4 ways SaaS legal teams can help move deals faster

Written by Kimberly Trull, General Counsel at Matillion and Summize Power Counsel Chair

As an in-house lawyer, you’re balancing two competing priorities: protecting the business while helping it close deals. As the business grows, we all know that balance gets harder. Contract volumes increase, sales want faster turnaround times and the legal team can quickly become a bottleneck.

But asking lawyers to simply review contracts faster isn’t a sustainable way to scale. At Matillion, where I’m General Counsel, I’ve found the better approach is to look at the contracting process as a whole: where can we standardize, where can we add capacity and where does legal expertise genuinely need to be involved?

Here are four ways I’ve found to help my team move faster while still managing risk.

1. How can SaaS legal teams standardize contract review without increasing risk?

To start with, SaaS legal teams can standardize contract review by separating material risk from contractual variation, then setting standard, fallback and escalation positions for the issues that come up the most.

One of the biggest contract management mistakes I see growing software businesses make is treating every agreement as completely unique. The question I ask is: “how much does it really matter if an NDA says something one way rather than another if the underlying position hasn’t changed?”

The distinction between contractual variation and material risk is important. If two clauses lead to essentially the same commercial outcome, spending significant legal time negotiating the wording doesn’t necessarily create more protection for the business.

For my fellow software lawyers, distinguishing between risk and variation can mean:

• Identifying clauses and issues that come up repeatedly, such as payment terms
• Establishing standard positions for common negotiation points
• Creating fallback positions where the business is willing to compromise – for example, accepting a higher liability cap for strategic customers, approved in advance so it can be offered without escalating to you and your team
• Defining clear escalation points for issues that need lawyer involvement, such as uncapped indemnities
• Reviewing whether repeated negotiations point to a problem that could be addressed at the process level, such as an outdated template clause

That’s where AI can be particularly useful – instead of looking at one agreement at a time, we can look across our contracting activity and identify patterns.

2. How can SaaS legal teams scale without adding headcount?

SaaS companies can add dozens of customers, partners and vendors without adding dozens of lawyers. With software deals often involving multiple contracts like NDAs, MSAs, DPAs and order forms, the contracting process has to absorb more volume without turning every increase in commercial activity into more manual legal work.

For me, scaling isn’t automatically a headcount question. Instead, I look at the whole contracting process and think about where better technology or processes are needed rather than simply hiring more people. For example, technology could take care of:

• Structured contract intake
• Initial information gathering
• First-pass redlining against an approved playbook
• Status updates and workflow notifications
• Tracking agreements that fall outside standard risk positions

At Matillion, we moved away from spreadsheet-based contract tracking and introduced a contract lifecycle management system into the tools the business was already using. We also use AI functionality to support first-pass contract review and risk flagging. When analyzing how much work (and therefore money) this actually saved myself and my legal team in manual work, we found that it led to a 4,062% ROI, which was independently verified by Nucleus Research.

Our goal was always to help our lawyers save time for work that requires their legal judgment, instead of technology replacing legal expertise.

3. How can legal and sales work together to close SaaS deals faster?

One of the biggest changes I’ve made is getting more commercial context earlier in the process. When a contract reaches me, I want to understand more than what the document says. I want to understand the deal behind it.

For example:

• What’s the value of the deal? A $50,000 agreement might warrant a different approach from a $5 million strategic deal.
• How urgent is it? A contract needed to close before quarter-end has a different commercial context from one that can wait another month.
• What’s driving the customer’s position? If they’re pushing for a particular term because they had a problem with another vendor, that context can help shape the negotiation.
• What’s already been discussed? It’s best for legal to join a negotiation on the same page as sales and the customer.
• Whose paper are we using? Customer paper can introduce different risks and may require a different approach from our standard agreement.

That information doesn’t necessarily change my answer, but it can change how I get to the answer. I encourage my team and other in-house lawyers to try and give sales a clearer path to “yes, but” – if the answer to a customer request is no, simply sending that no back to sales doesn’t help anyone close the deal.

Instead, I want to explain what we can accept, what needs to change and why.

That gives your sales team something useful to take back to the customer and keeps you and your commercial department working towards the same outcome: closing the right deal at an acceptable level of risk.

4. How can SaaS legal teams enable sales to self-serve contracts?

As a business grows, legal can become an information bottleneck without meaning to.  

Often, sales doesn’t need legal advice. They just want to know whether a contract has been reviewed, where it is in the process, what’s holding it up or whether they can generate a standard agreement.

If the only way to get that information is to message someone in legal, you then  end up spending time managing information rather than managing risk.

At Matillion, we give sales greater visibility into the contracting process. They can see where their contracts sit, and managers and our Chief Revenue Officer can see their team’s agreements and the wider pipeline quickly and easily.

Our sales team also has the ability to self-serve with approved templates, allowing them to generate standard agreements like NDAs without a lawyer drafting each one, giving us more time for the work that genuinely requires our expertise.

Legal should help the business close the right deals

For me, the bigger goal isn’t just making my legal team more efficient – I’m making us an active part of how the business generates revenue.  

That’s the difference between simply processing more contracts and building a legal function that can scale with the business.

I know firsthand how difficult it can be to know where to start when it comes to working out how technology can help and choosing a tech vendor – I evaluated more than 10 vendors in my initial process. My advice is to start with your biggest pain points rather than a feature list, and talk to people who genuinely understand contracting.

The contract experts at Summize can listen to the challenges your team is facing and help you understand what good looks like for a legal function at your stage of growth. Get in touch with the team, who will show you how to help your legal team scale with the business.