Author: Dave
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They were scattered across three departments, and not one of them matched the template I’d spent two weeks building with outside counsel. Sales had a version where someone had deleted the non-solicitation clause because a prospect pushed back on it once and the rep figured, why not just take it out? HR had a version…
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Last year, our CFO needed the original MSA for a vendor we were about to renegotiate. Not the SOW. Not the last amendment. The original agreement, signed four years ago by someone who no longer worked at the company. I knew it existed. I’d seen it referenced in an email. But I couldn’t find it.…
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I started doing this by accident. About six years ago, I walked into a Monday morning meeting and a VP asked me when the Aramark contract was up for renewal. I had no idea. I’d been managing the contracts for that org for over a year, and I couldn’t answer a basic question about one…
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I can tell you the exact moment I realized how broken post-signature contract management is at most companies. I’d been at a mid-size manufacturing firm for about three months. Long enough to know where the contracts lived (mostly), who the key vendors were (roughly), and which ones had renewals coming up (barely). A project manager…
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I’ve implemented contract management software five times across my career. One of those implementations took a single day. Another took the better part of six months and still wasn’t fully adopted a year later. The difference wasn’t the software. Not really. It was what we were trying to do with it. The day-long implementation was…
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I’ve onboarded maybe a dozen people into contracts or legal ops roles over the years. Different companies, different industries, different levels of experience. And every single time, on day one or close to it, I say the same thing: “Before you read any SOW, read the MSA.” Most of them look at me like I’ve…
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I’ve set up contract repositories at four different organizations. Three of them failed. Not because the software was bad (it wasn’t, mostly) but because nobody thought about what a repository actually needs to do before they bought something and started dumping files into it. The fourth one worked. It’s the one I still use. And…
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The first renewal negotiation I ever handled, I lost before the conversation started. I just didn’t know it yet. It was a document management platform. Annual contract, about $38,000. The vendor’s account rep emailed me six weeks before the renewal date with a “quick update” that included a 12% price increase and a note that…
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I almost cost my company $87,000 once because I missed a renewal by four days. It was a facilities management contract. Three-year term, auto-renewal clause with a 60-day notice window. I knew the contract existed. I’d even flagged it when I first organized the repository. But I hadn’t set an alert, because at the time…
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Last year I sat in a meeting where our VP of Sales waved a contract at me and said, “Dave, this vendor is saying we owe them for an extra year. Is that right?” I pulled up the agreement. The auto-renewal clause was on page fourteen, paragraph 8(b), buried in a sentence that ran nine…