Contracts are the grease on the skids of most businesses, i.e., it is how they make money.  Consequently, unless you work in a very unusual legal department, one of the most important tasks you deal with as an in-house lawyer is the drafting and negotiation of contracts.  Most of us sat through a contracts class the first semester of our first year of law school, where concepts like “consideration,” “statute of frauds,” “offer and acceptance,” and “direct vs. consequential damages” were drilled into our heads.  And I am glad this was the case because the bit of law school I use the most day-to-day as an in-house lawyer is contract drafting (followed closely by “meeting avoidance”).  Most legal departments use contract templates for their important contracts, as it speeds up the process.  Yet, less than 25% of in-house legal departments use contract playbooks as part of the process.  This is surprising because everyone in the legal department, executive team, and the sales organization should understand which contracts are acceptable to the company and which contracts the company will walk away from.  Contract playbooks do just that.  Given their importance and the lack of adoption, this edition of “Ten Things” will walk through the process of creating a contract playbook:

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