What the agreement work runs on
Part one showed the steps a contract goes through and how the legal persona works each of them. Each of those steps runs on knowledge, and knowledge lives in three places: outside the company, in its systems, and in its people. This page sorts through all of it.
Knowledge lives in three places
Every step runs on something somebody knows or has written down: what the law requires, what the company agreed to before, what positions it will and will not accept, who is allowed to sign, and what happened the last time it dealt with that party. Part of it lives outside the company, in the laws, regulations, and obligations it owes to other parties. Part of it lives in the company's systems: the playbook, the agreements it has signed, the way it operates.
The rest lives in its people, and much of that has never been written down. Where the knowledge sits decides the job. What lives outside has to be kept up with, written down, and turned into changes to the rules that matter. What lives in the systems has to be extracted or read, and where it runs thin the lawyer supplies the call live on the step. What lives in people has to be drawn out, and that is what this series is for.
Someone else maintains it
Laws, regulations, court decisions, the obligations owed to other parties, and market data on what terms are normal. The outside world keeps it current, and your counterparty reads the same copy.
Retrievable without asking a person
The agreements themselves, in the repository and the signing platform, with the terms pulled out of them. The playbook, once it is written down. Who is allowed to sign, in the systems that own that record. Where the systems run thin, the call falls to the lawyer on the step.
Retrievable only by asking, and it leaves when they do
Why the deal mattered. What got conceded in the last negotiation with this party, and what it bought. How the agreement turned out once it was live. Little of it has been written down until now, and it is most of what the department knew about the deal.
The kinds of knowledge, in the order a deal meets them
From the highest level, everything starts with the laws and regulations that govern the company and the party across the table, and with what the market treats as normal. Then there is the agreement itself, the business reason behind it, the positions the company has settled on, the history with this party, who is allowed to sign, and how the deal turned out once it was live.
Those are different kinds of knowledge, and they exist in different ways. Some are kept for you. Some sit in documents until someone pulls the terms out. Some exist only while the work is happening: the reason for the deal, what got said in the room, and what happened after signing. Each card below names one kind, where it lives, and what shape it is in today.
The record each kind needs before technology can reach it
Technology can start to capture knowledge, but only once each kind exists as a record it can read. The table names that record for every kind, grouped by where it lives: the outside world's records are kept for you, the systems' records exist once someone extracts the terms or wires the source, and the records in people exist once someone writes them down.
| Kind | The record it needs |
|---|