It was a Thursday. I remember because I was about to close my laptop and walk the dog. My phone buzzed: “Hey Dave, super quick one — can you look at this MSA before EOD? Customer wants to sign tomorrow morning.”
The attachment was 38 pages. The “customer” was a Fortune 500. The “quick one” had no pricing, no term, no signer named, and a redline history that started in February.
I did what I always did. I cancelled the dog walk. I cracked open the doc. I emailed the AE four questions. I got back two of the four answers at 9:14 PM. The contract did not get signed Friday morning. It got signed eleven days later, after we discovered the customer’s procurement team had its own paper, which the AE had not mentioned.
This is the part of the job nobody warns you about. The actual contract work is not the hard part. The hard part is getting the request to you in a usable shape, before the building is on fire.
I built a one-page intake form after that Thursday. I have used some version of it at three companies now. It is not magic. It is just a form. But it shifted the contract intake process from “whoever Slacks Dave loudest wins” to “we have a queue, we have rules, and Friday at 4:47 PM is not an emergency.”
Here is the form, the triage rules behind it, and how to roll it out without anyone calling you difficult.
Why this happens at normal companies
Before the form, I assumed the 4:47 PM Slack was a people problem. Sales was lazy. Sales was disorganized. Sales did not respect legal.
It was not a people problem. It was a system problem.
When the only way to ask for a contract is “find a lawyer and ask nicely,” three things happen:
- People wait until the deal is real before asking, because they do not want to bother you.
- By the time the deal is real, the customer is already pushing for a signature.
- You receive a half-formed request through whatever channel the requester thinks is fastest — Slack, email, a hallway, a text.
There is no queue, so everything is urgent. There is no standard input, so every request needs a follow-up. There is no triage, so the loudest request wins, not the most important one. The requester is not being a jerk. They are using the only path you gave them.
A working contract intake process does two things at once. It tells the business how to ask. And it tells you which ones matter first.
The one-page intake form
I have built this in Google Forms, Microsoft Forms, Jira, a Notion database, and once on a literal sheet of paper taped to my office door at a startup with sixteen people. The tool does not matter. The fields do.
Here is what goes on the page. Keep it on one screen. If the requester has to scroll twice, half of them will give up and Slack you instead.
Requester information
– Name and email of the requester
– Department (sales, marketing, procurement, HR, etc.)
– Their manager (you will need this for escalations)
The deal in one paragraph
– Counterparty name (the other company)
– One sentence: what is this contract for?
– Total dollar value over the full term (best estimate is fine)
– Desired signature date
The paper
– Who is providing the contract — us or them?
– If them, attach their paper here
– If us, which template? (NDA, MSA, order form, vendor agreement, SOW)
– Any redlines already exchanged? Attach the latest version
The basics legal always asks for anyway
– Term length and renewal type (auto-renew? notice period?)
– Payment terms
– Are we sharing or receiving personal data?
– Any custom terms the customer has demanded? (free-text box)
Internal approvals
– Has finance approved the pricing? Y/N
– Has the deal desk reviewed? Y/N (if you have a deal desk)
– Who is the signer on our side?
That is it. Fourteen fields, one screen, no required fields beyond what you actually need to start work. The number of fields will feel too short to lawyers and too long to AEs. That is how you know it is right.
A note on attachments: make the upload mandatory if a third-party paper is involved. Half of the back-and-forth in contract work comes from people describing a document instead of sending it.
The triage rules that do the heavy lifting
The form is not the change. The form is the input. The change is the triage rules you apply to what comes in.
I write mine down and share them with the business. Not because anyone will read them, but because when an AE complains that their deal is not being prioritized, I can point at the rules instead of arguing.
