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 ruined my copy in a weekend walking round the local park scribbling gnomic revelations on it (and occasionally walking into trees).
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:
Negotiations focus on the wrong topics
We know what is important. Indemnities. Events of Default. Governing Law. But these aren’t the parts that create litigation. Worse; these are all catastrophic fire-breaks; last-ditch tools for when the plane has ditched into the sea. But should we focus on airbags and inflatable life-rafts, on a plane, or on making sure there is enough gas in the tanks and the wings are properly attached to the fuselage. You only need airbags if you crash.
What is more, obsessing about disaster is rather like over-analysing what happens when you divorce on your wedding day. It may, curiously, make divorce more likely. I’m like, you are talking about process agents? Today? What, are you expecting to sue me?
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.
Contracts and scalability
Hamilton compares the traditional approach to contract negotiation with his “RADICAL” approach — I can take or leave mnemonics, but this one isn’t bad— in what they do to help scale your legal operation: to what degree you can be sure individual client contracts will conform with each other to provide a robust platform across your business, allowing you to concentrate on building and managing your customer relationships.
Traditionally you go out with an “optimal” position — meaning one that is practically outrageous, however much the concept might make your risk officer’s heart sing — and presume you will have to negotiate away from it. The theory is even, sometimes, to have something you can easily give a customer so it feels like it has won something.
behavioural economists like this idea: it gets the “anchoring” right, and some believe inflaming and then quickly redressing a grievance yields more relationship capital than just being a good sport from the get-go.
But these are superficial advantages, if they are even true at all.[1] It will leave you with a portfolio of contracts with variable terms, negotiated at cost and time
- ↑ The heady days when nudge solved everything are in the rear-view mirror nowadays: Cass Sunstein and Dan Ariely, and even Daniel Kahneman himself have been on the wrong end of recent invective.