Contract Management

Good Morning, 

I wanted to get the group's thoughts on best practices when sending a contract to outside legal counsel for review. We are a smaller organization and can't afford to send each contract out to legal counsel. I was thinking of some mix of term/risk assessment/amount/criticality as a determination. 

Thanks!

We are in a similar situation and have done a couple of things:

1) We require only certain vendor contracts to go to outside council based on criticality to organization (critical to organization), spend (annual spend >$100,000) and foreign based third parties.

2) We worked with our outside council to build out our preferred contract provisions based on the FDIC guidance.  We now have a baseline contract with additional provisions that can be dragged and dropped into our baseline contract based on the specific risks of the relationship.  This additionally allows contract owners to drag and drop our preferred provisions into third party contracts.  This helps drive consistency in contracting provisions and decreases the number of contracts that required outside council review.  

3) Our internal third party risk team has extensive contract experience so we also support our business owners and will review and redline contracts.

Shelly