Contracting mistakes with Alex Hamilton

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Contracts are crucial to the legal process, however more frequently the process of contracting can be painful. In this episode we discuss how to remove unnecessary barriers from contracts while offering the same protections, benchmarking the performance of your contracts, and Alex’s reflections on 10 years since founding Radiant Law.

Key quotes

Quotes have been extracted from the live conversation and have been edited for grammar and minor corrections.

“looking now from where we were 10 years ago when obviously no one was doing that and you know we were one of the first. There has been progress, but it’s been slow. Really what’s happened is that everyone’s talked a lot. I fear that too many customers have been fobbed off too easily… I don’t think there’s been enough change, and where there has been changed, I think has been quite token”

“Our contention is that contracting matters. These contracts are where you get your money into your business. So these contracts matter, but I don’t think companies take it terribly seriously. I think the lawyers involved take them seriously, but they are being starved for resources and ‘more for less’ and all of that”

“how you build a sane contracting process is relatively well understood. You need to put certain things in place and there’s a logical sequence to it. So we started with building the contracting capability maturity model – which is a five-stage process you go through. We’ve actually simplified it (and that’s what’s coming out in the next version basically).

There are three things you need to do. It’s really simple. You have got to make it a repeatable process. You put some basic automation in place… And then it’s all refinement after that, it’s continuous improvement.”

“I don’t think we could have grown that much faster without taking capital. And I think, taking capital would have been disastrous, because it puts a clock on you that we wouldn’t have been able to keep up successfully.”

“one of the great things that’s happened is there are a lot more opportunities now as two interesting things I think can be associated with the industry.”

Resources mentioned

Contracting Mistakes series

• #1: Accepting no time for the “important, not urgent”
• #2: Assuming change requires big bangs
• #3: Legal should stick to the legals
• #4: One more lawyer
• #5: “Robust” terms
• #6: Deals are different

Alex Hamilton (LinkedIn / Twitter)  is the CEO and founder of Radiant Law, the UK-based award-winning NewLaw firm. Alex is focused on improving the contracting process for clients, leading product and tech development. He also regularly talks and writes on improving contracting, LawTech and the changing legal industry. He has led a number of projects that have been recognized by the FT’s Innovative Lawyer Awards. Before founding Radiant Law, he was a Partner at Latham & Watkins and co-Chair of Latham & Watkins’ global Technology Transactions Group.