With its recent acquisition of CLM Matrix, ELM Solutions can now satisfy an urgent request from clients, and the CLM Matrix team now has a platform to bring their message to a much larger audience.
A Vision for CLM
When Bill Pugh and Tim Sparks started CLM Matrix, their goal was to create a useful tool that would help companies manage their contracts, trade agreements, and other important documents more efficiently and effectively than they ever had. This was a simple idea, but it meant accounting for a range of company sizes, organizational models, policies, workflows and preferences. In order to be the best, they knew they would have to adapt to their clients’ needs, not ask clients to adapt to their solution.
As legal operations teams assumed more responsibilities for contract management, they were also being asked to minimize administrative costs while managing large numbers of contracts. It therefore became increasingly common for these teams to turn to CLM providers who could do more than simply sell them a tool, and also act as strategic partners. The CLM Matrix team knew they could help meet the needs of these organizations, but they wanted to go beyond that and provide easy-to-use software that would support improved relationships with vendors and customers, decrease inflated costs and ensure compliance.
Building the Best
CLM Matrix’s applications were developed to deliver this rich functionality. In order to be sure each client could tailor the solution according to their particular needs quickly and simply, they built in a wizard-driven, no-code configuration tool. This allows clients the flexibility they need for both rapid deployment and making changes quickly as their business and processes evolve and improve over time – all without the need for coding.
Unlike others in the busy CLM market, the enterprise offering from CLM Matrix boasts a combination of very high customer satisfaction and industry recognition. In fact, it was ranked the second highest product offering in the 2019 Q1 CLM Forrester Wave report. It’s also one of the few CLM applications in which the document generation capabilities are built with a clause-based, instead of template-based, architecture, which reduces administration costs for governance of terms and conditions. Additionally, documents can be generated natively in Microsoft Word and PDF formats without plug-ins, providing users familiar and intuitive tools without the need for training.
Moreover, to serve organizations with a global reach, the team built their products with support for multiple languages. As a result, CLM Matrix customers are able to manage contract documents in over 90 different languages out-of-the-box. To further enable clients to exercise their preferences and meet a huge variety of needs, they offered both on-premise and cloud SaaS options.
By continually staying at the forefront of emerging technologies, CLM Matrix has delivered the most cost–effective, agile solutions demanded by today’s challenging legal and business environments.
Expanding on ELM
While the CLM Matrix team was hard at work perfecting the art of contract lifecycle management, we at ELM Solutions were increasingly hearing from corporate legal operations teams that they needed a better way to manage contracts, and we set out to help customers address this gap. CLM was a strong adjacency that aligned with our products as well as Wolters Kluwer’s strategy of providing a portfolio of expertise on a growing number of legal operations-related needs.
CLM departmental solutions are becoming enterprise-wide solutions, and with law departments increasingly involved in company-wide contract oversight, it made sense for us to find a world-class CLM product to fold into our own award-winning legal management solution portfolio.
We knew that CLM Matrix’s high quality technology and customer satisfaction would be an excellent addition for our broad customer base and trusted leadership position. We are pleased to introduce our customers to this first-rate CLM solution and grateful for the opportunity to add the CLM Matrix team’s extensive expertise to ours.
A Meeting of the Minds
CLM Matrix and Wolters Kluwer’s ELM Solutions make a formidable team. We knew immediately that our similarities would make it easy for our teams to integrate. We share a sharp focus on customer needs, a culture of empowering employees to be proactive in preventing and solving problems, and a commitment to delivering value quickly and consistently.
With the addition of CLM Matrix, ELM Solutions has extended its best-in-class portfolio of products and services for corporate legal and claims departments. The customers we’ve talked to are excited about the possibilities this acquisition has created for them, and so are we. As Jonah Paransky, ELM Solutions Executive Vice President and General Manager, has noted, “We are thrilled to respond to our customers by delivering solutions that provide deep contract management expertise, a strong global presence, and intuitive technology to the customer experience that will improve the legal operations workflow.”
I know I speak for both the longstanding ELM Solutions team, as well as our new colleagues from CLM Matrix, when I say that we couldn’t be more excited to add industry-leading CLM capabilities as a part of ELM Solutions’ top-tier offerings.
Published July 5, 2019.
