Commercial Contracts

Throughout my career, contracts have been a constant. When I was a litigator, it was settlement agreements and insurance contracts. At my first in-house job, with an online retailer, it was equal parts supplier agreements (both drop-ship and core inventory), marketing agreements to increase our reach (including partnerships with TV shows, sports teams, and film studios), and software agreements to improve our SEO or our internal operations. When I got into the mining and heavy industry sectors, my contractual world expanded to multi-million-dollar procurement agreements for equipment, materials, engineering services, and construction. It included change orders, statements of work, and purchase orders, as well as pre-contract agreements like bids, requests for proposals, and feasibility studies. Over the years, I have also become acquainted with different types of leases, joint-venture agreements, and the documents involved in each step of a merger or an acquisition.

I’ve learned that contracts work best when they simply state how your business buys, sells, delivers, and gets paid. It sounds basic, but it often gets lost in lengthy forms, schedules, and boilerplate. I have spent much of my in-house career working directly with procurement, operations, logistics, sales, accounting, engineering, and executive teams to get contracts completed without losing sight of the business reason for the deal. I’ve also learned that the contracting process goes most smoothly when I understand key points of a deal and the client’s appetite for risk before I review the contract, and I have instituted procedures and playbooks within companies to help the process move along.

I can help you handle one important agreement, or I can help you create forms, playbooks, and processes so the next agreement is easier.