Training the Next Generation of Contract Professionals - Jeanette Nyden

Made with speech-to-text software, so a few words may be off.

0:00You're listening to the Contract Heroes Podcast, your one-stop shop for all things contract management. And now, here are your hosts, Marc and Pepe. On today's episode of Contract Heroes, we'll be speaking with Jeanette Nyden. Jeanette is an internationally recognized contract negotiation expert, and also has written and co-authored four books. Since 2003, Jeanette has been helping contract professionals master their contract life cycle management needs by providing online and in-person training programs. Now, without further ado, let's get into the episode. Well, Jeanette, thanks so much for being here. We're really excited about this conversation. And, you know, I figured to kick things off, we could kind of chat about, um, something that we chat about often on, on the show, and it's how did you go from, from being a lawyer practicing law to transitioning into helping lawyers in these in-house teams to, to better their, their contract management? Yeah. So, um, hello, Marc. Hello, Pepe. How are you both? Thank you very much for having me. Um, okay, so long story short, um, I s- I got my license to practice, um, 29 years ago, so this has been a long journey, and I was in bankruptcy and I was in the litigation department.

1:19And the law firm, when I moved to Seattle, w- I was a temporary attorney, and they wanted me to become a permanent attorney in litigation, and I just couldn't take litigating these business disputes anymore, going to mediation. I was very good at negotiating, um, agreements. And I was sitting in an office, um, you know, as a temporary attorney looking for a permanent attorney position, and I had also taken a 40-hour mediation class through the University of Washington Law School because I needed my continuing legal education hours. And I just realized sitting in this office with this client, I was really good at negotiating things. And, uh, he looked at me and he said, "Wow, if you could teach my salespeople to negotiate that well..." And I just beamed. I thought, "I've got it. I've got it.

2:11I can help other people before it gets to litigation, before where they're sitting in my office and I'm sitting over a speakerphone arguing about the second circuit case says this, but the ninth circuit says this, and the ninth circuit is controlling," and all that nonsense back and forth, which is really irrelevant to the fact that my client had a check and wanted to settle. Would you take it? Will you take that check? So, uh, that's how I got started. And so I, I decided not to look for a permanent legal position with a big law firm. Started my own little law firm helping smaller clients, and, uh, started training, um, and negotiation consulting to companies back in 2003. That's amazing, Jeanette. And, uh, so we, we, we've been talking a lot with some of our previous guests on a lot of the processes that need to be involved when a company is starting to draft a contract, you know, the request processes, but we haven't talked that much on the post-award part of the contract.

3:19And I, and I loved, um, your des- the description in your bio on, on LinkedIn where you said that your clients are typically large organizations who are developing dedicated contract admins and/or contract management role or function within their organization. And I love this because I think... Well, I don't... I, I, I don't know how to put a number, but I gotta say that most of the companies, like, they know, like, they have some people involved in the, in the contracts, but they don't have a process in place, right? They have no idea. They just receive contract requests via email for, from everybody inside the company. And when you're talking about, uh, I don't know, a big organization, this might be a problem, right? So I would love you to tell us how, how is this, um, how do you work with this large organization, and how your work address post-award contract management. Yeah. Thank you. So I work i- in a couple of different ways. I can come in and I can develop customized training, and it, it is all customized because different companies want different nuances for their playbook on how to negotiate terms and conditions. I also can mentor.

4:36So I could mentor you, Pepe. If you were new in a role at a very large organization, you and I could team up together and negotiate an agreement together. And then I also provide consulting services, which is a little bit more along the lines of advising a team. Where post-contract management services comes in, and my history of being in litigation as a lawyer and not wanting to be in litigation anymore, is all of those clauses that we negotiate, that we take for granted, we don't pay a lot of attention to, become really important when there's a problem. And I didn't want to litigate these things. I wanted to get the clauses drafted properly. I wanted people to use them properly. So for example, you, Pepe, are super upset with Marc and his performance. Marc is your service provider. You're just done. You've had it. You call me. I'm your contract professional in the organization. You know, I should have clauses in there to put Marc on notice.

5:39So I should be able to call Marc up, set up a meeting, 'cause that should be in, in the agreement that I can do that. I can have Marc turn over some reports and some numbers and explain to me what's going on. And if he's still not performing, Pepe, then I can tell you we're gonna send him a cure notice, and he's gotta cure his performance. So now I'm starting to get more legal, right? Less conversational, more legal. Hey, Marc, you've got 10 days to get your act together and to perform. You know, at Pepe Company, he is not happy with you. And then if he still doesn't, now we've got another layer, um, of legal protection. You know, we can say that he's breaching his material applications, et cetera. Okay, so that's from the legal perspective. The problem is, is that you, Pepe, have not told Marc anything about what's going on. There's no cure notice. Marc called, he's delayed yet again on a, some project deliverable, and you call me and you're like, "That's it. Fire him. We're getting somebody new."