Here is the version I use now:
Tier 1 — same-day or next-business-day
– Deals over $250K annual contract value
– Anything where signature is genuinely tied to a quarter close (and the close is real, not aspirational)
– Renewals where notice-to-terminate is within 30 days
– Anything involving litigation, breach, or a regulator
Tier 2 — within five business days
– Standard new-customer paperwork on our paper
– Vendor contracts under $100K with low-risk terms
– NDAs (these should be near-zero touch if you have a clean template)
Tier 3 — within ten business days
– Everything else
– Custom redlines from counterparties on their paper, where no signature date has been promised
– “We are thinking about” requests
Tier 4 — does not enter the queue
– Requests submitted without a counterparty named
– Requests submitted without the paper attached, when the paper exists
– Requests where finance has not approved the price yet
– Slack messages
That last one is the one that changed my life. If it does not come through the form, it does not exist. I am not being difficult; I am protecting the queue. The requester has to take fifteen minutes to put it in the form. That is the cost of admission.
The first two weeks are painful. People test the rule. Someone senior will Slack you anyway. You respond — and this is the script — “Happy to look at this. Can you drop it into the intake form so it gets a ticket number? Otherwise I will lose it.” Polite. Cheerful. Immovable.
By week three, people stop testing.
How to roll this out without making enemies
The form only works if the business actually uses it. A few things that helped me:
Get sign-off from one executive sponsor before launch. Usually the General Counsel, the CFO, or the VP of Sales. You want one person who will say “use the form” in their staff meeting. You do not need a company-wide email. You need one boss saying it once.
Pre-fill what you can. If your form lives in the same tool as your CRM, pull in the counterparty name from the opportunity. Every field the requester does not have to fill is a field they cannot get wrong.
Publish the SLA out loud. I post the tier rules in the same Slack channel where people used to ping me. “Tier 1: same day. Tier 2: five days. Tier 3: ten days.” When someone asks where their contract is, I point at the channel.
Acknowledge every submission within a few hours. Even if it is just “got it, this is tier 2, expect a redline by Tuesday.” People will tolerate a slower turnaround if they know you saw the request. They cannot tolerate silence. This is the single biggest thing that reduces follow-up pings.
Track the urgent ones. Every time someone marks something “URGENT,” I log it. After a quarter I can show the sales leader that 60% of “urgent” requests came in on the last three days of the quarter, and most of them were not actually urgent — they were late. That data is what gets the deal desk created.
Low-tech first
You do not need a contract management platform to do this. Start with what you have.
A Google Form that dumps into a sheet works. The sheet becomes your queue. You add a column for status, a column for tier, a column for assigned reviewer, and a column for the date you closed it. Sort by tier and submission date. That is your day.
Microsoft Forms into a SharePoint list does the same thing if you are a Microsoft shop. Jira works if your company already lives in Jira and the business will not flinch at the ticket UI. Notion works if you are small.
I would not buy software for this until you have run the manual version for at least one quarter. You need to know what your actual intake volume looks like, which fields you are always chasing, and which requesters are responsible for half the chaos. A platform will encode your bad process if you have not figured out the process yet. There are good intake-and-routing tools when you are ready, but a spreadsheet is a fine first draft.
If you want a more formal starting template, Practical Law has a sample intake form you can steal fields from. Drexel publishes theirs publicly too. Look at three or four, take the fields that matter for your business, throw out the rest.
What changed for me
The Slack messages did not go to zero. There is always one VP who will text you on a Saturday because that is who they are. But the volume dropped. The 4:47 PM Thursday request became the 11 AM Tuesday request, because the AE knew that if they got it in by Tuesday they would have it back by Friday — and if they Slacked me Thursday afternoon, I was going to tell them politely to use the form.
The deals also got better. When people fill out the intake form a week earlier, they ask the customer for the redlines a week earlier. The contract that used to be a fire drill becomes a normal piece of work.
That is the trade. You put a small friction at the front of the process so you do not have a giant fire at the back of it. Most requesters will thank you. The ones who do not will at least stop walking the dog for you.
Do this week
Pick one tool you already pay for — Google Forms, Microsoft Forms, Jira, Notion. Build the fourteen-field form above. Write down your three or four triage tiers. Send the link to one executive sponsor and ask them to back you up in their next staff meeting. Then, the next time someone Slacks you a contract at 4:47 PM on a Thursday, paste the link and go walk the dog.
I’m Dave, and I write about contract management the way it actually works. No jargon, no sales pitch, just what I’ve learned from 15+ years of doing this job. If this was useful, stick around.
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