Key Takeaways
- Your first priority when joining a new company is not to automate or overhaul processes. It is to listen.
- A speaking tour across departments reveals the real contracting story your company is telling.
- Listening before fixing builds credibility, context, and the roadmap for smarter process design.
When you join a new company, many people will tell you to begin by mapping processes.
I disagree.
Start With Listening, Not Mapping
Your first 30 days are not about mapping, automating, or launching a tool. They are about listening.
Every company has its own contracting culture, an unwritten language that explains how deals really move, who approves them, and what “done” means in practice. You learn that language by going on what I call a speaking tour.
This is not about presenting a deck or offering quick fixes. It is about asking questions and meeting the people who touch contracts or legal workflows every day. It is about understanding how the process works in real life compared to how it looks in a flowchart.
I am writing this because it is exactly what I am doing in my first 30 days as a Legal Operations Manager at a fast-scaling tech company. The clearest insights about contracting are not found in dashboards. They are found in conversations.
This is why I recommend going on what I refer to as a “Listening Tour” which I lay out in detail in this article.
Who to Meet
Meet with stakeholders from each of the businesses and start the conversation with one question: Who touches a contract or legal workflow from start to finish?
Sales
How deals are initiated, what slows them down, and how they navigate internal approvals.
Revenue Operations and Finance
How commercial terms are evaluated, how revenue gets booked, what guardrails exist, and what needs to happen before a deal can move forward.
Procurement and Sourcing
How vendor onboarding works, how they negotiate contracts from both a legal and commercial perspective, and how they collaborate with Legal.
People Team
How employment agreements, severance workflows, and HR templates are created, reviewed, and approved.
Marketing
How legal review fits into their content development process. This includes blog posts, customer stories, press releases, and event materials. Understanding this workflow shows you how fast Marketing can move and how the company manages risk around claims, trademarks, and customer references.
Data or Engineering Teams
Whether their metrics tie into revenue enablement, how they rely on contracts for data access or customer commitments, and whether contracting helps or slows down visibility.
Legal
Who reviews which agreements, what thresholds exist for deeper review, and how the team decides what requires redlines.
IT and Security
What systems are used today, including Jira or low-code tools, and how IT or security reviews are conducted before a contract can proceed.
Each conversation adds a layer of truth. By the end of your first month, you will understand who owns what, where approvals stall, which templates people use or avoid, and how contracts really get done at your new organization.
How to Connect the Dots
As you meet with various teams, you will start hearing repeating themes.
Sales might say deals get slowed down.
Revenue Operations may say they are happy with the current sales process.
Marketing might say legal review delays content.
Finance might say commercial terms are clear and organized.
Legal might say thresholds are well defined.
IT might say their intake workflow works perfectly.
These contradictions are not problems. They are clues.
The real truth about contracting usually lives somewhere in the overlap of these stories. Each team sees the process through its own lens, and sometimes those perspectives do not match what is actually happening.
It reminds me of the country artist Mitchell Tenpenny in “Truth About You.” The truth often starts somewhere in the middle of two stories.
Contracting works the same way. No single perspective gives you the full picture. Your job is to connect those dots so your company can finally see how the entire process fits together.
What You Should Capture
You do not need a full process map, yet. A simple set of notes is enough.
Capture the following pieces of information:
- The real lifecycle from request to signature
- Who owns each step
- Where delays consistently occur
- Which tools and templates people actually use
- Which systems people avoid and why
- Where cross-functional handoffs break down
- Where expectations are unclear
- Where Marketing, Sales, or Ops need faster guidance from Legal
This list becomes your foundation for your next phase of work. It is your north star.
Why Listening Builds Credibility Faster Than Automation
New hires often feel pressure to prove value quickly by fixing workflows or launching a tool.
But in Legal Ops, trust is the real KPI.
When people see that you are taking the time to understand their frustrations before recommending solutions, they become allies. This is how you build the foundation for smoother workflow redesign, stronger template adoption, and more successful CLM implementations later.
Quick wins matter, but they will not stick without stakeholder buy-in. Listening is how you earn that buy-in.
By month two, you will have both the contracting context and the relationships needed to improve it.
The Real Win of the First 30 Days
In your first month, resist the urge to fix. Listen first.
A speaking tour gives you something far more valuable than a process map. It gives you context, trust, and momentum. When you introduce automation or a CLM later on, you will not be pushing change. You will be leading it with a story the entire company helped shape.
Contracts reflect how your company works together. If you start your Legal Ops journey with curiosity instead of conclusions, you will be amazed at how much clarity comes from simply asking the right questions.
You’ve got this.
Stay tuned for more practical legal ops tips and strategies from the trenches in my column Beyond the Fine Print, right here with Contract Nerds.
The post The Listening Tour: Gathering Key Contract Insights from Internal Teams appeared first on Contract Nerds.