Legal Hygiene
What It Means to Have a Contract Function
Companies have a finance function and a sales function, each with owners, systems, and a standing way of working. Contracts rarely get the same treatment. They are handled as a series of events, signed when a deal closes and reopened when something goes wrong, with the work scattered across whoever happened to touch them. What most companies lack is a contract function: a single, standing way the whole book is run.
A contract function is built from four capabilities. Each is ordinary on its own. Held together, in one place, they are what turns a pile of agreements into something the company operates rather than reacts to.
The first is one record of everything signed. Every agreement the company has entered, in a single place, current and searchable, so the question of what the company has agreed to has one answer rather than a search across drives and inboxes.
The second is review behind every signature. Each contract is checked against the company’s standards and against everything already on the book, so no agreement goes out carrying a term that contradicts one the company has already made.
The third is obligations owned and dated. Every commitment a contract creates is pulled out, assigned to a person, and placed on a date, so what the contract requires actually happens, and happens on time, rather than waiting to surface when it is missed.
The fourth is enforcement reachable wherever the business went. When an obligation breaks, the company can act on it, in whatever jurisdiction the contract reached, without that reach being limited to wherever its own people happen to sit.
Handled as events
- Signed when a deal closes, reopened when something breaks
- Work scattered across whoever touched it
- Some of the four, some of the time
Run as a function
- All four capabilities held in one place
- Continuous, across the whole book
- A standing capability, not an effort mounted each time
Any one of these can be done in isolation, and most companies do some of them, some of the time, in some part of the book. A contract function is what you have when all four hold together across the whole book, continuously, as a standing capability rather than an effort that has to be mounted each time.
Rilin delivers the contract function whole. One record of everything signed, review behind every signature, obligations owned and dated, and enforcement reachable wherever the business went, in a single system. The company stops handling contracts as a series of events and starts running them as a function, the way it already runs finance and sales.
