Making contracting a business enabler

When people want to grow their expertise with the latest in-demand skills, they look to Udemy. Serving 81 million learners with over 250K business and technology courses, Udemy is a global leader in education technology.

Udemy is constantly expanding its relationships with enterprise customers, which has resulted in a sharp increase in the agreements the legal team manages. Though legal already had a contract lifecycle management (CLM) tool, they knew they could further elevate service delivery—and their profile within the company—by moving to a new solution that provided enhanced efficiencies and greater visibility.

Along with adopting the Leah (formerly ContractPodAI) CLM tool, Udemy brought Slalom in to transform its contracting processes and equip the entire organization for success.

The Udemy legal team’s primary challenge was a lack of visibility and standardization around the contracting process. There was too much manual work, with team members tracking approvals in spreadsheets and through a tangle of Slack messages and emails. The technology itself created an additional blocker: with legal on one system, sales on another, and procurement on yet a third system—with limited integrations between them all—critical information could be hard to pin down.

“Our revenue velocity was constrained by information silos, not legal complexity,” says Laura Fitzgerald, VP, legal at Udemy. “Fragmented systems were creating deal friction and extending sales cycles. We needed streamlined processes that could capture actionable data and accelerate time to close.”

Sales representatives found this particularly frustrating. Working primarily in Salesforce, they often struggled with limited visibility into where a contract was in the review process, resulting in the legal team having to field a high volume of one-off inquiries and time to revenue being delayed. “The teams needed a more seamless handoff,” explains Ashley Vasilovski, VP business applications, IT at Udemy, “a single place to be able to have back-and-forth communication.”

Rather than simply implementing a new tool, Udemy sought a best-in-class solution that would transform its end-to-end contracting process from initiation and negotiation to signature and storage.

We worked with Udemy’s legal team to improve its processes and provide a technology solution to serve the unique needs of everyone who touches Udemy’s contracts.

“Slalom brings a lot of the human aspects to these projects,” says Vasilovski. “They really, truly listen, and fully embed themselves into the business.”

While Slalom led the business process design and requirements gathering—working with the sales, procurement, deal desk, and IT teams to define new processes that would meet all stakeholder needs—Udemy’s legal experts advised us on the specifics of their jobs, all while still focusing on their core work. “Slalom approached this as a strategic business transformation, not just a technology rollout.,” notes Fitzgerald. “Their collaborative methodology ensured we built sustainable legal processes that drive long-term value creation rather than short-term fixes. This partnership approach was critical to supporting the business so it could achieve the ROI targets.”

The core of the transformation involved creating end-to-end integrated workflows between the CLM, sales, and procurement tools. One of Udemy’s nonnegotiable goals was to keep Udemy’s sales team in Salesforce—the tool they use daily. By building what James Young, senior managing director at Slalom, calls a “single pane of glass,” we provided sales reps with a means to manage contracts and communicate with legal directly within Salesforce.

This wasn’t the only integration that removed the need for teams to jump between unfamiliar applications. On the procurement side, the integration with Zip enabled bidirectional data synchronization across platforms.

Udemy and Slalom enhanced the contracting journey by putting more power into the hands of the business. Together we optimized the process by:

• Enabling self-service: Sales reps can finalize standard non-disclosure and master service agreements much faster—sometimes as quickly as 30 minutes—without legal intervention.
• Streamlining approvals: By improving contract vetting with more guardrails upstream and a clearer process for determining when legal review is actually required, the legal team can focus on more complex contract work.
• Leveraging AI for reviews: The team uses AI for data extraction of key obligations and to assist with first-pass redlining.
• Automating reminders and follow ups: With fewer delays and prompt closure of completed projects, the legal team processes more requests without additional headcount.
• Modernizing reporting: Integration with Tableau delivers dynamic dashboards, giving leadership a high-level snapshot of key performance indicators, contract volume, and deal velocity.

During the project, Udemy and Slalom migrated approximately 40,000 legacy contracts from multiple scattered systems into a single, consolidated, AI-enabled repository. For the first time, Udemy has full visibility and searchable access to all its historical contract data.

The human impact is measurable: the contract intake process is now approximately 30% quicker. By reducing the administrative burden on the legal team, lawyers have been able to reallocate their time to more complex, high-value contracts rather than routine paperwork. At the same time, sales representatives have ready access to the information they need, so more of their valuable time is now spent on strategic deal making.

By reducing friction, simplifying the process, standardizing templates, and upskilling its internal teams, Udemy is operating more efficiently and is also teed up for success in its next phase of global growth. According to Fitzgerald, “Slalom built our legal system for scalable growth and competitive advantage. We're now properly positioned to leverage AI for predictive contract insights, automate routine workflows, and reallocate legal resources to high-value strategic initiatives that directly support revenue expansion and market opportunities.”