internal approvals and tasks → matter tracking → reporting. Legal can build and adjust each step with a no-code interface. And AI helps with that, but not as a simple, free-floating chatbot. Checkbox applies AI to capture and classify requests and assist triage inside legal-governed workflows.  

Myth 3: “You need a heavy CLM to get real automation”

Reality: Automation is not exclusive to CLM platforms. In fact, tying all automation to one heavyweight system often slows teams down. A modular approach lets you automate quickly where you feel the most pain and expand from there.

What to do instead: Start with the highest-friction workflow. Launch it fast, prove value, then replicate the model across other request types. This approach minimizes risk and change management fatigue.

How Checkbox helps: Teams can often stand up their first high-impact workflow in days or weeks and scale from there. Because legal owns configuration, improvements happen continuously, not in quarterly vendor sprints.

Myth 4: “Replacing or supplementing CLM is a cost sink”

Reality: Many teams pay for expansive CLM features but use a fraction of them. Meanwhile, the real inefficiencies sit outside contracts: intake chaos, manual triage, status black holes. Filling those gaps often costs less and delivers a faster path to ROI than trying to force-fit everything into a single platform.

What to do instead: Audit usage. Where are you spending the most time? Where are requests getting stuck? Where is data going dark? Compare those gaps to what you’re actually paying for today.

How Checkbox helps: Checkbox can sit alongside your CLM to manage what it doesn’t or replace the parts you never needed. Either way, the focus is operational outcomes: faster cycle times, fewer repeat questions, cleaner reporting, happier business stakeholders.

Myth 5: “Workflow tools cannot handle contract steps”

Reality: Checkbox supports key parts of the contract journey: intake, template generation, internal approvals, and parts of execution and storage status sync. Deep negotiation, advanced clause libraries, or large-scale repository search may still be best in a traditional CLM. That’s not a weakness, though; it’s a deliberate decision to put the right work in the right tool.

What to do instead: Define “contract work” precisely. Much of the heavy lift is upstream and downstream of negotiation. If a request never becomes a contract, a CLM doesn’t help. If it does, Checkbox can shepherd it to the point where a CLM is the right handoff.

How Checkbox helps: Use Checkbox to collect the right data, apply the correct template, gain approvals, and route to a signature tool or CLM. After execution, sync back status and key fields so reporting remains centralized.

Myth 6: “You need IT or engineers to maintain these tools”

Reality: If every tweak requires a ticket, your workflows fossilize. Legal needs the freedom to adjust questions, logic, and routing as policies or headcount change.

What to do instead: Demand no-code ownership. Ask potential vendors who will be responsible for changing or maintaining the platform after go-live and how long updates are expected to take.

How Checkbox helps: Checkbox is genuinely no-code. Legal builds and maintains workflows directly. Add a conditional path, change a data field, or spin up a new workflow without pulling engineering or IT into it.

Myth 7: “Platforms like Checkbox do not integrate well with existing stacks”

Reality: Modern legal stacks are ecosystems. Checkbox connects with Slack and Teams for intake, Salesforce for deal context, Jira for engineering tickets, DocuSign and Ironclad for signatures or storage, and more. API keys and lightweight connectors make this straightforward.

What to do instead: List the critical systems you need to talk to. Look for simple authentication and two-way data sync. Do not assume integration = multi-month project.

How Checkbox helps: You do not rip and replace. You connect. Checkbox becomes the orchestration layer that keeps data flowing and stakeholders informed.

How to Evaluate Your Stack: CLM, Checkbox, or Both?

Start with a few core questions:

Do we truly need deep contract negotiation and a full repository?

If yes, CLM plays a role. If no, a lighter stack could be more efficient.

Where are our real bottlenecks?

Intake chaos, manual triage, status blind spots, and copy-paste reporting are common choke points that CLM does not solve.

Who owns change?

If you rely on IT or a vendor for every tweak, your velocity suffers. Legal-owned changes keep you moving.

Are we paying for features we do not use?

Audit actual usage. Many teams find they only needed a slice of what they bought, and a modular model fits better.

Pro Tip: Map Every Request Type Before You Buy Anything

List your top five legal request types from submission to completion. Note who submits, what info you need, who approves, what tasks fire off, where the work lives, and how you report on it.

You will immediately see where CLM stops and where an operational layer like Checkbox adds value. Use that map to guide purchase decisions, not vendor promises.

Ready to See What Checkbox Really Does?

Checkbox can be your CLM-lite operational layer or the perfect partner for the CLM you already have. Either way, you get one place to manage intake, triage, workflows, and reporting across all legal work.

Book a demo to see it in action.