What Is The Value Of Deal Thresholds In Commercial Contracting?
Jasmine Singh: At Binti we built in conditional logic workflows that would trigger certain approvals based on answers that were given. We also built those workflows based on the legal review threshold, which when pressure tested changed.
When suddenly budgets are being cut, you get less lawyers or can't afford to continue to add lawyers when scale happens.
So those are the moments you make strategic decisions about what you will or will not review anymore. Then, you have to communicate that to the stakeholders and make it easy for them to make sure that those contracts are well done and well executed.
Laura Frederick: Did you do that in advance of those ups and down, Is that something you did at a strategic level or was it more reactive as needed?
Jasmine Singh: I would argue both. Going into any role, I sort of set a threshold to say, these are the contracts based on my current team that we're going to review, this is the reality of sort of the situation and this is the diligence.
As frankly the economy changes and as the business changes, those are the triggers for changing those thresholds.
Those are the moments you say, we're not looking at these contracts anymore. Business, you're so good at doing this yourself I've built you a workflow and all you have do is answer these questions, click to accept and send it to your counterpart. Now there's a lot less back and forth involved. So on the process side, I think there's opportunities.
We can leverage technology to really empower the business to do as much without legal as possible, which then reduces our need for overhead.
On the people side especially when I was junior in house, I thought I had to do everything no matter how little I had. So I figured I'll do it all with nothing , and that will be my value proposition. That was not a great approach to doing more with less because that sets bad precedent. It also creates a dynamic where you're actually not empowering people in the business to do more.
The reality of tech startups in particular is your counterpart teams are always going to scale and grow faster than legal is. It is in legal's best interest to make sure that those scaling teams are able to take on some of the responsibilities that rightfully should be with them in terms of how to do contracts and how to continue to scale.
