What Actually Speeds Up Contracting? A Practical Deep Dive for In-House Legal Teams

Every legal team says they want faster contracts. But many are still waiting weeks for signatures on routine agreements, chasing approvals across Slack, sending drafts back and forth by email, and relying on verbal approvals that never make it into the record.

The issue is not effort. It is design. Many contracting processes were built for accuracy and oversight, not speed. And when speed is not designed into the process from the start, the workarounds people reach for often become slower, messier, and riskier than the process they were trying to avoid.

Join us on Wednesday, July 22, at 12:00  PM ET as Akshay Verma, Chief Operating Officer at SpotDraft; Andrew Cooke, Chief Legal Officer at Perk; Patricija “Patty” Corey, Legal Operations Manager at Franklin Templeton; and Aditi Ramachandran, Legal Operations, Contracts and Compliance Manager at Houzz, share what actually speeds up contracting in practice. In this candid 90-minute discussion, they’ll explore where contracts really stall, what process changes make a measurable difference, what does not work as expected, and what they would do differently with the benefit of experience.

No vendor pitches — just practical insights from people who have worked through the operational realities of improving contracting speed.

Key Takeaways

• Find where contracts actually stall: Learn how to trace your contracting process from request to signature and identify where time is genuinely being lost, including delays that happen before and after legal review.
• Address pre-contract friction: Understand why the queries, certifications, and information requests around a contract often cause more delay than the contract itself, and how AI self-service can help reduce repetitive back-and-forth.
• Connect intake to cycle time: Explore why many contracting delays begin before a contract is even drafted, and what well-designed intake looks like in practice.
• Make CLM implementation deliver: Hear what legal operations leaders have learned about the decisions that determine whether a CLM speeds things up or simply creates new friction alongside the old.
• Build playbooks that get used: Examine when a playbook accelerates contracting, when it becomes a document nobody reads, and the difference between writing one for lawyers and writing one the business can actually navigate.
• Measure what matters: Identify the metrics that show whether contracting is genuinely improving — and the ones that only show how busy the team is.

Who Should Attend

This session is designed for in-house legal professionals responsible for improving contracting speed, consistency, and business support, including General Counsel, Heads of Legal, legal operations professionals, and contract managers. It will be especially useful for teams looking for practical answers on cycle time, intake, CLM adoption, playbooks, approvals, and process improvement without a vendor pitch.

There is NO COST to attend this program!

This program is FREE, thanks to our gracious sponsor, SpotDraft! If you can’t make it to the live program, the recording will be available for viewing via our paid CLE library, In-House Connect On-Demand!