Category: Contract Management
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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…
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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 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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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…