Legal Ops Essentials: Commit to Constant Contracting Improvement

CONSTANT IMPROVEMENT

Pareto’s Principle of 80:20 applies to contracting as it does to just about everything else. About 80% of the time when your in-house team supports contract negotiations:

• the issues that come up most frequently are the same;
• the pushback you receive will relate to the same issues; and
• where you land on 80% of those issues tends to be the same. 

In short, much of the contracting experience is generally predictable - and this means that if you are prepared in advance, you will thrive. 

It also means that if you spot a new and improved approach to the 80% - it can massively improve your overall contracting outcomes.

As such, high-performance in-house teams actively look for ways to constantly improve their approach to the “80% contracting scenarios.” This is a significant performance hack. 

Here are 10 things that your team can do to turbo-charge the rate at which it improves at contracting function. 

When you encounter a new or better way to handle an issue, you need to intentionally consider how your team:

1. Spots the issue: update and upgrade your checklists
2. Resolves the issue: update your Group Legal Policy
3. Documents the issue: update and improve your Templates, update your Clause Banks
4. Negotiates the issue: update and improve your Playbook 
5. Escalates the issue: does it need escalation and to whom, make it clear
6. Communicates the issue: who inside your business needs to know about the issue
7. Trains on the issue: train your team in respect of your new/upgraded approach to the issue
8. Performance manages the issue: what can your implementation teams do to performance manage the issue
9. “Process-ify” the issue: you need an improved workflow process to deal with the issue
10. Tracks the issue: consider whether the issue warrants tracking through some kind of data metric

It is simply not acceptable for a lawyer in your team to come across something new, or an improved way of doing something– and then sit on it!

High-performance in-house teams ensure that “new” and “improved” are effectively incorporated into and available to all contracting function people, platforms and processes.

If you find these “short’n’sweet” in-house legal team performance insights helpful – please do join the GLS Legal Operations Community

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