Contract management tools may be all the rage at the moment, but there's a strong chance that very few organizations are actually exploiting those tools to their fullest potential. Tuesday's "Optimizing Legal Ops Outcomes with Technology: A Decision Framework with a Focus on Data Management and the Importance of Contract Data" panel, held during March's continuation of Legalweek(year) 2021, examined where businesses are going wrong with their contracts and how to fix it.

But first, some fun facts. The panel opened with statistics pulled from the Association of Corporate Counsel's (ACC) "2020 Legal Ops Benchmarking Report," specifically data that tracked where the adoption of a legal ops function has had the most impact on functional maturity.

E-discovery and litigation functions, for example, saw an almost 70% improvement in maturity among companies with a legal ops function. On the other end of the spectrum was contract management functions, which saw roughly a 10% improvement. Conversely, contract management were also shown to be the second most widely adopted piece of legal technology behind e-signature tools.