Contracts are an integral part of everyday life for every business. When you make an offer of employment to a new colleague, sign with a new vendor, or create a new commercial partnership, you’ll be asked to sign a contract.
For many people, signing a contract doesn’t always involve careful attention, but this casual attitude can come back to haunt them. A contract review process is essential to reducing this risk and avoiding unwelcome liability. But what actually is contract review, and how can you make the process more efficient?
What is contract review?
Contract review is the process of thoroughly reading and understanding a contract before agreeing to its terms. It can be conducted either manually or by using contract automation software.
During contract review, the document will be examined to confirm that it contains all the elements of a contract, that everything is stated clearly and accurately, without errors or discrepancies, free of potential conflicts, and important, with acceptable terms to help the parties avoid getting locked into an unsatisfactory agreement.
Although contract review can involve an investment of time and resources (depending on the nature and value of the contract), it is generally much less expensive than defending a breach of contract lawsuit.
Why do you need to review contracts?
The purpose of a contract review is to ensure that legal agreements and the terms contained within them are robust, and that legal and financial risk is reduced as far as possible to protect the interests of your business.
Have you ever signed a document without reading what you’re signing? Most people have – not to mention the number of policies we just click through and opt into without reading them (readable privacy policy, anyone?)
When someone asks you to sign a contract, they are really asking you to legally bind yourself or your business to the provisions outlined in the document. Contract review is a vital part of any contracting process since it typically reduces overall risk, increases the chances that all parties to the contract will benefit, and provides both sides with the opportunity to fully understand what they are agreeing to before they sign anything.
A comprehensive contract review can:
- uncover unclear or outdated provisions
- prevent misunderstandings
- highlight areas for improvement, and
- expose pitfalls that might adversely shift risk between the parties.
If the contract review process is incomplete or avoided, one or both parties risk agreeing to commitments that they can’t fulfill, sustaining reputational damage, and wasting valuable time and money to resolve avoidable disputes.
Who should review contracts?
The contract review process often includes several people, depending on the stakeholders involved in the contract itself.
It might begin with the sales representative, who drafts the initial contract and decides the key values, having taken basic terms from the template. This person should review the entire agreement carefully for accuracy before forwarding it to the counterparty and the legal team.
The counterparty will review the proposed agreement to make sure that the risk, legal and commercial implications of the agreement work for them. It is considered best practice for a contract specialist or legal counsel to review a contract after every round of negotiations and before it is signed by the parties.
Contract review represents the parties’ last chance to identify and request changes before signature. After it’s signed, it’s a question of obligation management, with parties looking to anticipate specific contracting events such as re-negotiation or opt-out windows to avoid being caught off guard by upcoming critical dates and deadlines. (Learn more about contract renewal).
How a contract is reviewed depends on each reviewer’s role. The counterparty will read the contract line by line, accepting some changes and suggesting others, all the while thinking about a compromise that both sides will accept. They’ll typically send it back with changes. By way of contrast, the drafting party will only need to review whatever was changed or rejected.
How to review contracts
Contract review process in Microsoft Word
Most lawyers still spend an average of three hours each day working with Microsoft Word documents. While Word has a rich set of features for editing offline files, critical issues with the platform are frequently encountered if you use it to review contracts. These might include:
Tracking changes
Using Microsoft Word’s track changes option may seem like an excellent way to keep track of revisions made to the original document – at least, at first.
However, once the proposed contract has gone through several reviewers, changes start to be layered over changes, metadata may be lost, and version control spirals out of control.
Accuracy
When the various parties to a contract work in an editable Word document format, there is no way to preserve the audit trail of changes made once the document is converted to PDF for signature.
A party can conceivably make significant revisions to a contract without anyone else knowing about it, creating the risk that the parties will agree to an inaccurate or incomplete version of the agreement; it’s also impossible to learn from negotiation data to make future negotiations go more smoothly.
Security
Word is largely built on offline files and unstructured data, which lack the advanced security features of cloud-based editors designed specifically for contracts.
Formatting
A contract drafted in Word and subsequently shared with others via email can be subject to various formatting errors, including corrupted numbered sections, scrambled bullets, deleted comments and broken images.
Crashes
If Microsoft Word crashes during contract review, there is a good chance that all the work done on it will be lost if it was not saved, since performing a ‘document recovery’ is by no means a guaranteed fix and can entail hours of additional work.
The limitations of Word as robust environment for contract review lead many modern legal teams to choose a digital contracting platform instead.
Contract review process in Juro
Juro is the all-in-one contract automation platform that allows users to review contracts in-browser with a seamless, flexible approval workflow and the ability to skip back through previous versions with one click.
This means legal and business teams can automate routine contract workflow in one unified workspace, with a seamless review process that enables real-time collaboration. Unlike legacy contract management platforms designed to handle offline files, Juro’s dynamic repository is built on a flexible data layer, allowing users to query contract data at any time, removing information silos across teams.
Instead of trying to make or accept changes via tracked changes in Word, which need to be reconciled over email and compared with previous versions, users can simply mark up their document in real time, directing comments either to internal colleagues or external counterparties as they need to.
Contract reviewers can also scroll back through previous version with Juro’s timeline feature, comparing different iterations with one click, but without having to hunt through static files. And all that contract metadata and negotiation audit trail is captured securely, to enable stakeholders to improve the workflow next time.
By creating a review workflow that can be completed quickly, in-browser, forward-looking legal teams can create a contract process that will scale with the business, instead of needing to hire more and more contract managers or outsource work to expensive law firms.
Looking to remove bottlenecks from your contract workflow and implement a more seamless contract review process for your business? Hit the button below to find out more.
