⚡️ 8 simple contracting hacks for 1st Legal hires

If you work in-house, you already know: EOQ pressure is real.

And Legal is always in the firing line.

In today’s newsletter, I’m sharing 8 practical, tested ways to reduce chaos, move faster, and keep your focus intact at EOQ.

From building a legal team playbook to training AEs and mandating comms platforms (seriously, pick one!), these tips are all about making your life easier when the pressure's on.

💡 Bonus: Legal tech can help with most of this. Fewer repetitive tasks. More automation. Less burnout.

Read on below 👇

What do you need to do to reinvent your legal function? You can find out from me at LegalTechTalk in London on Thursday 26 June!

I'll be on a panel with Chris Combs (Co-founder, LinkSquares) and Anand Pandya (Accenture Legal) where we'll break down:

👉 How to upskill and build a tech-forward team
👉 Why humans are at the heart of transformation
👉 How to thoughtfully embed AI, agents and automation in the right places
👉 Driving adoption & success with dedicated change management

Reply to this email and let me know if you’re going!

Here are 8 practical, tested ways to reduce chaos, move faster, and keep your focus intact at EOQ:

1️⃣ Build a legal team playbook - stick in all negotiation must-haves, nice-to-haves, hard no’s, fallbacks, concessions.
Build per clause – critical stuff first (indemnities; limitation of liability; IP). Add a clause library too with relevant language to reflect all these.
💡 Build asap in Excel
💡 Then power with AI
💡 Outsource to an ALSP FTW

2️⃣ Build a comments playbook - always add comments explaining your changes. Especially dealbreaker clauses. Keep sample language in your legal playbook, per clause, so you can cut and paste quickly. AI can handle all this when you’re ready.

3️⃣ A word on MNDAs - hated on (with good reason), but quick to review and 90% of the time don’t need redlining so you can turn them fast.
💡 Use them to build Legal’s reputation (for speed!) and relationships with Sales – key to working through EOQ pressure

4️⃣ Be a good teacher - bring AEs on the journey with you – they are managing the deal.
Explain key changes you made and why. Tie the law to their business aim.
💡 Mindset: You are there to have their backs and guide them through the legal part of the deal cycle – this reduces EOQ friction

5️⃣ Know the deal structure - be clear on this early on – direct with customer? Indirect through partner? AWS? Know your paperwork, correct terms and process to save time-wasting and faffing at EOQ.

6️⃣ Mandate one platform for comms - pick a platform and stick to it. Even if it’s email.
Communicating across multiple platforms creates version control issues and associated risks. You don’t have time at EOQ to remember which platform the last version or instructions were in!

7️⃣ Plan ahead - for Thanksgiving, December, public holidays (especially ones they have in the US we forget about in Europe like Labor Day!). Signatories & decision-makers may not be available. Yes this is the AE’s job, but be proactive with advance reminders.

8️⃣ Leverage legal tech - there are plenty of legal tech tools out there that can solve most of the issues in this guide that slow down deal cycles — and that also cause lawyer burnout at EOQ — by replacing manual, process-heavy, repetitive workflows with automation and AI.

Dive in deeper on my YouTube channel 👇

I'm sharing more in-house pain points (and practical ways to handle them) over on my YouTube channel. Check it out here!

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P.S. Curious about in-house practice or simply want to reach out?

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Let’s connect! 💜

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