Overview
We believe that contracting is about creating relationships, not offloading all risk, and we espouse short, clear, reasonable, relevant contracts and simple and human-friendly processes that minimise negotiations, speed up the contracting process and put the relationship first.
Challenge
This global financial services organisation outsources the negotiation of thousands of deals to Radiant Law through a legal managed service. Previously, negotiations were drawn-out and the response service level of five days was not being met. The client wanted to ensure consistency, reduce negotiation cycles and build positive business relationships both internally and with customers.
Solution
Radiant’s approach to contract negotiations has been to standardise both the stages of the contracting process and how we handle points that come up in negotiations. Reducing the number of rounds of negotiations is critical to reducing the time to close. We minimised (and still to do so through our continuous improvement approach) unnecessary contentious points by refining the client's templates, and by ‘being reasonable’, rather than delivering dense, incomprehensible agreements and negotiating aggressively on non-material issues.
Implementation
Before an agreement ever gets to negotiation we ensure that the terms are short, clear, reasonable and relevant. We optimised the client's long-form agreement from 60 pages down to 6 pages, and built a modular structure with annexes for relevant types of goods/service. This has ensured that mark-up is minimised and time to close is significantly faster. In negotiations we utilise a playbook developed with the client, which avoids needing to continually escalate items to the in-house legal team, and allows them to be confident that we are operating using an approved approach and focusing on the priorities.
Benefits
Deals are being turned significantly faster under Radiant’s approach. 90% of deals (new and returning) are being turned in half a day, and average turnaround for a new matter is 0.58 days. Our customer satisfaction score with the client's business team is 4.6 out of 5 and it is clear that quick turnaround is a key priority for the business. Radiant has been able to reduce time to close and minimise negotiation cycles to deliver business value faster and support the client's strategic priorities. 27% of deals are closed in 15 days and 41% within 30 days.
“Feedback from stakeholders is that quality and tone are excellent. You bring a pragmatism to negotiations that was lacking historically. You are not raising points for the sake of it, not just ticking boxes. Your advice is much more useful and thoughtful.”
