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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

I’ve been doing contract management for over fifteen years, and for most of that time, nobody above my direct manager cared what was in the contracts database. As long as nothing blew up, the data quality of our contract records was my problem and mine alone. That’s changed. In the last two years, I’ve been…

I’ve sat through a lot of leadership meetings. Probably too many. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about presenting contract management data to a CFO, it’s this: they do not care about your KPIs. I don’t mean they don’t care about performance. They care deeply about performance. What they don’t care about is your…

I want to tell you about the time a vendor rep just stopped answering my emails during a renewal negotiation. Not a polite “let me get back to you.” Not a “we need to run this up the chain.” Just silence. Three emails over two weeks, zero replies. At the time, I was furious. This…