The goal of traditional contract management has been to find and track all corporate agreements. Today, innovative general counsel are finding that the real value of contracts lies within the content—and mining that content exposes adherence to compliance issues, either to the company or to support a potential external recovery opportunity.
Discovering those risk and/or return nuggets can help general counsel in their role as corporate risk manager. Finding vendor or customer compliance opportunities can turn the GC into King Midas—using the gold in the contracts to recover real dollars—and potentially change the value of the GC from leader of the law department as a cost center to that of a “profit center.” This is referred to as “contract recovery.”
