Sales & revenue
Days in legal: the revenue metric nobody owns
Sales measures pipeline in days. Finance measures cash in days. Legal measures nothing in days — so the days a deal spends waiting for a contract belong to nobody, and slip every quarter.
Q3Median days from “sent to legal” to “signed”: 196. Deals over 30 days in legal: 71. Rounds per deal: 3.41.8. Slipped to next quarter for contract reasons: 0.
- Days in legal = business days from the contract entering legal review to signature. Measure the median and the tail, not the average.
- Most of the time is waiting, not working: the redline sat for four days because the reviewer had other work. Fix the queue before the clauses.
- Pre-approved fallbacks are the single biggest lever: most rounds exist because the person negotiating was not allowed to say yes.
Define it before you measure it
Days in legal is the number of business days between the moment a contract enters legal review and the moment it is signed by both parties. Two rules make the number useful. Count business days, or every deal that hits a weekend looks worse than it is. And track the median plus the tail (deals over 20 days, say), because one 60-day monster makes the average meaningless while hiding the fact that most deals are fine.
Where the clock starts is a decision. The most honest version starts when sales sends the paper to legal, not when legal opens it — the waiting is the point.
Where the days actually go
Trace ten deals and time-stamp every hand-off. The pattern is remarkably consistent across companies:
| Stage | Typical share of days in legal | What it usually is |
|---|---|---|
| Waiting for first review | 25–40% | Queue. The reviewer had other work. |
| First redline | 5–10% | Actual work. |
| Waiting on the counterparty | 20–30% | Their queue. |
| Internal escalation | 10–25% | Someone had to ask someone whether we could accept X. |
| Subsequent rounds | 10–20% | Work plus both queues, repeated. |
| Signature logistics | 5–10% | Finding the signatory; the DocuSign that expired. |
Two-thirds of the time is waiting. This is why hiring a faster lawyer changes little: the lawyer’s working time is a tenth of the total.
Benchmarks, with appropriate caution
Published surveys of contract cycle time vary widely by definition, and vendors of contract software have an interest in the “before” numbers looking bad. With that said, for mid-market B2B SaaS a median of two to three weeks for a negotiated customer agreement is common; under a week is achievable with a playbook and a dedicated desk; and NDAs should be same-day. If your median for negotiated deals is over three weeks, the queue is the problem, not the contracts.
Five changes, in order of effect
- Pre-approved fallbacks. Write down, per clause, what the negotiator may agree to without asking. This removes most of the escalation stage and most of the rounds: deals go long because the person on the call was not allowed to say yes.
- A turnaround commitment with a clock. 48 hours from receipt to redline, every round. Not “as soon as possible”. A commitment that is measured is a commitment that is kept.
- Take the counterparty call. When your negotiator speaks to their counsel directly instead of relaying positions through two sales teams, a three-round negotiation becomes one call.
- Standard paper first. Sending your own agreement (with an order form structure) before they send theirs removes the whole “their template does not fit SaaS” stage.
- Fix signature logistics. Signatory identified at deal start; e-signature envelope prepared with the final redline; expiry set. Embarrassingly, this alone can save days.
Report it, or it does not exist
One page a month: median days in legal, number of deals over 20 days, rounds per deal, and revenue that slipped a quarter for contract reasons. The last number is the one that gets a CRO’s attention and a budget. The first month’s report is usually uncomfortable. The third month’s is usually the argument for whatever changed in between.
Every Engross desk client gets days in legal per deal, monthly. Not because it is a nice chart — because it is the only way to know whether the desk is doing what it was bought for.
Next step
Have a contract like this on your desk?
Send it over. We will mark it up and walk you through it in twenty minutes — no cost, and you will know whether the desk is worth it.