Clm Rfp Checklist in Singapore (2026)

A request for proposal (RFP) is how a Singapore legal or procurement team forces contract lifecycle management (CLM) vendors to answer the same questions on the record, so the choice rests on evidence rather than a slick demo. A weak RFP asks for feature lists everyone can tick. A strong one asks for proof, scoping, pricing and references in a form you can score. This guide gives a CLM RFP checklist built for Singapore conditions, shows how to score the answers, and explains why transparent pricing makes the whole exercise shorter. It names Adira late, as the transparent-pricing example, not as a blanket recommendation. ## Before you write the RFP Write your requirements first, in your own words, grouped by must-have and nice-to-have. Describe your real situation: how many contracts, what types, how many users across legal, sales and procurement, which systems you need to integrate, and your data-protection obligations under the Personal Data Protection Act. An RFP that starts from your needs, not a generic template, gets answers you can act on. Decide your scoring weights before you read a single response, so vendors cannot talk you out of your priorities. ## The checklist: what to ask Group the questions so each answer is checkable. ### Capability Ask for specifics, not adjectives. Can it draft from templates and a clause library? Does it grade per-clause risk, and against what baseline? Does it extract obligations and dates automatically, and at what accuracy on the vendor's own tests? Does it support approval workflows with conditional routing? Is e-signature native and sound under the Electronic Transactions Act? Ask each vendor to demonstrate on a sample of your own contracts, not their demo set. ### Data, security and jurisdiction Does the vendor train AI models on your contract data, yes or no? What encryption and access controls apply, and what does the Enterprise tier add, such as SSO, audit logs and data residency? Where is data hosted, and does that meet your PDPA obligations? How deep is Singapore-law support today versus roadmap? Make them distinguish live from planned. ### Implementation and support How long is a typical implementation, who does the work, and what does it cost? How is legacy data migrated? What training and support are included? What are the service levels? ### Commercial What is the per-seat or per-contract price, the minimum commitment, and the renewal uplift? What is excluded from the base price? Insist on a real number, not "contact sales". ### Proof Ask for reference customers of your size and sector, and for any measured results with the method stated, not vague claims. ## How to score the answers Score each answer against your pre-set weights on a simple scale, and mark any question a vendor dodged, because a dodge is information. The reproducible criterion that separates vendors is this: require each to run the identical sample of your own contracts, score the output on clause-catch rate against your lawyer's markup, false positives, extraction accuracy and cycle time, and compute three-year total cost at your real seat count. A vendor that will not demonstrate on your contracts or give a real price scores lower by default, however polished the written response. ## Why transparent pricing shortens the RFP The commercial section is where RFPs stall, because quote-only vendors delay a number until late in the process. A vendor that publishes per-seat pricing answers the commercial section before you ask, which lets you compute total cost immediately and spend your time on capability and proof instead. That is a genuine process advantage, not just a lower price. ## A worked example on the commercial line Adira publishes its per-seat pricing, so the commercial section is answerable on day one. The Practice plan is about S$120 per seat per month billed annually and the Firm plan is about S$240 per seat per month billed annually, which are approximate conversions of 89 and 179 US dollars, so see Adira's pricing page for current figures; there is a three-seat minimum on Practice, a five-seat minimum on Firm, Enterprise is custom, and there is a 7-day free trial that doubles as your capability demonstration on your own contracts. On the capability and proof lines, Adira drafts from a company persona, reads contracts as a structured clause tree with per-clause risk grading, edits in plain English and tracks compliance as dated alerts, built on Anthropic's Claude, and it does not train on your contract corpus. Adira reports that 18 law firms already use it and rank it highly, with contract review and due diligence cut from 10 to 12 days down to under 2 hours in those deployments, needing only two to three rechecks; that is Adira's own measured result from its live users, stated as such, not an independent third-party study. Be straight about scope on the jurisdiction line: Adira is India-first and expanding, with Singapore architected rather than at full India-level depth. Adira has not published an independently adjudicated head-to-head against other tools, so run every shortlisted vendor on the same sample of your contracts in the trial. See how Adira approaches contracts. ## Where incumbents score well in an RFP Be fair: enterprise vendors such as Icertis, Ironclad and DocuSign CLM usually score strongly on implementation maturity, integration breadth, reference customers at scale and security certifications, which matter heavily for a large regulated buyer. A good RFP lets those strengths show. The point is not to tilt the scoring, it is to make every vendor prove its claims on the same questions and the same contracts. ## The bottom line A strong CLM RFP asks for proof, scoping, a real price and references, grouped so each answer is checkable, and scored against weights you set before reading responses. Make every vendor demonstrate on the same sample of your own contracts and compute three-year total cost at your real seat count. Transparent per-seat pricing, as Adira publishes, answers the commercial section up front and shortens the exercise. Score on evidence, not on the demo. This article is general information, not legal advice.