Love them or loathe them, contracts are the mainstay of every business. Virtually every relationship with a customer, client, supplier, employee, or service provider is underpinned by a contract. Each contract defines the details of that relationship, from the financial terms, reporting requirements, and key obligations of each party, to non-performance, break clauses and renewal dates.
As a business grows, the complexity of the contract management process grows – and so do the risks of getting it wrong, from financial penalties and ruined relationships to legal disputes and, potentially, business viability.
To get an inside look at overcoming challenges around maintaining contract visibility and keeping up with obligations, ContractWorks partnered with Alternative Insights to learn how four top in-house lawyers approach contract management.
Below are some of the highlights from Post-signature Contract Management: Actionable Insights from Four In-house Lawyers.
Sarah Ouis explains the essential role of contracts in the work of in-house legal teams:
Contract activity is usually pretty heavy for in-house legal teams and represents a significant portion of their workload. It could be commercial agreements, ranging from the most trivial and low risk type of agreements, such as confidentiality agreements, all the way through master services agreements and more project related agreements, such as work orders and change orders. In-house legal teams can also get involved with procurement related needs, such as supplier related contracts, says Sarah.
“Contracts are what puts the money on the table. If there are no contracts, there is no business.”
As Head of Legal for an international firm of about 1,000 employees, Chris Fox leads a relatively large team of around 20 people. The reason, he explains, is that his role encompasses more than legal alone. He also oversees the compliance, regulatory, and regulatory compliance functions, which for an international B2B sports betting solutions provider, are fairly significant responsibilities in themselves.
“All three areas are critical to our business. Compliance includes legislative requirements such as GDPR, anti-bribery and corruption, but also touches on insurance, AML, and various international certifications; our regulatory function supports the Sales department when prospecting, and also acquires new licences for specific territories or US states; and the regulatory compliance team ensures that we maintain our licences and achieve against our regulatory requirements. On top of that, we’ve got the usual legal work an in-house legal team is tasked with.”
A seasoned Head of Legal Operations, Faye Moran has first-hand experience of multiple different approaches to contract management.
Regardless of sector or business, one of the issues most organizations have in common – according to Faye – is that no-one has really nailed the contract lifecycle management process. This is surprising given the obvious – and not so obvious – value in their contracts.
“The lack of a contract management system and clause level data can be critical. Without clarity, you don’t know what’s been agreed to or why it was agreed to. If it all blows up two years later, Legal has to try and unpick it all. Better systems and information might prevent some of that.”
Tamara Franks oversees the central Group General Counsel Operations team that works alongside the individual legal, compliance, and governance teams to help them streamline and improve the process aspects of their work.
“It’s a delicate balance between developing more efficient systems, without taking responsibility for contracts away from the business units. It is really important that the business does not lose sight of its contracts. We are a second-line function and therefore need business units to consider risk locally and to bring matters to us when legal advice is required.”
To read more from these in-house legal experts, download Post-signature Contract Management: Actionable Insights from Four In-house Lawyers.