The following blog post was written by Avanade alum Bob Malone.

Avanade’s business is rapidly transforming, and Avanade Legal is an integral part of that journey. Last month, after a year of hard work by our legal team, we launched our updated Contracting Policy as the fundamental blueprint for what good deal making should look like at Avanade.

With this change, our team will bring value when we’re needed most, providing legal counseling from deal shaping to project delivery. This is an evolution of what we do today, and yet a major leap forward as we apply our best-in-class business lawyering across the board.

In this article, we tell the story of what we learned and what we wish we had known when we embarked on our journey to transform not only an internal policy but the mindset of our legal team and Avanade as a whole.

What’s new – and why?
Our previous policy was drafted at a time when Avanade had a more consistent risk portfolio across the majority of our deals. But standardization alone, which was key to contracting success at the time, no longer makes sense. Our revised Contracting Policy enables our lawyers to apply good judgment to focus on the issues that matter most in the context of the industries our clients work in and the way we deliver our offerings, in closer collaboration with the deal team.

Avanade’s refreshed contracting principles
As a company, we must prioritize and look at our business from many angles to determine our aspirations for future success in deal making. Our Contracting Policy is much more than an escalation process; it defines what good deal making looks like.

Six key principles form the backbone of our new approach. These principles are not only relevant for our legal team; they're critical for everyone involved in the deal process:

What will be better?
With the new approach, our clients will get more value during deal shaping, including negotiations with an empowered deal team and faster contract approvals. We’ll achieve this by ensuring our people are empowered and qualified to determine and resolve the most relevant risks. Finally, our business will have more contractual certainty.

The practical side: How did we get here?
When we decided to address our Contracting Policy, we started with several brainstorming sessions. We imagined we were hired to develop a legal review policy and process for a company like Avanade, working with a blank sheet of paper. We deliberately detached from the approach we had applied for many years but wanted to learn from it.

To help us understand our existing contracting environment, we focused on factors like the number and global distribution of our client contracts, key high-risk matters, a comparison between the size of an opportunity and the generated revenue, and a root-cause analysis for contractual challenges.

We decided early on to work with our own Avanade Advisory team and our Avanade Transformation Office, not only to benefit from their people and techniques, but to also ensure alignment with other transformation projects within the company.

How did we tie in our team?
Together with the transformation team, we held a design-thinking workshop for the entire global legal department and leaders from our technical delivery team. The focus of the workshop was on “Providing Certainty - What is our future role in client contracting?”

Key questions addressed during the workshop included:

• What should our attorneys focus on to provide the best value?
• What kind of lawyer do you want to be?
• How can we change from a standard contracting approach to a more value-driven, adjustable one?
• How can we create a great contracting experience for our clients?

The workshop was designed to help us understand the needs of the lawyers who apply the policy every day and who are the closest to our clients. The engagement was amazing. In small breakout groups every participant was free to express their opinion, needs and wishes. Results were later presented and discussed with the full legal team.

Following the workshop, a task force with legal representatives from our team around the world, including lawyers at all career stages, participated in the numerous workstreams, ultimately leading to our new approach. We proactively aligned our thinking with all affected stakeholders throughout Avanade like Delivery, our solution architects, Sales, Finance and business leadership. As a final step, we kicked off workstreams to complete the various needed artifacts summarizing the new approach in more detail, giving the attorneys hands-on guidance for their daily work. We worked with our IT team to get our Microsoft Dynamics-based Opportunity Management Platform ready for the automated distribution of contracts requiring legal review. And training was put in place to enable our attorneys to better navigate commercial matters and new focus areas like corporate sustainability.

As part of the launch of the new Contracting Policy, a video with our global COO provided an overview, followed by practical small team sessions to compare notes among the attorneys on how to best apply the new approach.

How do we measure success?
Early on, we were challenged by our CEO, Pam Maynard, to determine how we would measure success. That’s a difficult moment for all legal innovators. But seeking feedback from our lawyers, our business stakeholders and our clients, combined with data from our opportunity management system and pre-existing internal and external surveys, will enable us to measure where we’re succeeding and where we need to continue to adjust our course. The number one success criterion for our team is to learn while we’re adopting the new policy. This can be uncomfortable for lawyers but is critical for a growth mindset. Course corrections are therefore already built into the design of the new Contracting Policy’s review cycles, and we’ll continue to evolve the approach over the coming years.

One month in, we’re delighted to see how our teams are bringing the new contracting approach to life as we do what matters in deal making for Avanade and our clients. The new approach is being infused into the deal-making process for every opportunity in which we engage. We are #AvanadeProud of our legal team and everybody who helped us get here!