Rebuilding a contract template set is not the hard part. Finding the time is.
You already know your templates need work. Most organizations do, and most have known for years.
The rewrite gets scheduled against work that has a deadline attached, and it loses every time. The sponsor who championed it stops asking. The people who were going to do it were never given room to do it.
This is why I bring a drafted template to the first working session instead of a project plan. The question your team answers is "Is this right?" not "When can we start?"
What it costs your people
The fee is the smaller number. The real cost of a template program is your legal team's time, your business units' time and your procurement staff's time, spent among everything else they owe someone.
So the work is built to spend as little of it as possible. I draft; your people decide. Each review arrives bounded; what changed, what needs confirming, and the specific places your business units disagree and someone has to pick. Two rounds, each with a date.
What I find, nearly every time
Accretion
Every clause in a twenty-year-old template was added by someone responding to something real. A supplier failed. An audit found a gap. A deal went badly. Adding a clause is safe, so it keeps happening. Removing one requires someone willing to carry the risk of having removed it, and no one has that job. The template grows in one direction for twenty years.
This isn’t a drafting failure, and it isn’t anyone's fault. It is what happens to a document that has many authors and no owner.
Vintage Drift
One business unit is working under a three-year-old MSA. Another signed a new one last quarter. The terms differ, and the difference has nothing to do with the two deals — it is an accident of the execution date. Nobody decided this. It is what happens to a template set that no one owns as a set.
The Redline Tax
Suppliers return redlines to language your own template invited. Every round costs calendar days and legal hours. The expensive part of contracting is not writing the document. It is everything that happens after the document goes out.
The score does two jobs
A sponsor needs something to take into a budget conversation. "Our contracts are a mess" has no owner and no budget line. A score, like a grade, against a published rubric, broken out criterion by criterion, with the specific language behind each finding, is something you can put in a plan.
At the end, it does the second job. The same rubric re-run on the rebuilt set is what you show the people who approved the spend.
What I do
Five steps. Most clients start at the first.
1 Score it
Two weeks
A fixed-fee assessment of one template or family against the rubric, with the findings and the specific language behind each one.
2 Architect the set
Two weeks
The right set of templates for how the business actually buys; which families, which need an MSA and which a standalone agreement, and a selection rationale the person choosing between them can follow.
3 Rebuild it
Four weeks
The rewrite itself, scored before and after. I do the drafting. Your attorneys review a draft instead of writing one, and your staff answers questions instead of running a project.
4 Build the negotiation playbook
Two weeks
Pre-approved responsive language mapped to the redlines you actually receive. Playbooks that not only tell you who can change what, but also what it means and why what’s written is important.
5 Build the contract management playbook
Two weeks
What your team has to do after signature: the notices, cure periods, inspections, approvals and withholding decisions each template requires, with who does each one and when.
Once your templates are right, the DraftOnce platform can keep them that way, assembling each contract, its playbook and its inspection forms through guided questions. It is a separate conversation and a separate agreement. Learn about the platform →
Who this is for
Large buyers operating on their own paper. Utilities, energy, government, heavy industry, manufacturing. Enough contracting volume that template quality compounds. A legal team that is not growing while contract volume is.
It is not for organizations buying on someone else's paper, and it is not for anyone who wants the assessment without the implementation.