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It’s Fry Day!!!!!!!!!!!
This made me chuckle.
Bain & Company My 13 YO is taking Career and Tech. She is dead set on diving for Michigan. What are her chances of getting hired from MBB with a degree from UM? Or would she need her MBA first? Is a Michigan degree good enough to get you into a top MBA program?
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Totally agree 😁
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Early in my in-house career, a very senior counsel once told me: “90% of all contract drafting mistakes never become an issue, and 90% of the time they do, you can fix those mistakes.”
I have been in-house for over 25 years and can now vouch for this. Do your best, leverage the resources available to you, and try to self-learn/improve.
You will do fine.
Rising Star
Contract drafting is my weak point (I have some very specific experience that made me ideal for the GC role, but little commercial background) and I’ve been telling myself this just to feel better :). Good to see someone else say it!
Practical Law and Google. I’m in a similar boat coming from a specialized field that is 90% of my work. When I see a clause or what appears to be a term of art that I don’t know, I look it up. If I’m still not confident I understand the ramifications, I ask the other party to explain how they see that clause operating in this context, and go from there.
Second on Practical Law. It has helped me look smart many times.
Also there is a lot of winging it. If there’s a mistake, you can almost always fix it later. 🤷🏻♀️
You will feel like big bird in the meetings for the first few months.
That really is the best description for it. Big bird.
If you have some down time, go through any drafts and redlines reviewed by your colleagues and predecessors on the internal drive. You’ll start to get a sense of your specific company’s and legal team’s approach to different types of agreements.
Find a good outside counsel you can trust and work well with. If they have a history with your company, even better, but not necessary. Never hurts to have someone you can call just to do a gut check with.
Pro
A lot of Google 🐦
Are there others at your company who are familiar? If so, ask them for an hour of their time to go over the contract (after you’ve done the work of marking it up) so that you can get a gut check. Most people won’t think twice about helping you out.
This is the most realistic advice. Also; if they won’t help you probably want to know now. In house counsel teams shouldn’t be zero sum.
I will say I am not as great with tech contracts outside of simple SaaS agreements, so I do keep a Tech Contracts book for times I need it. Some areas do have affordable resources, but just depends on what you need help with.
Get to know the managers for the departments you are working in and know their business inside and out. If you don’t get that aspect of the work the legal side won’t make sense. Don’t treat them like law firm clients, you are part of the business so treat everyone like a business partner.
Also- the accounting department. Can’t stress how important they are. At the end of the day every business is money in and money out, so you should discuss with them how payments interact with their department and the contracts you are reviewing. I’d say more often than not, when a lawyer wasn’t looking at the agreement, payments were not made/received according to contract.
Look into Laura Frederick’s How To Contract group. I am not a part of the group but do follow her posts on LinkedIn and have found them helpful.
Same boat. The first six months it would take me days to write a contract plus I only have the law library, no in house tools and I’m the only one. My first SAAS contract had me sweating bullets.
Now it’s actually getting fun. I took a bunch of CLEs, read a ton of books, and you’d e surprised how quickly you start to pick it up.
There’s a few basic how to draft contracts on Amazon that I got kindle version. The technology contracts book helpful
Great CLEs on ACC.com
Adams on drafting can be very technical for quick commercial contracts but it was helpful when I started
Practical Law and googling “[contract issue] + Adams” always gets me what I need to know! Would highly recommend his book (A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting) for good tips on drafting better contracts.
West law practical and Contract Teardown are helpful. Also having a supervisor that’s a mentor or someone within the company that’s a mentor is beneficial.
I’m 6 months into a commercial in-house role while my previous role was privacy-specific. It’s definitely a learning curve but honestly the job is at least 50% building relationships and managing people. The redlines will get easier with time and there’s some great advice here from people with more experience. You’ve got this!
I’ve done thousands of contracts. Usually, the actual legal concepts are similar enough that I figure it out, but what can trip me up is how those concepts will actually apply to a business unit I have less familiarity with. So then I just ask direct, simple questions of the business folks (and also state that I genuinely do not know!). At first it felt weird to admit that I didn’t know everything, but now it comes naturally. And once I have those answers, the contracts make way, way more sense.
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You will do just fine- there is excellent advice here. While I’m sure your skills will ultimately prove transferable, one thing I find fairly absurd is the fact that you were hired for this role with niche experience when there are countless lawyers out there with contract review/ analysis experience who are passed over for prestige reasons. Maybe if that experience was more valued, you’d already know your stuff contract wise.
To be fair, 95% of my in-house role is in my specialty & is exactly what I was doing at my firm. There’s 5% of general contract review that I’ve never handled before because my former clients used to handle them in-house.
PLI has great CLEs. I turn to them when I can’t find help elsewhere.
What parts of the agreement are new to you? If there are actual, legal sections (not just standard business performance and deliverables) that are new to you, I’d loop in an outside counsel expert or another in house lawyer with experience in that field. I would never just wing it.