Lawyers and Clients

Us versus them! This often seems to be the attitude of an organisation's legal department vis-à-vis its internal clients, and vice versa. As Ken Adams puts it:

"lawyers consider business people to be loose cannons willing to sell their first-born to close a deal, whereas business people regard lawyers to be “overhead” always eager to find obstacles so as to remind their masters why they were hired in the first place."

Lawyers vs Business People

To close a deal, the business people need a signed contract. Historically, this has required them to wait for legal to draft and/or review each agreement to ensure that it is compliant. The problems with this approach are:

1. It increases the time to produce a contract, which frustrates the business person's ability to do their job.
   
2. The lawyers get tied up doing repetitive, low value contract review because they don't trust the business people.
   

How can we get these two groups working with, rather than against, each other? How can the business people turn their deals around in real time without causing legal to fret over lack of compliance?

One option is for legal to automate their standard contract templates, and provide the business people with a pre-approved self-service contract creation system. This is the approach that Factiva has taken (PDF).