6:44And I have to say to myself, "Hmm, is that really the best choice for the organization?" Because there's a lot of risk in that choice. So I look at this contract post management, post-award management phase as I put these de-risking clauses in there, now use them. Use them so that we don't create any more risks. Use the tools. And that was the thing about litigation, was people wanted me to fight their battles for them, but they were making stupid mistakes all along the way. They weren't documenting conversations. They weren't documenting missed milestones. They weren't having the conversations, and then they're just blowing their top. Marc gets to get his attorney and say, "Wait a minute. Pepe, you didn't do all the things you were supposed to do.

7:35See all these obligations in the contract you have to approve, you have to provide access to, you have to get this done, you have to get provider ABC to get me this information. You didn't do any of it, so of course I'm not performing. A part of it's your fault." Now you can put my child through school, you know, through a private college, thank you very much, on the fees as we argue both of those. But we haven't actually r- prevented the risk event from happening, which is the poor performance, and we actually haven't gotten the thing that the company wants, which is Marc's performance. Now we just have a his and her contest, he said, she said. Yeah, that's, that's super interesting. And, and, and, you know, Jeannette, just a, a perspective that I don't think we've really talked about before. I mean, how, how often is it that you, you work with these organizations and they don't have any of the proper... Let's, let's say first off they don't have any of the proper language inside of their agreements to, to make sure that this is the path that they're going down.

8:32And, and secondly, it sounds like more often than not, people are really jumping the gun when they are approaching these steps. Um- Yeah... a- and, and they always want to, uh, like you said, go, go right after somebody's throat and say, "Hey, we're done here. We're gonna go find somebody else to work with." So the inclusion of the appropriate tools really depends. If at the enterprise level that I work with where people, uh, companies are traded on the NASDAQ or the stock ex- the, um, stock exchange, y- those lawyers will have developed a template that will have this language. Whether people know it and use it is a whole another ball of wax, right? I mean, we can include cure periods and notice and a notice address. You know, where do you receive your official notices, Marc? It's not gonna be in an email, et cetera, et cetera. But if you don't actually know that it's in there and you don't know how to use it, then you're not gonna use that tool. I have a toolbox full of tools. I have little idea of how to use any of them.

9:34I know how to use my pliers. I know how to use my hammer to hang, you know, pictures. I could take a nail out of something. But like I have these things with these wrenches that, you know, you can switch, turn the little dial and it opens and clo... What? I don't know what you need that for. I apparently have one. Same thing in a contract clause, right? People are like, "What is this? I, why do I even need this? Why do I need this little thing that dials and makes something go out, you know, a wrench go out or in, and why would I even do that? No, no, I would get somebody else to use that wrench." And it's the same than the legal clause. I'll get somebody else to give you, Marc, notice on Be- Pepe's behalf that you're not performing. And that's part of it. The other part of it that is t- truly controllable at the service provider and the, the procurement level is the establishment of the appropriate metrics and the appropriate governance. Now, this is where all of my work addresses all three phases of the contract life cycle.

10:33This is where, you know, what you do in establishing your RFP event, RFX event, how you award the agreement, and what you negotiate as part of the award phase directly impacts the post-award phase. If you have crappy metrics, you're gonna get crappy performance, unless by some miracle the service provider knows how to meet your needs. If you have crappy governance, then you're not gonna have a way to call those two parties together, the buying organization and the supply or s- service provider organization, to hold anyone accountable. And by that what I mean is a lot of lawyers put in a dispute resolution clause, which basically says, okay, first Marc and Pepe are gonna negotiate in good faith. Then after that, then, you know, we might go to mediation, and then depending on the industry, if it's construction you'll go to arbitration, and if you're in another industry, then we're gonna litigate this.

11:30That's not actually dispute resolution. That's, that's how the justice system becomes involved. First you have to prove you negotiated, then you might wanna try an intermediary step. Dispute resolution is where Marc and Pepe have the rules of how they're going to resolve the dispute when they sit down to negotiate in good faith. What information are they gonna have? Who is gonna be a part of that? What's the escalation process? Right? So the larger the organization, the more likely that the daily teams that do the daily tasks know that there's a really big problem. The middle management is the team that may or may not be getting those escalations and may or may not know how to address the escalation. Then that's when the procurement team and/or the legal team gets the call from Pepe, "I've had it with Marc. I'm done. Get him out of here."

