Contract Management Outsourcing Bloopers Part I
You are outsourcing a contract management or an M&A project for the first time. You have spent weeks selecting a vendor and think you have a good deal in place. Chances are that everything will go off smoothly as per the project plan the Vendor submitted to you. However, keep the following in mind and remember that it's a team effort at your end and at the Vendor's end to manage and assess your contracts.
To bridge the gap between stories of outsourcing projects that went bad and reality, I will try and enumerate through real project examples how misunderstandings and complications occur while outsourcing legal projects. If any body else has first hand experience of mistakes that they made while outsourcing their project or during delivery of legal services, do feel free to chip in or comment on my post.
Part I - Sort your contracts in an intelligible manner
Whether you upload your contracts to your Vendor through FTP or send them through some other manner, make sure you do not just dump them. Let me give you an example. I was part of a project where it was a tight deadline M&A project. On the first day my Client was supposed to send 12 huge contracts with a lot of attachments, amendments and addendums to it. When the files got to us, we realized they were in a complete mess. There were missing files and pages - it took a senior level resource (remember as a Client, you are going to be billed that much extra) 2 days just to figure out which file goes with which contract. It just showed us what a mess the in-house legal department was - that they didn't even have a proper filing system and did not care about their assets. They ended up paying extra for the time my senior resource took to figure it all out. The first step in managing contracts is to ensure that the files are stored according to the deal name/party name. This is of course unless you have specifically contracted with your Vendor to sort out your filing for you as well.
