Your contracts pass through four teams. Not one of them can say where they are.
Sales, Procurement, Finance and Legal all touch the same contract and all lose time in the same handover. This 4-page brief shows what AI already changed in DACH contract work, what the gaps cost you, and the five fixes you can start this week.
4 pages, not 40 · Instant download · No sales call required
3 more pages inside
Docusign & Deloitte, 2026 · The figures from our own DACH research are in the report
One broken handover, four different symptoms
Find your team, then find out what it is costing you
We spent months talking to General Counsels, Procurement leads, CFOs, COOs and Contract Managers across DACH. Everyone described the same breakdown from a different seat.
Sales & Revenue
The deal is agreed and then the last mile eats a week. The draft goes out as a Word attachment and comes back with tracked changes from someone you have never met.
In the report
- Where the handover between Sales and Legal actually breaks, and why it is rarely a legal question
- A count you can run across your next three negotiations that explains your whole cycle time
Procurement & Supplier Management
You negotiated the terms once. Six months on nobody can say which version was signed, where it sits, or when it renews itself.
In the report
- A 15-minute inventory that exposes how many places supplier contract work is happening today
- Why one shared environment beats point solutions as soon as four teams touch the same contract
CFO & Finance
Contract admin never appears as a line item in your budget. It appears as committed hours you are already paying for.
In the report
- What roughly 100 contracts a year cost in working hours and staff cost, with the arithmetic shown
- The payback window DACH companies report after moving to an integrated platform
Legal & Compliance
Colleagues are already pasting contract clauses into AI tools nobody approved. From August you will be asked who changed what, and when, and the answer has to hold up.
In the report
- How far unapproved AI use in document work already reaches, measured two independent ways
- The one logging question to settle before the EU AI Act obligations bite
The biggest problem in everyday contract work is not a legal problem. It is a systems problem.
What the report settles
Six questions you cannot answer from a dashboard
Each one is answered with a figure, a named source and the first step to take. The numbers themselves are in the PDF.
The bottleneck nobody budgets for
Teams across DACH named one daily blocker more often than any other. It is not a shortage of legal expertise, and training will not fix it.
The hours that vanish before the work starts
Before anyone drafts or reviews a single clause, a measurable slice of every week goes somewhere else entirely. We put a number on it.
Shadow AI in your document flow
Two independent surveys measure how many people already use unapproved AI tools at work. The second one also records what they paste into them.
Assumed use versus approved access
Most companies assume staff use private AI tools; far fewer offer a sanctioned alternative. The gap between those two figures is the governance problem.
Ambition against execution
Two thirds of companies see concrete potential in AI for contract processes. A much smaller share has anything running in production, and the report sizes the gap.
The date the rules change
From August 2, 2026 high-risk AI systems carry documentation and accountability duties, with fines attached. What that means for a contract touched by AI is spelled out.
For the business case: We costed a year of contract work at a typical mid-market volume, in working hours and in euros. It is the number the CFOs we showed it to asked us to repeat, and it is on page 1.
Free download
Twenty minutes to read, one meeting to act on
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- Every figure sourced and dated, none of it recycled
- Written for Sales, Procurement, Finance and Legal together
- 5 fixes with the first step for each, no budget needed
- 4 pages, so you can forward it instead of summarising it
Download the report
Four fields, then the PDF is yours.
Sources in the report: top.legal, State of Legal AI & Contract Collaboration · DACH 2026 (proprietary research) · Docusign & Deloitte, 2026 · Commerce & Contract Management Institute, 2026 · BearingPoint, 2025 · Bitkom, 2026 · ESCRIBA, 2026 · EU AI Act, Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 · Germany's Fourth Bureaucracy Relief Act (BEG IV)
Next step
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