Zvi Margalit, CEO of OpenSourceCM, on Fixing the Costly Pains of Contract Management
- Mykhailo Lytovchenko
- Apr 9
- 6 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
In this conversation, Zvi Margalit outlines the core pains companies face in contract management—lack of transparency, version control issues, inefficient workflows, and compliance risks. He explains how OpenSourceCM addresses these challenges by offering a centralized, role-based platform that integrates with tools like DocuSign and NetSuite. The system streamlines contract creation, approval, and tracking, reducing legal overhead and improving cross-departmental collaboration. With built-in workflow automation, real-time data access, and audit-ready reporting, OpenSourceCM helps organizations avoid costly mistakes and operate more efficiently.
Zvi Margalit: Personal banking, non-profits. When you manage contract management, every company needs it. So almost every segment of the market is going to be using some sort of a platform or disk or cell or something in order to know where their contract is, what’s the liability, when they renew, how much are they, and all that. Somebody has to manage it, otherwise you'll be losing more than five to seven percent of your net income every year.
So if you go to our website, opensourcing.com or opensourcecm.com, you can see some of the value that we bring into these particular markets, especially in the enterprise world where it's really complicated and expensive. We do this in a very easy and very cost-effective way.
Q: In terms of the customers you have coming in right now, I see you’ve got LexisNexis—that’s an awesome brand name. How did you get these customers? What’s your main source of customer acquisition?
Zvi Margalit: Well, the customers that we have today, most of them came in through references and word of mouth. When general counsels see that they have a really good platform, they kind of share it with other general counsels. They have groups on LinkedIn and they have all kinds of groups they're organizing.
CFOs, for example, or IT directors—when they need to answer for the demand from the legal department—then they will be creating that request for us.
In the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry, as well as banking, the demand is for certification: SOC2, HIPAA, GDPR. And that comes from the IT cybersecurity department. The CFOs are going to benefit from efficiency. So cost structure—when you look at contract management in corporations—the legal department is a cost structure. It's not revenue-making; it just costs you money to manage.
And so if you can reduce the team from 50 to 20, from 50 to 5, you can see that the CFO is interested. The general counsel is interested in controlling the contracts, the liabilities, the renewals—all the stuff in the life cycle of the contract, of course.
The CEO needs to know that information because of Sarbanes-Oxley and the regulations around that. So if you run a company, you need to know the liabilities you have in your contracts. And if it shows up and you didn’t know about it, it doesn’t release you from the responsibility.
So you can see that there are four personas that are really interested in solving problems:
The contract managers – efficiency
The legal department – certification
IT and cybersecurity
And floating the information to the CEO, which adds transparency
So the transparency within the organization creates the efficiency, because you don’t have to chase an email and the right version and the right this and the right Excel. The guy’s on vacation? You have to wait until they come back? The whole thing is just a mess. Everything is here, and there’s transparency in it.
If you belong to a role and somebody in that role is on vacation, you can take part in that process, in that workflow.
So now you start seeing that we talk about workflow, efficiency, transparency, regulation, QA, finance—it’s all one layer after another built up when you have that capability.
Q: If you had to pick one vertical or one segment of the customers you have that sees the most value right away—where you can create a champion and leverage that relationship into other departments—which use case would you pick?
Zvi Margalit: I think that if you have a champion, regardless of the vertical that the company is in, we can build a really good story for them.
If you have a champion that represents the difficulty the company has in maintaining transparency or cybersecurity, or making it more efficient to run contracts—because imagine what it is when you don’t have a platform.
You need to create a contract, send an email to somebody to review and approve it, then send it to the vendor for redline negotiation. By the time it gets back from them, the whole thing is in Excel or Word attachments, and you never have the latest version.
So that’s where you can see the value pop up really easily.
Because when you do have a platform like this—imagine you didn’t have email in your organization. You had to send letters. Everything would take much, much longer. You send a fax, you get a fax. Now you have e-signature. Everything happens in minutes versus weeks or months.
The benefit from that goes straight to the bottom line. It makes everything more efficient, more profitable.
So you can choose the champion in pharmaceuticals, for example, who understands their internal process—creating documents, managing documents, reviewing them, signing them. It could be with developers, customers, markets—anything they need to do in pharmaceuticals, including patents.
Now you see that this is a very effective tool for a company that has a large set of documents.
The benefit you have in the back door? It’s not only contracts. It’s everything attached to the contract—amendments, pictures, reports—whatever you need available when you negotiate a contract. It’s also available.
When you create the role of a group, the group has a meaningful batch of contracts they need to work on. They don’t need to look at someone else’s contracts. So you have access rights management to help you create the workflow that doesn’t let your users get lost in a large system.
Q: So it’s essentially a more comprehensive version of something like DocuSign, where you can have multiple file attachments. And the value increases when the contracts increase in complexity and number?
Zvi Margalit: Yeah. DocuSign is one of our partners. We use DocuSign for e-signature. But e-signature is only one step out of many in the workflow or lifecycle of a contract.
You need to:
Create it from a template
Maintain the data: customer, amount, dates, values
Store that in a term sheet
All the information that represents what’s in the contract—legal adds the language around it. Finance cares about the data in the database: values, liabilities, and regulations.
There’s legal language, and there is the data—and the data is really where the business is.
So we’re actually talking to the business owners about the data. The legal department just gets a tool to do everything more efficiently.
But the real value—the business intelligence—rises up to the General Counsel, CFO, and CEO.
Q: Is there value for CROs or sales managers too? Like Chief Revenue Officers, in terms of sales contracts?
Zvi Margalit: Yeah, Chief Revenue—you can see that revenue management companies are basically adding a financial application on top of contract management.
This is what a financial application does: they need the contract because you can’t run financials without the contract.
At first, they only have a disk and a financial tool like NetSuite.
What we do is provide an API library that allows us to connect to any financial application and sync it. The metadata we have in the contract becomes available to the finance department.
So finance always has the most updated information. Legal, operations, and cybersecurity are also in control.
This kind of platform benefits everyone and increases value across departments.
Every department has:
Its own group
Its own roles
Its own notifications
Its own data and reports
HR needs contract data differently from sales or vendors. Right now, we have insurance companies with four divisions. It's a $20–30 billion company.
Each division has its workflow.
They’re asking:
How do we make this make sense?
How do we avoid all this training that costs more than the app itself?
How do we make it simple and unified?
The answer: limit the users to only what they need to do.
Instead of them going into a cloud and searching for what they’re doing—create a workflow:
"Click here → click that → click this → done."
No more writing data again and again. Fewer mistakes. True, secure data. And that’s where the reports become really valuable for the CFO and CIO.
Making a change in the legal department requires executive buy-in. It’s not something IT just adds quietly.
This is a business-centric application. It sits in the middle of the company. Everybody is affected by it.
It’s not just “add another calendar tool.” This is where the rubber meets the road.
The CFO and CIO need to:
Be involved
Understand the value
Understand the difficulties
And they do, in most cases.
Our approach has always been to float up the challenges our current customers are experiencing.
And when you go to the opensourcecm.com landing page, you’ll see our page.
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