Tip 5: Review the content of Your Templates

Introduction

This is a follow up on the previous tip 4 to make a full list of all your contract templates. If you want to read that part, follow this link here: https://amstlegal.com/tip-4-make-an-inventory-of-your-contract-templates/. Staying on the same track, we at AMST Legal strongly advise to regularly perform a detailed review of your contract templates. That is part of our tip 5 of the article series “How to Improve Contract Templates”.

Keep reading to learn more about this appraoch.

Review the contents of your templates

Leaning back on the previous tip 3, which builds on cross-departemental collaboration, legal should review the templates – of course together with business – to make sure that the templates are all legally up to date and still work for all products/services that you are offering and cover all business risks. That require knowledge of the content of your templates though. The solution to that is to review your contract templates on a regularly basis.

What the review can show you

Think back to when the company started. In the beginning, the company might used certain contract templates without legal alignment, i.e. templates made by the commercial team or online templates. Another scenario is that the company has changed considerably. Thus, your company’s current needs might not be reflected in the contract templates.

Due to this review you might also find out that you can potentially: 

• combine templates to limit the amount of different templates, 
• remove templates that are not used, or 
• make new templates, 

Doing this can further improve the scalability & productivity of your company.

Pro-tip

Certain large corporates that I have worked with even ask an external law firm every two years to do a full review of their templates. That concerns e.g. General Terms & Conditions and Master Ordering Agreement. This ensures that their templates are up to date. It can also show how they generally can improve the templates for the business and their customers. 

Conclusion

If you make sure to keep an eye on your templates you can ensure that the content will be up to date, Additionally, the contracting process can be made easier if unnecessary templates are removed.

Do you want to improve your scalability and productivity? Contact us at AMST Legal for tailored advice on how to do this in a simple way.