Continuous Improvement: A Game Changer for Your Contracting Process

“Continuous improvement” sounds great - an easy term to toss around - but what does it really mean when it comes to improving contracting? And why should it be a non-negotiable part of your contract managed services?

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As an alternative legal services provider, Radiant has always been expected to be different. But we’ve found that continuous improvement is more than just a buzzword, and making changes every single day can be transformative in making contracting processes better.  Here are 11 lessons we’ve learned along the way that have significantly improved our approach to contract lifecycle management.

1. Continuous Improvement is Everyone’s Job

Why do so many continuous improvement programs fail? Because they put the onus on just a few people. While we’re fans of the rise of legal ops in contracting—it's great to have those additional skills—they’re often left in a corner, expected to make all the improvements alone.

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Why is this a problem? Legal ops doesn’t live the day-to-day work. It’s the team members closest to the coalface who:
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• Know what the issues are
• Are most impacted by changes
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If the whole team, including legal ops, isn’t part of improving the work, changes will often hurt rather than help them. We regularly hear from teams where change has been imposed on them, and they have no desire to play along—and why should they? 
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Everyone must be part of making things better, and especially deciding what the priorities are. This doesn't mean legal ops shouldn’t be involved but they can’t drive change alone. The people closest to the work are best placed to make small, day-to-day improvements.
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A culture of continuous improvement means everyone has two jobs: both doing the work and improving the work.

2. Decide Where You’re Going

Why can a year of continuous improvement often lead to no real impact? Because you need a clear direction. How do you know something is an improvement if you don't know where you're headed?

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Start by identifying your stakeholders:

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• It’s definitely the contracts team,
• But what about other departments?
• Don’t forget the other side; you are creating a relationship after all.

What do these stakeholders need?

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• Faster contracting?
• Better relationships?
• More usable contracts?
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Note that winning innovation awards isn’t on the list, although a bit of recognition does go a long way. 
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Doing lots of things is not the same as making improvements. There needs to be alignment  and bigger goals. We recommend starting with a broad conversation about (a) how to fit continuous improvement into the day job (hint: very small regular changes can always be fitted in, so tone down the big projects) and (b) agreeing on where you are going.
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If the team isn’t aligned around a big goal, continuous improvement will look more like going around in circles.

3. Continuous Improvement is All About Behavior

Technology is not the point of continuous improvement—behaviour is. If continuous improvement is everyone’s job (meaning that they are both doing the work and improving the work) then their behaviour needs to change. For example:
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• Making changes every day
• Defining and following processes
• Making knowledge explicit
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But the most challenging part? Encouraging the team to act with agency—to believe they can make things better. This is down to leaders to foster this mindset.
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It’s  a difficult balancing act - leaders must set expectations that behaviour is key and something to focus on, but the team needs to decide what ideal looks like. You can't achieve continuous improvement by just rolling out systems. Instead, you need to create a framework of expectations, build agency within the team, and empower them to experiment, make changes, and set priorities. Yes, this IS hard!

4. Start with Easier (Then Better, Faster, Cheaper)

Why is a little selfishness good when starting continuous improvement? Because motivation matters. If everyone’s job is to improve the work, start with areas where the job is too hard.
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Encourage your team to figure out what’s getting in the way of their ideal behaviours. Fix those first. According to Shigeo Shingo (one of the creators of lean at Toyota), the order should be easier, better, faster, cheaper—and by the time you get to cheaper, it has probably already sorted itself out. Our mantra is “effortlessly delight the client”.
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Motivation is everything, so start by making your team’s work easier.

5. Set Whopping Challenges

Want results from continuous improvement? Set ridiculous goals. If you have a direction, then one of the most effective ways to drive change is by setting whopping challenges.
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We did this at Radiant with our challenge of achieving half-day turnarounds. It seemed impossible, but we broke it down: weekly coaching, interim goals, and a lot of grit. It took us nine months, but now turning contracts in half a day is just business as usual.
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To motivate change, start a bottom-up transformation with a whopping challenge. One of our ridiculous goals is to win a Shingo Prize (colloquially known as the Nobel Prize for manufacturing), and a lot has changed at Radiant as we work towards it.

