Category: Contract Management
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The first week I onboard anyone into contracts, I hand them two PDFs from the same vendor. One is 22 pages and reads like a legal textbook. The other is 4…
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A few years ago, I inherited a contract folder from someone who had left the company three months earlier. There were 312 agreements in it. The newest one…
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The first contract spreadsheet I ever inherited had 47 columns. Forty seven. I counted. Some of them were reasonable: counterparty, effective date…
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The call came in at 4:47 on a Friday. Our biggest software vendor wanted to know why we hadn’t responded to the renewal notice they sent in March. It was…
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I sat in a SOX audit prep meeting two years ago where the auditor asked one question that stumped the entire room: “Can you show me the original contract that supports this revenue line item?” Not “do you have a contract management system.” Not “what’s your process for tracking agreements.” Just: show me the paper.…
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I’m not a healthcare contracts specialist. I should say that up front. I’ve spent my career in commercial contract management across multiple industries, and healthcare has only been one of them. But the year I spent helping a regional health system get its contract house in order taught me something I think about a lot:…
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I once watched a vendor contract go through nine rounds of redlines over six weeks. Nine rounds. The final version had exactly three material changes from the first draft. The other six rounds were people on both sides editing the same clauses back and forth, losing track of what had already been agreed, and reopening…
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Two years ago, our external auditors came in for the annual review and asked me something nobody had ever asked me before. They didn’t want to see a contract. They wanted to see how my contract management system was set up. Specifically, they wanted to know: Who can edit contract records after they’re finalized? What…
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Last year I pulled up a vendor contract because someone in operations was complaining about response times. The SLA said four-hour response for priority incidents. I asked the vendor for their performance reports. They sent over a PDF that showed 99.2% compliance. Sounded great. Except it wasn’t. When I matched their report against our internal…
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I used to think sales hated legal. Turns out they just hated waiting three weeks for someone to approve a contract that should have taken two days. The frustration was real and it was specific. A sales rep would send over a new vendor agreement or a customer MSA, and it would disappear into a…