Does anyone know where I could find industry standard timelines (cycle times) for legal and privacy teams to provide input on commercial contracts?
Agree "prefer a good outcome over a fast process" but at the same time business does need to move forward. I've seen a good working relationship where legal and privacy teams have 5 business days to acknowledge and give an initial response. If there is more review required, then the expectations can be set that more time is needed.
Thank you @Rose Punkunus. Five days would be wonderful! We are seeing much longer timeframes, and it does lead to business frustration, but more importantly business interruption which is not good.
I think that many SaaS vendors host their products on AWS/Microsoft and as such they need to make sure that their costs and revenues match so that they don't take on risks. This and the reason that most SaaS vendors can be a bit "lazy" when it comes to creating their contracts. You can pick which one is more true.
Personally, I think that this can vary significantly. I've seen short contracts that have needed a lot of review and large contracts that did not. The large contracts were boiler plate and the text was common, the shorter contract was more bespoke and had other issues.
I've dealt with lawyers who are new to my firm and therefore need time to catch up and I've dealt with lawyers who've been around forever and know much more.
I've also reviewed contracts where things have gone for a loop because there was a term that wasn't well defined or another reason and it just opened up a can of worms.
When it comes to commercial contracts, I prefer a good outcome over a fast process. That said, what I do like to focus on is to make sure that I have responsive lawyers that return emails/phone calls etc. reasonably quickly and can stay on top of my legal matters. I've dealt with one lawyer who did not respond to emails, phone calls for a while and by the time they started to get back into the swing of things, the rest of us had to move on with the issue at hand. Such lawyers should be avoided. I do understand that my legal matter may be one of many that a lawyer has to deal with and as such I might have to remind the lawyer of the details of my issue but dealing with a disorganized lawyer is a problem.
What you should do is where possible work with standard contract templates. These contracts may be standard to you and your firm but ideally they should be based on boiler plate so that other parties can review them quickly. The setup of such contracts is a bit of an investment but they payoff is huge. If done correctly you can just customize the few pieces for each client (i.e. name, contact details, pricing, etc.) and just go. These are safer as well since people aren't creating a new contract each time.