When to Call Your Lawyer

I had the opportunity to present some training sessions on "Working with the Law Department" to some of our sales teams last week. A frequent question was when to involve the Law Department in deals. I would recommend bringing the lawyers in as early as possible, in fact, even before they are needed. What I like to do is to contact the counterparty's counsel prior to documents being exchanged, just to explain the deal and to explain our approach to our business. There is an uncanny correlation between the occurrence of these calls and quicker negotiations.

As I have mentioned in an earlier post, contract negotiations are all about trust- if you build the trust before negotiations start in earnest, the contract negotiation cycle will be shortened. Plus, the other party will often avoid taking a "by the book" approach to document drafting when they understand the context of the deal better.

As I said to the group, "If you do a little bit of law, I'll do a little bit of sales..."