It’s May. Let’s Talk About the 2025 CLM Trends That Are Actually Happening

We’re now five months into 2025. Which means it’s a good time to stop predicting trends and start grading them. What’s actually happening in the world of contract management, and what’s still stuck in theory?

AI: The headliner, the workhorse … the misunderstood intern

The trend that got the most airtime was indisputably AI. Everyone got excited, most got distracted. By January, every thought leader had declared 2025 “The Year of AI in CLM.” I know, they weren’t wrong. But most folks heard “AI” and translated it into “hands-off automation (with legal’s stamp of approval) and zero risk.”

That… hasn’t exactly panned out. Not all is lost though!

What’s real:

• AI can scan and summarize a 25-page contract faster than most people can open the file.

• It can surface non-standard language, detect missing clauses, and even spot common redline patterns.

• It can organize, tag, and classify contract types with some scary-good accuracy.

What it can’t do:

• Interpret nuance the way a human does when reading around the clause, not just through it.

• Catch the quiet landmines hidden in business logic.

• Own decisions. AI can assist, but it won’t take accountability.

Bottom line? It’s not your legal team. It’s a very fast intern with perfect memory and no context.

Modularity: Still More Aspirational Than Operational

Another big 2025 trend was “modular CLM.”
In theory, you’d start with a contract repository, plug in e-signature, bolt on intake workflows, and snap in AI review like it’s contract-themed Tetris, just carefully moving around stackable pieces as you scale.

Sounds good, right up until you try to get five disconnected tools to agree on what “effective date” means. Modularity only works when when there’s structure underneath it.. Most teams aren’t there. They’re retrofitting workflows on top of duct-taped processes and calling it architecture. Not to mix two games in one post, but … Jenga.

If you want modular CLM to work, have a foundation that solves the core:

• Intake

• Review

• Approval

• Obligations

• Renewals

Then build outward. Not the other way around.

Compliance: How is this still a ‘trend’?

Earlier this year, compliance was everywhere. Every “Trends for 2025” article wrapped it in a candy-coated shell to make it more palatable. Data privacy, ESG disclosures, vendor risk, contractual obligations, they all made the list. Nestled somewhere between AI automation and modular CLM.

But five months in, I’m still stuck on the same question: Why is compliance being treated like a bullet point? It’s May now, and in practice, most mid-sized companies are operating exactly as they did last year.

Vendor agreements are still managed in spreadsheets. Clause language is still being dug out of someone’s inbox. And somewhere, a file named Q1_Acme_MSA_Final_v2_UseThisOne2 is still sitting on a desktop, marked “last modified: 6 months ago.”

If compliance was ever a “trend,” it never landed. It got new packaging, got added to a lot of sales pitches and slide decks. But it didn’t get built into systems.

That gap is playing out everywhere: Organizations are being asked to describe their internal frameworks, and they’re stalling because nothing’s in place yet. AuditBoard’s recent research confirms it: companies are aware of the rising pressure, but few have fully operational frameworks to support it. And while AI shows promise in automating compliance monitoring, most teams are still “exploring” its potential rather than applying it to actual workflows.

You can’t prove compliance if the system behind it is still half-manual.
You can’t respond to audits if your vendor access logs live in five different tools.
And you definitely can’t reduce risk if every third-party review is treated like a surprise.

Compliance should never be a trend, it’s infrastructure. If it’s still sitting in the “to do” column, you’re not alone. But by this point in the year, it shouldn’t be a forward-looking priority, it should be recognized for what it is: an operational gap. Until it’s built into the system, into the intake, the workflows, the reviews … it’s just another recurring fire in disguise.

The AI Assist Isn’t Enough

Let’s come back to the AI conversation, because here’s where most companies are stuck:

They bought the pitch, installed the tools, fed in the documents. So, they have more visibility, right? That depends entirely on what was done with it. AI can tell you what is in the contracts. But it can’t build a process around that information. By that I mean, if you don’t have:

• Standardized fields

• Defined review stages

• Permission levels by contract type

• Lifecycle stages with automation triggers, etc.

…then AI is just turning your messy basement into a well-labeled inventory of garbage.

The teams seeing ROI from AI are the ones who already built the structure. The ones using it to accelerate smart workflows, not replace them.

So Where Does That Leave Us?

The 2025 trends were not wrong. AI is changing the game. Modular platforms are the future. Compliance is the pressure cooker everyone said it would be.

But none of these trends fix anything on their own. Not unless you have a CLM system that turns those ideas into actual process.

The companies that are winning right now have stopped chasing the trends and started building systems that are using the trends.

No one ever said structure is sexy. But it is what separates scalable from stuck.