Why better contract management starts with understanding who you are doing business with.
Contracts are often treated as the starting point for understanding a commercial relationship.
Find the agreement. Capture it. Extract the important information. Manage the obligations, approvals, renewals and risks associated with it.
But there is a problem with starting there.
What about the relationships for which you cannot find a contract at all?
This question was explored recently by Mark Vigoroso, MBA, in his article Solving for the Identity Blind Spot in Contract Lifecycle Management in the Agentic Era. His argument raises an important challenge for organisations investing in contract lifecycle management: if you begin by looking for documents, you can only manage the agreements you already know exist.
Mark describes this as the “denominator problem.”
His article prompted us to explore the issue from a Realm perspective, because it connects directly with something we increasingly see across identity, contracting and business processes: organisations don’t only need better visibility of their documents. They need better visibility of the parties and relationships behind them.
Read Mark Vigoroso’s original article on LinkedIn:
Solving for the Identity Blind Spot in Contract Lifecycle Management in the Agentic Era
The contract completeness problem
Ask an organisation how many contracts it has in its contract repository and it may be able to give you an answer.
Ask whether that represents all of its active contractual relationships, and the answer becomes more difficult.
This is the distinction Mark makes with the denominator problem.
A document-led contract discovery exercise can tell you how many agreements have been found. What it cannot necessarily tell you is how many agreements should have been found.
If an agreement was never captured, stored in the wrong location, managed by another department or simply lost over time, its absence may produce no obvious signal.
The organisation knows what it has.
It doesn’t necessarily know what it is missing.
This becomes particularly important in complex organisations where supplier, customer and partner relationships may span multiple business units, systems and years.
The starting question therefore needs to change.
The real question we should be asking
Instead of only asking:
“What contracts do we have?”
organisations should also be able to ask:
“Who are we doing business with, and what contractual relationships should exist with those parties?”
That small change creates a very different view of contract completeness.
Start with the relationship, not only the document
A contract does not exist independently.
It represents a relationship between parties.
Those parties are often already visible elsewhere in the organisation: supplier masters, customer records, finance systems, procurement platforms, ERP environments and accounts payable processes all contain information about the organisations and individuals with whom the business interacts.
That creates another way of looking at the contract landscape.
If an organisation can establish a reliable view of its active counterparties, it can begin comparing those relationships against its contract records.
For example:
Active supplier → Contract exists
Nothing unusual.
But:
Active supplier → Payments are being made → No corresponding contract can be identified
Now there is an exception worth investigating.
This does not mean every party necessarily requires a formal contract. Business relationships differ, and so do contracting requirements.
The important difference is that the organisation can identify and investigate the exception, rather than relying entirely on somebody knowing that a document is missing.
The relationship becomes the reference point.
Identity adds another dimension
Knowing that a counterparty exists is only part of the challenge.
Organisations also need confidence in the information associated with that party.
Who is the organisation?
Who is authorised to act on its behalf?
Are the details being relied upon still current?
Has something changed since the relationship was established?
Does the information held in one system correspond with the information being used somewhere else?
These questions extend beyond traditional contract management.
They are questions of identity, authority, validation and trust.
And they are becoming increasingly important as organisations digitise more of their supplier onboarding, procurement, contracting, payment and approval processes.
A supplier may have been onboarded correctly two years ago, for example. That does not automatically mean every piece of information associated with that supplier should continue to be trusted indefinitely.
People change roles.
Directors change.
Banking information changes.
Authorised representatives change.
Companies change.
The answer cannot simply be to establish trust once and assume nothing changes.
The more useful model is one in which important information can be validated when the business context requires it.
AI makes this distinction even more important
Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing what organisations can do with contract information.
Large volumes of documents can increasingly be searched, classified, summarised and analysed at speeds that would previously have required significant manual effort.
That creates enormous potential.
But there is a fundamental limitation.
AI can analyse the information available to it.
It cannot identify a contract that was never captured simply by becoming better at reading the contracts that were.
Mark puts the underlying issue particularly well in his article: intelligence applied to an incomplete contract population still leaves you with an incomplete picture.
The same principle applies to identity.
