Sign Here: The Enterprise Guide to Closing Contracts Quickly

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Sign Here: The Enterprise Guide to Closing Contracts Quickly — Alex Hamilton

It’s a nice snappy title and excellent cover design, but in calling his book “sign here”, and not “everything you need to know about designing commercial legal process in the twenty first century” Alex Hamilton has sold himself short. This is a really good book, filled with counter-intuitive insights which have you jumping off in directions you didn’t expect. I basically ruined my copy in a weekend walking round the local park scribbling gnomic revelations on it.

What I liked about it especially is that so much of it focuses not on legal services delivery — which every other thought leader ibsesses about — but the design and content of legal processes, with a view to optimising their outcome. Legal service is not pizza. No one cares about the box.

Here are just a selection of points well made:

The fear that one may become redundant drives a lot of behaviour

The thing is, it isn’t a realistic fear, unless you are genuinely hopeless. But the genuinely hopeless shouldn’t be being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year when trauma nurses get twenty five k.

Fixing contracts is hard, requires leadership and requires refocus on stuff you don’t always think about

Like relationships.

Ask process runners, “do you think there is a problem?” and “if so, what do you think is the problem?” Many are so siloed by their own organisations and terms of reference that there may not be a problem locally, even when there is globally. Thus, if your remit is “manage credit risk at all costs” then the cost/benefit of the tools you bring to bear is not your problem.