(Author) Legal Operations Lead

Hello! Our legal team is looking to introduce contract review SLA’s depending on type of contract they need legal to review.  Does anyone do this or is advisable not to have contract SLA’s published externally to business lines? I worry about not meeting the SLA’s since all contracts are slightly different and we have a very small team.  Please let me know you thoughts when you have a second.  Thanks!

Legal Operations Reponses:

• In my experience, if you provide SLAs at all, they should be directed at "first reponses" - i.e., acknowledging receipt of the request. It's best not to commit to SLAs related to actual contract review as there are too many variables at play -- how complex the terms are, whether on your paper or the other parties', how quickly the other party returns responses to you, etc. Finally, there's a potential conflict of interest in pushing the legal team to accelerate reviews purely to close deals.
• Hi! I would be happy to connect and share my experiences with SLAs and the different ways I’ve used them over the years.
• In my experience, setting SLAs is difficult because each contract is different - your paper vs. customer paper, type of agreement, etc. Also a lot depends on the engagement of the other party. I don't like to commit to internal SLAs for these reasons. What I've seen in the past is setting an SLA of, say, 2 business days to acknowledge receipt and to provide high level feedback only (i.e. I glanced at this document and the redlines are light, so I will get it back to you by end of week). Just so the business feels acknowledged and you don't get a million pings asking for status (although you probably will anyway)
• I think complexity definitions rather than SLA’s might help not having a solid turnaround time for the business to understand the turnaround time is, “well it depends” on the type of agreement.  I really appreciate the feedback.

Head of Legal Responses:

• Here's what we share through our confluence page

Additional Questions

• Question for the group--do you have a separate SLA for third party paperwork? We have an internal SLA broken down by [Internal] paper and Customer paper.Also, does your company have different internal SLAs for customer contracts v. vendor contracts v. partner contracts?

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