If you work in procurement or finance, you already know that the quality of your decisions depends on the quality of your information. You also know that when it comes to contracts, the most basic requirement is knowing exactly which agreements are active and where they are.
For many organisations, that confidence is missing. The problem is not new, but it is often underestimated, until a renewal is missed, a key clause can’t be located, or an acquisition reveals a trail of unmanaged agreements.
In most organisations, the answer lies in how contracts have been stored over time. Shortcuts, workarounds under pressure, and shadow procurement all create blind spots, a problem that only grows with staff changes, business complexity, and mergers and acquisitions. As a result, agreements may sit in dozens of different places - network drives, SharePoint sites, e-signature platforms, legacy CLM systems, even individual inboxes. In some cases, essential files exist only as email attachments or as scanned images embedded in other documents.
Over the years, changes in staff, IT systems, and business structure add to the fragmentation. Mergers and acquisitions bring in contracts from unfamiliar repositories. “Shadow procurement”, where agreements are signed outside official processes, creates further blind spots. Even when a document is found, it might not be the final, in-force version; amendments and addenda are often stored separately, with no clear link to the original.
Hidden or unmanaged contracts can have direct and avoidable financial consequences. Automatic renewals for unused services, missed termination windows, and overlooked performance clauses all lead to value leakage. Procurement’s ability to negotiate effectively is reduced if the current terms are unclear or scattered.
Beyond direct costs, there is an operational impact. Teams waste time searching for documents. Supplier relationships are harder to manage without a clear record of commitments. Risk assessment is compromised if clauses on liability, exclusivity, or compliance can’t be verified.
Most CLM systems were designed to manage contracts from the point of creation onwards. They work well for documents authored and stored within their environment. But they are not optimised for discovering agreements created elsewhere, especially older, “legacy” contracts spread across multiple systems.
Bulk upload tools exist, but they assume the organisation already knows where its contracts are and has them in the correct format. Comprehensive, ongoing discovery has typically been treated as a one-time clean-up, not as a routine part of contract management.
At Digital Mirror, we believe that Contract Discovery is a foundational step, a necessary foundational step to contract performance. Before performance can be tracked, obligations can be monitored, or value leakage can be checked, there needs to be confidence that the contracts in scope are the correct ones and that they represent the full picture.
This is where Contract Discovery comes in, not just as a one-time exercise, but as a regular piece of work that makes sense of the contract landscape.
That’s why we’ve built a Contract Discovery engine focused on surfacing the contracts organisations don’t realise they’re missing. It works across contract repositories, such as file shares, using metadata extraction and version ranking to identify what’s likely to be a current contract and what’s not. It doesn’t replace your CLM; it complements it by ensuring the inputs are complete and you get the visibility you need to deliver value.
At Digital Mirror, we treat contract discovery as a continuous operational capability, not a project. We provide a local discovery agent to be deployed behind your firewall to scan designated locations for potential contracts. The agent identifies and ranks likely agreements, flags duplicates, and recognises possible amendments or expired versions.
This first step produces a factual picture of contract visibility without requiring deep system integration. If you choose to go beyond Contract Discovery with Digital-Mirror, it is also the first step in a layered analysis that forms a bridge into the Contract Analytics that enables Contract Performance Management.
Once contracts are identified, selected files are securely migrated to Digital Mirror’s cloud platform for analysis. Here, the system indexes documents from any source, CLM, SharePoint, or file share, to create a single searchable view of active agreements.
This layered approach enables procurement to work from a complete, accurate baseline, supporting performance tracking, compliance monitoring, and financial analysis, such as working capital assessments.
With complete contract visibility, procurement teams can act with confidence, identifying agreements with non-standard terms, confirming which contracts are up for renewal, and verifying obligations before engaging suppliers. The result is not a replacement for existing CLM tools, but a complement, ensuring that the “single source of truth” is actually complete.