What I Wish I’d Known as a Contract Admin for a Trucking Company
By Amy Engle
That day started like any other. I got to my desk, checked my email and got up to go to the kitchen (yes, this was pre-COVID). When I returned to my desk, one of our salespeople, let’s call him Joe, was waiting for me.
“I need that contract today,” he said. I looked at the pile on my desk, arranged by date received. I shuffled to the bottom of the pile and found Joe’s contract. I flipped through the pages—it was 45 pages.
I pointed to the pile in front of me and said, “but yours is on the bottom of the stack.” Joe gave me his best smile, picked up a few of the highlighters from my desk—blue, yellow and pink. “Well, ask the Pres himself. This is top priority—a big revenue generator for us.” Just as Joe walked away from my desk, Sue
from safety walked up.
“There you are,” she said. I’ve been looking for you.” I checked my watch: 8:15. “What’s up,” I asked. “We’ve had an accident and I need to see company X’s contract immediately. I need you to find and summarize all the key terms in it for me. I need it before 10.”
I looked at my desk. Printed stacks of contracts were waiting for me to read, highlight, and discuss with others in the company. I threw Joe’s contract down and walked over to the row of metal file cabinets that held our contracts. I ran my finger down the alphabetical listing and cranked open the draw that contained X’s contract. Or rather that should have contained X’s contract. I yanked out a fat folder labeled, X, but all I found inside were a dozen drafts of the contract. I heaved them out and brought them back to my desk trying to make sense out of them. My head began to swirl.
Ok, so this is a fictionalized morning, but my fellow contracts people know what I’m talking about. I had few tools at my disposal to make the process of reviewing, redlining and organizing contracts easier, faster and safer. Little did I know that just a few short years later, I would be on the cutting edge of changing the way people like me review and organize contracts—I just had to wait for technology to catch up.
My company, Transaction Expeditors, along with our tech partner LegalSifter, have pioneered AI contract review and organization solutions for the transportation industry. We identify issues in contracts. We embed advice and sample language to help you understand and markup contracts faster and better. We extract important contract terms from signed contracts and organize that information for reporting and easy access. We make your life easier.
I think about my fictional day above and imagine quickly “sifting” Joe’s contract in a fraction of the time it would have taken me to review it using highlighters and sticky notes. While Joe’s contract was sifting (2 minutes+/-), I would have checked our data base of contracts and downloaded a report on the key terms contained in X’s agreement. While sharing the report with safety, I would have opened Joe’s sifted contract, reviewed the results, and started redlining it. All of this would have been done in the amount of time it took me to walk to the file cabinet and search for X’s contract.
If you’re interested in improving your contract process, contact us at info@transactionexp.com.