The top 3 reasons in-house legals get frustrated at work

Once a contract is signed or negotiated, it often ‘disappears’. It vanishes in the mailbox of someone in the sales department, or part of the contract is uploaded on the shared drive, but the addenda and e-mails containing extra agreements are nowhere to be found. This pushes legal departments to go on a wild contract hunt to follow up on the agreements that are made or to provide valuable lists to co-workers (e.g. list of clients whom you don’t have an NDA with for marketing, or a list of licenses that are about to expire for IT). Or to easily find all contracts that contain a specific clause (e.g. change of control clause).

It’s always the legal team that runs after the information from other teams in order to serve them

Most companies work with so many programmes that don’t communicate with each other when it comes to contracts (e.g., Excel for listing all contracts, Sharepoint for storing them, Adobe for e-signing and a personal calendar for notifications). On top of that, most companies lack a clearly defined procedure on how to handle contracts consistently. Both these issues lead to contract tasks getting either forgotten or inaccurately completed.

Contracts aren’t just legal documents, they are business documents first. So why are they dropped with legal?