Do this to avoid mistakes when working with contracts

Some time ago, we interviewed Maureen Heisinger, Associate General Counsel at Eagle View and a How to Contract member. Maureen has been working with contracts for 21 years!

 Maureen's contract advice was so good that we decided to create a separate blog post about the ways you can use to make fewer mistakes when working with contracts.

Dive in!

✅ If you don’t fully understand the purpose of a contract you are working on or a particular provision within the contract, ask questions until you do understand.

Ask your internal stakeholders about the products, services, commercial terms, or the other side if they drafted a provision or provided reasoning that doesn’t make sense to you.

Too often the fear of appearing inexperienced or not knowledgeable results in mistakes that might not be readily apparent to you if you don’t fully understand the deal or the other side’s reasoning.

✅ Avoid blindly copying and pasting provisions from existing templates or contracts without determining if they fit the deal you are working on.

Tailor the contract, your redlines, and responses to redlines to the deal.

This goes hand in hand with fully understanding the deal and the other side’s requests/reasoning. 

✅ Be realistic about the time you will need to complete the contract reviews, drafts, or negotiations in relation to the deadlines requested by your internal stakeholders or the other side.

When you are starting out or starting at a new company, it will often take longer than you think to complete assignments.

Everyone wants to get contracts completed ASAP, but if you realistically need more time to get a request completed, speak up when you first get the assignment request rather than miss the requested deadline and then have to explain/apologize afterward.

Often talking through the timing issues at the start will result in the requester agreeing to adjust the time frame, not always but more often than not it helps.

If you need assistance prioritizing assignments to meet the competing deadlines, ask your manager to help you. They will likely have a better idea of what is most important or who should make the decision if competing deadlines come from different departments.

If you give a realistic time frame for completing something at the start, no one will complain if you get it done earlier. But if you miss an unrealistic deadline that you didn’t object to or warn others that you might miss in advance, eventually people will complain and it will reflect badly upon you.

✅ Read through all documents, policies, and provisions incorporated into a document by reference (including all hyperlinks) as well as any specifically cited laws and regulations, which you are not familiar with.

This will ensure your company’s ability and willingness to comply with such documents, policies, provisions, laws, or regulations.

Check out the full interview here.