Contract management has a blind spot, and it’s not in the negotiation room. It’s everything that happens after. NLPA VP of Education Jeff Dean makes this case in a new Corporate Counsel Business Journal piece: the contract you signed isn’t the finished product. It’s the starting document for a job that hasn’t started yet.
Jeff calls it the “Contract Execution Gap™,” the space between what got negotiated and what actually gets tracked and enforced once everyone moves on. Legal signs off. Procurement closes the file. Six months later, nobody can say with confidence whether the vendor is hitting the SLAs that took three weeks to negotiate.
If Jeff’s theory hits a little close to home, that’s probably the point. Most of us didn’t learn post-award governance in school. We learned it the hard way, usually after a missed rebate or a supplier relationship that quietly went sideways. That’s exactly the gap NLPA Learning was built to close. Whether you’re just starting out or you’re managing a full contract portfolio, the CPO certification track walks through the exact skills this article is talking about, not just how to negotiate the deal, but how to manage it after the signature dries. Worth a look if you’d rather learn this before your next contract teaches it to you the hard way.
Read the full article on CCBJ: Why Most Commercial Contracts Fail After Signature
