What Actually Happens Between First Redline and Signature

When a deal is stuck, the sentence you hear is "it's in legal."

Sometimes that's true. Often it means "it left sales and hasn't come back," which is a very different claim. The distinction matters because the two situations have completely different fixes, and companies routinely spend money on the wrong one.

Split your contract cycle at the first redline and look at what happens after it. That second half is where most of the surprises live.

Why nobody measures the second half

The first half has an obvious owner. Legal received a request, legal produced a redline, legal can be held to a turnaround time. It's measurable because it's one team's queue.

The second half has no owner at all. It passes through security review, procurement, finance, the customer's counsel, the customer's procurement, and eventually two signatories' inboxes. Nobody owns the whole path, so nobody reports on it, so it doesn't appear in anyone's metrics. It shows up only as the gap between "legal sent it back" and "the deal closed," and that gap gets attributed to whoever touched it last.

The five things actually happening in there

The customer's side is doing everything you're doing. Their counsel has a queue too. Their procurement has a process. Roughly half of your second-half time is often outside your walls entirely, which is worth knowing before you redesign your internal process to fix it.

Security review. For anything touching data or systems, a questionnaire is circulating. In most companies this runs after legal rather than alongside it, purely by habit, and it routinely adds one to three weeks. This is the single most common parallel-path opportunity I see, and it's usually free to fix.

Approval authority. Somebody accepted a term that requires a signoff nobody anticipated, and now it's waiting on a person who isn't expecting it. If you don't have a written authority matrix, this happens on a meaningful share of deals, and each occurrence is unpredictable.

Procurement and vendor onboarding. On the buy side, or when you're the vendor to a larger company, there's an entire parallel process involving insurance certificates, W-9s, supplier portals, and diversity questionnaires. None of it is legal work. All of it is contract cycle time.

The signature itself. Two executives, two calendars, one of them traveling. It sounds trivial and it regularly costs three days.

What this means for the fix

If your second half dominates the cycle, adding legal headcount will not move your number. It will make the first half faster, which is real but limited, and the deals will queue somewhere else. Teams discover this after the hire, which is an expensive way to learn it.

The interventions that work on the second half are almost all sequencing and authority:

Run security review in parallel with legal review, not after it. Trigger the questionnaire when the deal reaches a stage, not when the redline comes back. On deals with a security review, this alone is often the largest single reduction available.

Publish the authority matrix to sales so the terms that require an extra approval are known before they're accepted, not discovered afterward. Surprise escalations are the most expensive kind.

Put a clock on each stage with a named owner. Not an SLA anyone gets punished for missing. Just visibility, so a deal sitting in a queue for nine days becomes something someone can see.

Pre-stage the procurement paperwork. Insurance certificates, security documentation, and standard vendor forms can be assembled once and reused. Many companies rebuild them per deal.

The measurement that makes this arguable

Take your last forty closed deals and record three timestamps: request, first redline returned, signature. Compute the two segments and report the medians.

You will get one of three answers:

• First half dominates. A legal capacity or prioritization problem. Playbook, fallbacks, and delegation will help most.
• Second half dominates. A sequencing and authority problem. Parallel paths and the authority matrix will help most. This is the most common result.
• Roughly even. You have both, and the second half is usually cheaper to fix first.

Whatever the answer, you now have something better than an argument about whether legal is slow. You have a number with two halves, and the halves point at different people.

Why this is worth doing before anything else

The reason I push this split so hard is that it's the cheapest diagnostic in contracting and it changes the decision more often than any other single measurement.

I have watched a team build a year-long case for two additional lawyers when 70% of their cycle time sat after legal was already finished. The hires would have been approved. The number would not have moved. And the next conversation would have been about why legal spending went up while deals were still slow.

An afternoon with a spreadsheet prevents that.

If you want a faster read before pulling the data, the Deal Velocity Scorecard is twelve statements covering baseline, authority, and friction. Most teams already suspect which half is the problem. The scorecard tells you whether they're right.