Marketing Services Agency

A leading marketing services agency with 350-400 employees experienced the acute pain of inadequate contract management during their 2022 private equity acquisition. During M&A due diligence, the organization couldn't answer basic questions about their contract portfolio. They had no visibility into assignment clauses across their agreements, contracts had expired without either party realizing it, and the team had to manually open and read every single contract to extract critical information for the transaction.

The acquisition pain drove the organization to implement DocuSign CLM over a year ago, hoping to prevent similar crises in their planned 2027 exit. However, the solution largely failed to deliver on its promise. The system required manual attribute tagging for any reporting functionality, creating a massive bottleneck where historical contracts remained untagged and unsearchable. With everyone possessing legal knowledge already over capacity with current deal flow, the migration project stalled completely.

Meanwhile, the marketing services agency's contract volume increased 100% after investing in a sales team, moving from a handful of new MSAs per year to a handful per week. This growth overwhelmed their single contract management resource, who had to review every contract from scratch without AI assistance. DocuSign CLM provided no automated clause extraction or risk flagging capabilities, forcing manual reading of every line to identify key provisions around indemnification, IP rights, termination clauses, and other critical terms.

The DocuSign implementation failed on multiple additional fronts. External clients refused to negotiate within the system's interface, forcing reversion to traditional email-based workflows. The SOW template capabilities were too rigid to accommodate the graphs, pictures, and flexible deliverables that the agency's marketing services engagements required, forcing abandonment of the system for statements of work entirely. The redlining and negotiation processes were cumbersome enough that the team frequently worked outside the system in Outlook, further fragmenting their contract management workflow.

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With a 2027 private equity exit on the horizon and DocuSign CLM failing to deliver value after more than a year of effort, the marketing services agency needed a solution that could genuinely solve their M&A preparedness and operational efficiency challenges. The organization had learned painful lessons from both their 2022 due diligence crisis and their failed first CLM implementation.

Their requirements centered on capabilities DocuSign lacked: AI-powered automatic clause extraction and metadata tagging that would eliminate the manual bottleneck preventing historical contract migration; intelligent search that understood legal concepts rather than requiring exact word matches; flexible SOW templates supporting graphs and custom deliverables for client engagements; and negotiation workflows that accommodated external parties' preferences without forcing them into unfamiliar interfaces.

The M&A preparedness requirement was particularly critical. The organization needed instant retrieval capabilities for assignment clauses, indemnification provisions, IP language, jurisdiction terms, and termination rights—all the categories that had caused friction during the 2022 transaction. With less than three years until their planned exit, they couldn't afford to enter due diligence unprepared again.

Operational efficiency was equally important. As contract volume continued scaling with sales team growth, manual review of every contract was unsustainable. They needed AI capabilities to flag key provisions and risk areas automatically, freeing up capacity for higher-value work like complex negotiations and strategic contract structuring rather than rote contract reading.

The failed DocuSign experience also taught them that user adoption matters. Any solution had to work within the realities of how clients and counterparties actually prefer to negotiate—primarily via Word documents and email—while still capturing contract intelligence and workflow benefits internally. Forcing external parties into unfamiliar systems had proven unworkable.

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