Procurement at Calder & Rowe clears vendor paper without waiting on legal

Legal as the bottleneck

Calder & Rowe is an engineering consultancy with 11 offices in the UK and Ireland. Procurement buys everything from site software to subcontracted surveyors, and every purchase came with a contract that waited for one of five lawyers.

Most of those contracts were routine. Procurement could see which ones were, but had no way to show a clause was acceptable without asking legal.

Positions procurement can use

Legal wrote down where it stands on liability, insurance, intellectual property and termination, with a fallback for each. Proviso gives procurement those positions inside the draft, with the edit to send back.

Legal sees the exceptions

When a vendor pushes past the fallback, the agreement goes to legal with the vendor’s language and the negotiation so far attached. Everything else, procurement closes on its own.