A system may be able to analyse what a document says about a company or individual. That is different from validating whether the information being presented remains accurate, whether the party is who they claim to be, or whether the individual acting for that organisation has the appropriate authority.
Document intelligence and identity assurance solve different problems.
Both matter.
Contract management is becoming relationship management
This leads to a broader change in how organisations can think about CLM.
The objective is no longer simply to create a better electronic filing cabinet.
Modern contract management connects the agreement to the business processes surrounding it: requests, parties, approvals, execution, obligations, milestones, amendments, renewals and reporting.
But there is an opportunity to go further.
The contract can form part of a broader view of the commercial relationship.
Instead of:
Contract → Counterparty → Verification
consider:
Party → Relationship → Contract → Execution → Ongoing Validation
The difference is subtle but important.
The first model begins with something the organisation already knows it has.
The second begins with the organisations and people with whom the business is actually interacting.
That creates opportunities to identify gaps that a document-only approach may never expose.
Where Realm ID, RealContract and RealSign fit
At Realm, we see identity, contracting and execution as closely related business capabilities, but they are not the same thing.
That distinction matters.
Realm ID provides the identity and validation layer. It enables organisations to collect, maintain and validate information relating to the parties with whom they interact, supporting a model where important information can be validated again as circumstances or business processes require.
RealContract manages the commercial and contractual lifecycle, from request and drafting through approvals and execution to obligations, milestones, amendments, renewals and reporting.
RealSign provides the electronic execution layer, enabling documents and approvals to be signed electronically either as a standalone signing process or embedded within business applications and workflows.
Each product can address a specific requirement independently.
Together, however, they demonstrate what becomes possible when organisations connect three questions that have historically been addressed separately:
Who are we doing business with?
What have we agreed with them?
Who authorised and executed that agreement?
This moves the conversation beyond simply digitising documents.
It creates greater visibility around the business relationships those documents represent.
Why this matters beyond Legal
There is another reason this conversation is important.
Contract performance is not only a Legal issue.
Research published in 2026 by World Commerce & Contracting in partnership with Ironclad estimates that organisations lose an average of 11% of contract value after signature. The research attributes this to issues across the contracting lifecycle, including missed savings, changes, poor forward planning and failures in how contractual commitments are operationalised.
That makes contract visibility an enterprise concern.
For Procurement, the question may be whether supplier relationships are appropriately contracted and whether negotiated commercial terms are being realised.
For Finance, it may be whether the party receiving payment is the correct party and whether changes to critical information have been appropriately validated.
For Legal, it is about agreements, obligations, authority and evidence.
For Operations, it is whether contractual commitments translate into actions, milestones and accountable processes.
For IT, it is how identity, contracts and execution interact across the systems supporting the organisation.
The contract may be the legal expression of the relationship.
But the relationship itself extends far beyond the contract.
From documents to relationships
For years, digital transformation in contracting has largely focused on the document.
Digitise it.
Centralise it.
Search it.
Automate it.
Analyse it.
Those capabilities remain important. But the next question may be more fundamental:
Do we understand the relationships those documents are supposed to represent?
An organisation with sophisticated contract intelligence but incomplete visibility of its counterparties can still have blind spots.
An organisation with verified counterparties but disconnected contract processes can still have blind spots.
And an organisation that executes agreements electronically without considering identity and authority can still have blind spots.
The opportunity is to connect these capabilities without confusing their respective roles.
Identity establishes who is participating in the relationship.
Contract management establishes what has been agreed.
Electronic execution records the act of agreement.
And continued validation helps organisations respond when the information surrounding that relationship changes.
That is a much broader view of contract lifecycle management.
It is also a much closer reflection of how businesses actually operate.
Acknowledgement
This article was inspired by Mark Vigoroso, MBA’s article, Solving for the Identity Blind Spot in Contract Lifecycle Management in the Agentic Era, published on LinkedIn on 6 August 2026.
Mark’s discussion of the “denominator problem” – and particularly his argument for approaching contract discovery through counterparties rather than documents alone – provided the foundation for the perspective explored here.
We appreciate Mark bringing this important discussion into the contract management conversation and encourage readers to read his original analysis in full.