Fixing the Legal-Procurement Disconnect to Speed Up Contract Review

February 2026Procurement IT

Abstract

It’s a familiar scenario: a critical vendor deal lands in procurement’s lap. Commercial terms need to be negotiated, and it heads off to legal. Six weeks pass. The business is frustrated, procurement is blamed, and legal is overwhelmed. Nobody is winning – and critically, nobody intended for this outcome. The handoff between procurement and legal remains one of the most significant bottlenecks in commercial contracting, yet it's rarely discussed openly. Friction points in the legal-procurement relationship – from misaligned risk appetites to duplicative approval workflows – are commonplace, but that doesn’t mean they’re unsolvable. With just a few key steps, organizations can create integrated processes that respect both functions' priorities and ensure that the process of getting vendor contracts finalized isn’t any slower than it needs to be. Because that slowness has a price – not just in time, but in vendor relationships, competitive positioning, and ultimately, the overall effectiveness of the organization.

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The Central Government, various State Governments and public sector enterprises and organizations (i.e. enterprises/organizations that are either owned or controlled by central/state governments) in India carry out procurement at an...Read more

Subhrarag Mukherjee

Asia Pacific & Japan Region Lead Counsel - Communications Services Business, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, India

Agile Procurement

The contemporary state-of-art procurement is a well-organized, centralized, robust machine that gains benefits through ability to issue comprehensive RFP processes aiming, inter alia, for volume discounts. Through standardization, it is...Read more

Janne Järvenoja

Director, Legal, Avanade, Finland

Managing Risk in Data Center Construction: The OEM’s Challenge in a Multi-EPC Contracting Model

Fixing the Legal-Procurement Disconnect to Speed Up Contract Review

Abstract

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