Contracts are touched by every part of a company. It’s a myth that they are the domain of the legal team. In fact, the legal team is the direct stakeholder in very few contracts.
So there are lots of people across the company who care about some subset of contracts but probably not others. And many of those people are not going to be power users of whatever tool is used to store them. When your contract database (even if it’s just a Sharepoint folder) isn’t widely accessible, the whole business funnels its questions to the power users. And you probably have better things to do than click through folders and open PDFs all day.
You need something that everyone can jump onto and use to find what they need. That something is only going to work if it’s so simple that a large number of low-touch users across your company can log in and instantly know how to find what they’re looking for.