Managing CLM inside Jira?

Shivam Sharma - Optimizory

Hey Atlassian Community! 👋

I’ve been exploring how contracts fit into Jira, and here’s what came up in a recent conversation:

Yes, we at Optimizory, already have a tool that helps teams manage contracts inside Jira, but my curiosity got the better of me, and I couldn’t resist learning more how other are approaching towards a full-fledged CLM system. That got me thinking:

• Have you tried using Jira for contracts beyond just tracking or organizing them?

• Do you know of apps or integrations that come closer to supporting the whole contract lifecycle within Jira?

I’d love to hear how others are approaching this. Are teams extending Jira with apps for CLM, or does it make more sense to connect Jira with dedicated CLM platforms instead?

Morgan Watts_9u2pqd

TL;DR: Company size: 50–200 people. We’re building a lightweight contract workflow in Jira Premium using Automation and Confluence rollups (no marketplace apps). Financials stay out of Jira; most reference docs and templates live in SharePoint. Early experiments with Plans for customer/contract mapping.

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I’ve been slowly attempting something like this using Jira Premium and no other apps. Our main goal is to track repeatable work, expected work, and some customer information.

We’ve created Jira projects for different parts of the contract lifecycle. We lean on Jira Automation to generate as much work as possible. This is still under construction and evolving.

Typically, a contract starts in our Bids and Proposals project. When we mark a “win” (status change), an automation creates a new issue in a restricted “directory” project to preserve information. That “directory” item becomes the parent we tie work to. From there, work splits based on what it is: we track deliverables and back-office processes in one project, production tracking in others, and we use Confluence “hubs” to roll up status across these items in one place.

When a contract hits its turnover stage (status), moving to that status generates tickets based on whether it’s a close-out, re-compete, or option-year turnover. This keeps us from guessing or manually tracking “what needs to be done.”

We don’t track financials in Jira—Jira isn’t great for that—and we don’t connect Jira to our financial systems for security reasons. We aren’t using marketplace apps. SharePoint houses our contract templates, executed PDFs (e.g., NDAs), and most reference materials.

There are early plans to use Plans to link contracts to the same customers as a simple “map” of who we’re working with and why, and to pull in more contract-specific information. We also use Confluence templates for signable documents when it helps, but most signable documents (like NDAs) are templated as PDFs in SharePoint.

It’s a slow integration because we’re asking: “Is this tracked somewhere else?” “Do we want to enter the same information again?” “Does the team find this useful?” “Are we saving time?”

Most of this is still rough draft, but so far our teams like the transparency, how simple it is to track information in Jira, and the breakdown of siloed information.