Why procurement paper slows down, and where to look first

The fastest contract to review is often the one you never receive. We found the first question in procurement should be whether you can contract on your own terms.

When we started looking closely at procurement contracting, the obvious problem seemed to be contract review. A supplier sends through their paper. Procurement passes it to legal. Legal reviews it, identifies the issues, gets input from the business, marks it up and sends it back. There are now some incredibly powerful AI tools that can make that review much faster. But as we worked through the process with our clients, we found ourselves asking a more basic question: why are we starting with the supplier's contract?

For a lot of everyday procurement, there is no particular reason the supplier's paper needs to be the starting point. The organisation already knows the protections it needs. It knows its position on privacy, security, insurance, liability, payment terms and termination. Often it already has its own procurement terms. Starting there changes the process completely. Instead of receiving a contract and asking legal to work out what is wrong with it, the business can answer a small number of questions, generate the right agreement and start from a position the organisation already understands and is comfortable with. The right approvals and delegations can be built around that process from the beginning.

That is why our Procure module is designed to keep contracting on our client's paper wherever possible. It sounds simple, but we think it is an important distinction. There is a lot of focus at the moment on using AI to review third-party contracts faster. We use AI for that too. But if you can avoid starting with unfamiliar third-party paper in the first place, there is simply less to review, fewer departures to resolve and less reason for legal to sit in the middle of an otherwise routine procurement.

Of course, suppliers don't always agree. Sometimes they insist on their own terms. Sometimes they propose changes to yours. And sometimes the size or nature of the procurement means supplier paper makes sense. That's where AI-assisted review becomes really useful, but we found there was another trap here too. Producing an issues list in a few minutes instead of a few hours is valuable, but a faster issues list isn't necessarily a faster procurement. Someone still needs to decide what matters, what can be accepted and who needs to approve a departure.

That pushed us to think more carefully about the playbook sitting behind the review. A payment term might belong with finance. A security departure might need infosec. Some departures might sit within an agreed tolerance and need no escalation at all. Others genuinely require legal judgment. If those rules are clear, the technology can do more than identify an issue. It can help move that issue to the right person, apply the right approval process and bring legal in when the decision actually needs a lawyer.

So rather than treating every supplier contract as a document for legal to review, we increasingly think about procurement contracting as a pathway. Start on your paper where you can. Make the organisation's position clear from the outset and build the approvals and guardrails around it. If the supplier pushes back, identify the departures and route them to the people who own the decision. If supplier paper really is necessary, review it against the same playbook and escalate what matters.

AI plays an important role throughout that process. It can help understand the procurement, prepare the right agreement, interpret supplier changes and identify departures when third-party paper does come back. But the lesson for us has been that the goal shouldn't simply be to review contracts faster.

It's to need less review in the first place.