Procurement staff are an expensive resource, and important to make sure that they are not spending their time on low-value and/or low-risk contracts.

The key to success is good analysis of the risks. Once the risks are identified you can decide which are material and which not of, those risks that are material, which are best addressed by provisions in the contract, and which are best addressed by measures outside the contract.

It’s important to avoid kitchen-sink contracts. That is, contracts which refuse to take a position and which try to address every possible scenario. Kitchen-sink contracts are very expensive to run (they take a lot of explanation and negotiation) and increase a company’s risk profile by encouraging everyone into a false sense of security.

The desired transformation is to get your procurement-contracting process to a position where:

• it is as friction-free as possible.

• the time taken from the decision to buy to actually buying is reduced to a minimum.

• Procurement staff are able to operate as autonomously as possible, knowing that they are supported by a high-quality contract infrastructure.

• your contracts give the business the protection it needs,

• there is a clear differentiation (and a clear process to achieve that differentiation) between those spends which are large enough to justify human intervention at the contract level, and those that are not.

The service comes in two parts.

Part 1: Diagnose. Review the current Procurement contract templates and process, and create a short report on what’s working, what’s not working, where the real problems are, and what can be done to fix things.

Part 2: Fix. Implement the recommendations of the report, and fix the problems. This usually includes creating new contract templates.

• You need to be a lawyer, but that’s only a starting point. More than that, you need to be the right kind of lawyer. The right kind of lawyer is someone that can identify the business needs, translate them into legal concepts, and then produce templates that not only address the needs of the business, but which are clear and easy to understand for non-lawyers. This is not a common set of skills, which is why most contract templates work at the lawyer level but, in the real world of business, cause more problems than they solve.

• You need to be a good communicator, not only in the initial discussions with the business and Procurement, but also in the creation of the templates and in the creation of the training materials.

• You need to know what’s market standard so as not to introduce unnecessary friction into the contracting process.

• You need to have a good understanding of process. You need to be able to take legal knowledge and understand how contract templates fit into the relevant process.

• You need to have an in-house lawyer mentality. In-house lawyers look at the world differently to law firm lawyers. They understand how the different elements of Procurement and the business need to come together to produce successful contracts. And they have, from lived experience, a much better understanding of the gap between theory and practice.

Do Nothing. Always an option, but it doesn’t move the problem forward.

DIY. Always an option too, but it’s unlikely that you have got the right skillset in house.

Use an external. There’s plenty of law firms that provide this service. Some of them are very good.

Part 1: fixed price, based on scope and the nature of the business.

Part 2: fixed price, based on scope and the desired outcome (i.e. the output of the diagnostic stage). You don’t have to use me to carry out the Fix (i.e. you could use internal resources, or other external resources to follow the recommendations in the diagnostic report).

It’s hard to measure ROI on legal spend for this kind of deal, but I expect your ROI to be much more than 10x.