Overall experience with
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Critical Review
Product: Malbek CLM
Platform flexibility supports evolving needs, but account guidance lacks depth
Likes and dislikes about
likes
Contract lifecycle reporting is a significant strength. I have worked in the CLM space for 20 years and one of the challenges has been tracking negotiation cycle metrics (what I call the chess timer concept): Measuring how long a contract remains with each party (external and internal) along with the rounds of negotiation. Malbek has come closer than any other platform I have worked with over the years. Another strength is the MS Word integration. I think it's pretty robust and easy for the contract admins to use and facilitates the contract authoring experience. They have also just leveled up with a new '2.0' version that we are testing out. This new version more seamlessly incorporates the system's AI functionality. The #1 reason we selected Malbek was its overall usability and intuitiveness. From creation through negotiation and overall workflow management, the tool provides a UX that aligned with our goal of building a system that everyday and (more) casual workers could navigate without too much guidance or training. Ease of use / user adoption was a key factor in our decision to select Malbek. A couple of caveats worth mentioning: our organization has a highly complex operating / approval model, so we made a deliberate decision not to rely on Malbek system approvals. We have also augmented Malbek's reporting capabilities by exporting data into our EDP and have worked with internal teams build out custom PowerBI metrics and dashboards. the important note here is that native reporting is okay, but the fact that we can export all the contracting data from Malbek into our PBI tool is a huge win. Lastly, this is a global implementation... there were too many countries to have to select.
May 18, 2026
dislikes
Our biggest frustrations are platform reliability and usability. The Microsoft Word integration is particularly cumbersome- the add-in cannot easily be toggled on/off, making it difficult to work with non-Malbek documents, and the Personal Access Token frequently requires renewal without sufficient notification, disrupting connectivity. We also experience product updates introducing regressions, limited visibility into known issues or fix timelines, and troubleshooting that often lacks actionable error messages, making it difficult to determine whether problems stem from configuration or the platform itself. These issues create unnecessary administrative overhead and reduce confidence in day-to-day operations.
July 2, 2026
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