Contract Data Migration Playbook: Moving from Shared Drives to CLM Without Losing History
Target keywords: contract data migration, migrate contracts to CLM, OCR contract documents, contract metadata mapping.
Why Contract Data Migration Fails (and How to Avoid It)
Most migrations stumble over three issues: incomplete inventories, inconsistent metadata, and weak validation. Shared drives hide duplicates, versions, and image-only scans that a CLM can’t search. Success requires a defensible inventory, a clear data model, and rigorous quality checks.
Build a Defensible Inventory of Contracts
Start with a crawl of every storage location: shared drives, email archives, legacy repositories, and outside counsel links. De-duplicate by file hash and filename patterns, then classify by contract type, counterparty, and status (executed, draft, expired). Create a remediation queue for corrupted or password-protected files.
Design the Contract Data Model
Map core fields—counterparty, effective/expiry dates, renewal terms, auto-renew, governing law, value, business owner—and attach type-specific attributes (e.g., service levels in MSAs, pricing floors in reseller agreements). Keep the model lean: too many fields will slow adoption and degrade accuracy.
OCR, Clause Extraction, and Enrichment
Run OCR on image-only PDFs to enable search. Use clause extraction to identify renewal windows, termination for convenience, assignment, liability caps, and data processing addenda. Normalize party names with a master counterparty table and link child entities to parents to reduce duplicates.
Metadata Mapping & Transformation
Create a mapping spec from legacy columns to CLM fields. Standardize date formats (ISO 8601), currencies, and picklists. Establish rules for conflicting fields (e.g., if Termination for Convenience appears in both master and order form, prefer the order form if its effective date is later).
Gold-Standard Validation
Adopt sample-based QA: for every 200 migrated contracts, perform human validation on 10% with a checklist that confirms effective/expiry dates, renewal terms, counterparty, and links to child docs (SOWs, addenda). Track error rates by vendor and phase to spot systemic issues early.
Cutover Strategy without Business Disruption
Use a “dual-run” period where read access to legacy folders remains while the CLM becomes the system of record for new agreements. For in-flight negotiations, migrate only the latest redline and the approvals trail; pull historical versions post-go-live.
Change Management: Train on the New Source of Truth
Publish a “where to find what” guide, sunset legacy shortcuts, and instrument in-app guides for frequently asked flows (search, renewal calendars, playbook lookup). Measure adoption via weekly searches per user and time-to-contract retrieval.
Measuring Success
Report on searchable contract coverage (% with core metadata), reduction in retrieval time, and renewal surprises avoided. Tie outcomes to business value: fewer missed renewals, faster diligence, and better negotiation leverage from clause analytics.
What to Do Next
Stand up a pilot on one contract type (e.g., NDAs) to fine-tune the model, then scale by business unit. Build a reusable migration playbook so future acquisitions onboard seamlessly.