6. Fast Cycles

What can Atomic Habits teach you about continuous improvement? Big goals are great, but break them down into small steps. The smaller the steps, the faster you can move. 
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Lawyer perfectionism is a major blocker to making things better. If we can get past the need for everything to be perfect and instead focus on just getting something going, then continuous improvement becomes possible.
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A classic example is creating contract templates and contract playbooks. You could spend six months on it, or choose to do it in a week or two. Or better yet, create an outline playbook in a day and keep adding to it.
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You can fit continuous improvement into your day if you break it down into small enough chunks. Just get going!

7. Write Everything Down

You will fail at continuous improvement if you don’t write things down. Without a standard way of working, you can’t improve—it’s all just random chaos. Writing things down gives you a place to capture improvements and share the best-known ways of doing things. You might have thought that lawyers love writing things down, but it's funny where the writer’s block suddenly kicks in. 
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This isn’t about timesheets (not that anyone enjoys them)—it's about documenting what you do before you do it (or ideally as you do it the first time) and then following it going forward.
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This applies to everything—knowledge, processes, and more. It might feel like a slight to autonomy, but consider it this way: you want to share the best current known way of doing things so everyone benefits.
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If you want to progress, you need to foster a written culture.

8. Data First

Forget fancy dashboards for continuous improvement—all you need is a pencil. If you don’t know how you’re doing, how will you know if you’re getting better? Getting past opinions to understand what is actually happening is essential if you want to make progress.
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You need to measure how you’re doing, but that doesn’t mean investing in a big new system with fancy dashboards. Sometimes, a simple pencil and paper are more effective to get started. Before worrying about pie charts (don’t do it), ask yourself: what’s the first question you need to answer and what’s the minimum information needed to make a good enough decision?
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We highly recommend How to Measure Anything as THE book on the topic. It covers various statistical tricks, but the main lessons are: 
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• you measure to make a decision, 
• you often only need a small amount of data (or can rely on estimating), 
• aim to reduce uncertainty enough to decide, not to achieve perfection, and 
• you can quickly get better at estimating. 
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Questions and decisions change over time, so learning how to collect data quickly—without implementing a new system every time—is a valuable skill!
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As W. Edwards Deming said, "In God we trust, everyone else must bring data." 

9. Fix Other Departments’ Problems First

Need other departments to help with your contracting problems? Here’s how. One of the toughest things about fixing contracting is that it’s cross-departmental with no obvious leader. We had a fun workshop at CraftyFest discussing how to start with other departments' problems. One key takeaway was shifting from being the hero to being the guide—helping other departments to solve their issues.
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If you can start by helping solve other departments' problems, they are going to be more interested in helping with your problems. There are many issues caused by challenges with getting deals signed and using contracts. There’s a lot that legal teams can do to clear the way in organisations. Lawyers have often created a sense of mystery around legal processes, and we can also help demystify and simplify them.
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A little empathy goes a long way in getting other departments to be interested in making your life easier. Start with empathy.

10. Give Air Cover for Reasonableness

Your team is probably afraid. One of the biggest concerns for lawyers, especially young ones, is whether they’ll be blamed if something goes wrong with a contract. They want to be safe, which means they lean towards being overly conservative.
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That conservatism can damage your company—slowing down or even killing deals unnecessarily.
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If you want your continuous improvement efforts to take off, GCs and business leaders need to provide the air cover to allow the team to be reasonable.

11. Use Technology You Can Change

Choosing the wrong technology will kill continuous improvements. One of the biggest traps is trying to solve everything with a big, shiny new system. It might look like it will tick every box, but it often slows things down in practice.
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An even bigger problem? Big systems are hard to change:
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• changes need technical expertise
• changes cost money
• changes take time, killing momentum
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Be careful that your big leap forward doesn’t end up being your last for the foreseeable future.

Conclusion

Continuous improvement isn’t easy. It requires a cultural shift and a commitment to ongoing change. At Radiant Law, we live and breathe this philosophy in our contract managed services - but it’s not something you can fully outsource. Your team must also be part of the journey, continually looking for ways to improve and adapt.
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By building a culture of continuous improvement, you’re not just delivering more value—you’re also making work more rewarding for your team.

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