Ask most legal or business leaders what’s buried inside their contracts, and the answers are usually vague. Someone in legal knows. It depends on the deal. We have templates. It’s under control. But the reality is, few companies truly understand what’s in their signed agreements across the board. That lack of clarity comes at a cost.
Contracts aren’t just legal paperwork. They’re business signals. They reflect what you’re willing to trade, how much risk you’re comfortable with, and what kind of relationships you want to build with customers, vendors, and partners. They’re not just about enforcement. They’re about alignment. And most legal teams are missing the opportunity to use that information to make more informed decisions.
In a recent episode of “Notes to My (Legal) Self,” Flo Nicolas, a legal tech strategist and founder of Get Tech Smart, offered a perspective many legal leaders need to hear. Flo built her career negotiating and managing licensing agreements in one of the country’s largest telecommunications companies. She wasn’t sitting in a legal silo. She was working cross-functionally, alongside engineers, vendors, and business units, and using contracts as operational blueprints. “When you’re reviewing and negotiating license agreements across departments, you see firsthand how much depends on clarity,” she explained. That clarity, or lack of it, impacts delivery, accountability, and outcomes across the entire company.
And yet, in most organizations, contracts are created in isolation and managed as one-offs. Legal negotiates the terms. Business teams execute the deal. After that, the contract gets buried in a shared drive or a CLM, rarely touched again unless something goes wrong. What gets lost in that handoff is the data, the patterns, the trends, and the inconsistencies that could be used to improve not just legal performance but business outcomes.
Flo pointed out that legal operations is one of the few functions capable of bridging that divide. “Legal ops is uniquely positioned as a conduit across departments,” she said. “If they don’t bring this stuff to light, who will?” The truth is, you don’t need generative AI or a full CLM rollout to start learning from your contracts. You need a mindset shift. You need to treat contracts as data because they are.
This means understanding which terms you negotiate most, which positions you consistently fall back on, and where language varies across geographies or departments. It means looking at where risk shows up repeatedly and where standardization might free up resources for more strategic work. It means aligning your templates not just with legal preferences but with how the business actually operates. Contracts, after all, are commitments. And broken commitments are expensive.
Flo also addressed something every in-house lawyer should hear. “You can’t talk about AI to a legal team that’s already burning out.” The same goes for contract transformation. If your team is stuck in redlines and reactive review, the solution isn’t another piece of software. It has better visibility. Legal leaders should be asking what their contracts actually say, where things are getting stuck, and how much of that can be solved with clarity rather than complexity.
This isn’t about perfection. It’s about progress. Start with your most common agreement types. Focus on the terms that slow you down or cause confusion. Talk to your business counterparts about what’s working and what’s not. And take a page from Flo’s book. Step outside the legal echo chamber. Look at contracts the way a business leader would, as tools for execution, not just compliance.
Contracts are some of the most powerful data sets your company owns. They govern your revenue, your expenses, your partnerships, and your obligations. If you’re not extracting insight from that data, you’re flying blind. The teams that win in the next decade will treat contracts not just as legal tools but as strategic inputs into how the business runs.
Watch the full interview with Flo Nicolas here.
Olga V. Mack is the CEO of TermScout, an AI-powered contract certification platform that accelerates revenue and eliminates friction by certifying contracts as fair, balanced, and market-ready. A serial CEO and legal tech executive, she previously led a company through a successful acquisition by LexisNexis. Olga is also a Fellow at CodeX, The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, and the Generative AI Editor at law.MIT. She is a visionary executive reshaping how we law—how legal systems are built, experienced, and trusted. Olga teaches at Berkeley Law, lectures widely, and advises companies of all sizes, as well as boards and institutions. An award-winning general counsel turned builder, she also leads early-stage ventures including Virtual Gabby (Better Parenting Plan), Product Law Hub, ESI Flow, and Notes to My (Legal) Self, each rethinking the practice and business of law through technology, data, and human-centered design. She has authored The Rise of Product Lawyers, Legal Operations in the Age of AI and Data, Blockchain Value, and Get on Board, with Visual IQ for Lawyers (ABA) forthcoming. Olga is a 6x TEDx speaker and has been recognized as a Silicon Valley Woman of Influence and an ABA Woman in Legal Tech. Her work reimagines people’s relationship with law—making it more accessible, inclusive, data-driven, and aligned with how the world actually works. She is also the host of the Notes to My (Legal) Self podcast (streaming on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube), and her insights regularly appear in Forbes, Bloomberg Law, Newsweek, VentureBeat, ACC Docket, and Above the Law. She earned her B.A. and J.D. from UC Berkeley. Follow her on LinkedIn and X @olgavmack.
The post Flo Nicolas On Why Contracts Aren’t Just Legal Tools, They’re Business Signals appeared first on Above the Law.
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