How legal can shorten enterprise sales contract turnaround

Legal can shorten enterprise sales contract turnaround by measuring where time goes, then fixing the biggest delay first. Delays may arise in the queue, legal review, negotiation or approvals; measure your own process before choosing a fix.

Measure before you change anything

Break one contract's life into stages and record the time in each, for a sample of recent deals.

1. Request received from sales
2. Waiting in the legal queue
3. First review and response
4. Back and forth with the customer
5. Internal approvals
6. Signature

Turnaround in total is the sum. Identify the stages causing delay in your own sample before choosing an intervention.

The usual causes and what to do about each

The queue

Requests wait because there is no triage and no visible priority.

• Put every request through one intake with required fields: customer, deal size, deadline, template used.
• Prioritize by deal value and date, not by who asked loudest.
• Publish a service target for first response.

Review time

Reviews take long when each contract is treated as new.

• Use a standard paper and pre-approved fallbacks.
• Keep a clause library with the positions you will accept.
• Have the reviewer mark only the changes that matter and accept harmless ones.

Authority and escalation

Deals stall when the reviewer must ask before conceding.

• Write down what the reviewer can agree alone, what needs the GC and what needs finance or security.
• Pre-clear common requests: payment terms within limits, standard liability caps and data protection addenda.
• Give sales a one-page guide to what they can offer without legal.

Approvals outside legal

Security reviews, finance sign-off and data protection assessments often cause delay.

• Run them in parallel with legal review, not after.
• Prepare standard answers for customer security questionnaires.

Back and forth with the customer

• Respond within a set time even if only to say what is being checked.
• Put the full list of open issues in one message, not a series.
• Offer a call when three or more points are open.

Where extra capacity helps

If the queue time is long and your playbook is sound, extra capacity can help. A part-time or embedded lawyer can own standard-paper deals so the GC handles exceptions. Cohere used fractional counsel to improve its contracting cycle, a measure its VP Legal watched closely. Capacity without a playbook usually moves the delay rather than removing it.

What to ask sales to change

Legal cannot fix turnaround alone. Agree a few habits with the sales team:

• Use the standard paper unless there is a reason not to, and say why when you do not
• Submit complete requests with the deal size, deadline and any special terms promised to the customer
• Flag unusual requests early, before the customer sends a redline
• Name one contact for each deal, so legal is not answering several people
• Do not promise a signature date before legal has seen the draft

These changes require team time; measure whether they reduce delay.

A turnaround worksheet to copy

For each of your last ten enterprise deals, note:

• Days in each stage
• Number of rounds with the customer
• Which clauses caused the most rounds
• Who approved what and how long it took

Then answer:

• Which stage took longest most often?
• Which three clauses cause the most rounds?
• Which of those can you pre-approve a fallback for?
• What could sales have done without legal?

Pick one change, apply it for a month, and measure again. Repeat with the next largest delay.