THE PROBLEM !
The Communication Gap
Given that it is usually not part of their professional education, commercial or engineering staff members have often limited knowledge about the interactions between their daily tasks and contracts. They often cannot identify when a situation becomes legally critical or which business information is crucial for a lawyer to draft an adequately risk-tailored contract.
On the other hand, external law firms are rarely getting the chance to dive deep into the client’s specific business because the costs of doing so would exceed the allocated budget. Although in-house legal counsels do have better insights into the particulars of the company’s business, the efficiency of their work strongly depends on the detail and quality of the information received from the business, and their own workload usually limits the time that is available for additional facts research.
Risk Exposure and Costs
Such gaps in communication can harm a business in various ways:
- the drafted contracts may (despite of its costs) not properly address the individual risk profile,
- the capacity of the in-house legal team may be unnecessarily consumed,
- the company may be exposed to undetected risk.
This can, in turn, create conflicts between the business and external or internal lawyers (Whose fault was it?).
Drafting & Structuring Pitfalls
Further pitfalls lie in the wording and structuring of the non-legal parts of a contract, such as:
- price clauses,
- forecasting & ordering procedures,
- technical specifications,
- KPIs,
- service levels,
- acceptance tests,
- other project milestones.
Any deficiency can materially impact the project success.
The danger of creating a "Parallel World"
Staff also often underestimates the need to work in accordance with the processes that are pre-defined in a contract, and creating a “parallel world” can lead to missed deadlines, exposure to claims, or loss of rights.
Don't make the same mistakes!
In the past 20 years of my career, I witnessed the same oversights happening over and over again.
In most cases, the companies were not aware of the traps, but had to painfully realise them afterwards when they ended up with material delays, significant extra costs, failed projects, and demoralised and stressed staff.
My Mission
It is my personal desire to provide this course and enable procurement, sales, engineering, and management staff to undertake the appropriate risk management within their work responsibilities in order to facilitate any in-house or external legal work, and to ensure project success and business growth.