12:27Then when I start, if I'm the lawyer in the litigation, and I start to do my due diligence, the daily team are gonna tell me, "We knew this was a problem. We've been talking to him," blah, blah, blah. You know, "Our team is also at fault," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The middle manager may or may not be clued in, and then I have to tell Pepe, like, "Listen, you got counterclaims. You can't hold Marc accountable. You can't, you can't say that this is termination for cause. We're gonna have to cancel the contract for business reasons, and then we're gonna have to pay him for work in progress." Well, that work stinks. I'm sorry, but that's... W- we don't have enough to justify terminating him for cause. And that's what I mean about this co- this confluence of the law and reality of daily operations. And so I wanna see better metrics written. I wanna see those metrics absolutely applicable to the work, not cut and pasted from some other contract or from some speech someone went to at a conference or a webinar.

13:28"Oh, use these metrics." And I absolutely wanna see governance processes where there's monthly meetings, more frequent depending on the industry, monthly meetings, quarterly meetings. I mean, if I were to say to Pepe, like, "When's the last time that you had a QBR on this big account where you wanna terminate Marc?" He might not have attended for the last three QBRs. I mean, WTF, right? How, how is that possible? And so of course as an attorney I'm gonna say, "I can absolutely represent you to the best of my ability, but it's gonna cost you way more to try to breach him than it is gonna be to terminate him for, um, business reasons and just pay him for his work in progress." Um, so you really have to understand how to motivate the people at the different levels who are gonna be touching this contract to talk to each other and to negotiate problems long before you get to Article 23, Dispute Resolution. Right. And as any other tool, you need a lot of training to adopt them, right?

14:32Because you can have a perfectly drafted clause with the whole process in it inside the contract, but if you have a training and people don't know what to do when somebody misses some deadline, some milestone, and they don't document that, of course when you hit a li- a litigation process, this is not going to be useful, even if you have it on, on your contract, right? So I believe that this kind of, uh, consulting services is, uh, very ongoing, right? So now you have it drafted on, on your contract. This is the process that you need to follow. Maybe a playbook, right, right, on the things that you gotta do. Now, how do you apply those? And then you, you have to continue doing the, the, the training so people when they miss, again, a milestone or anything else inside their commercial relationship, it is well documented so you can bring the peoples to the li- li- lili- to the litigators or the lawyers or whatever and, uh, once, uh, something wrong happens, right? Right.

15:34I mean, you should only go to a litigator for things like fraud, you know, something really, like, that, that just has no other alternative to it. But if Marc isn't performing, that sh- really shouldn't go to litigation. We should really try to resolve it. And you're absolutely correct. It does take training. And one of the things that I've been talking about for the last several years is the fact that in 2024, approximately 75% of the workforce in the United States will be the millennial generation. I'm not the millennial generation, but I'm also not the boomer generation. So what that means is that all the people that I learned how to do this from, who have the wealth of information, who were writing phenomenal contracts in the '90s with the first version of Word and things like that, and I look at those contracts, they're simpler, but they're solid. They understood the principles of these contracts. Um, you know, those people are retiring, and there's not... they're not necessarily transferring the knowledge to the millennial generation, right?

16:33We've, we've kind of not transferred that baton in these enterprise organizations. So you're right. There has to be training first. What are the three phases? How do they work together? Why do we care about post-contract management having those clauses? What's our role gonna be, et cetera? Then, yes, it does typically move into some sort of cons- mentoring role. The mentoring role is where I would work directly with you, and then the cons- it can even involve then to the consulting role, where I do help write the playbook, which is what I'm doing for a client right now that's seen, um, phenomenal growth from when three years ago when I first trained their team. And now I'm, I'm helping to write the playbook, and they've got bits and pieces of information about the contract everywhere. I'm aggregating it in to a single location and a single training that, that they'll own for the next several years. So every time someone gets onboarded, they'll watch this training.

17:31So it is training, mentoring, consulting. Three years from now, they may need a new playbook. Laws may have changed. Things may have changed. Services may have changed. And then they'll reiterate it again. But by having that playbook, we can make people aware of the clauses, like cure periods. "Hey, give Marc a notice. Tell him he's gotta do this. If he still doesn't do it, call a meeting. Document it. Do these things. Help us help you so that we can get this performance, um, up to speed." Mm-hmm. Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, I, I, I think that's great, and I, I think that even a lot of the organizations that we work with don't have that, that type of training, um, a- and don't interact with their clients or vendors in that way. Um, so, you know, that's- It's definitely something that I, I wish more orga- organizations would, would do.

18:24Um, but and, and Jeanette, you know, I'm curious when we're talking about this and you're implementing these, these playbooks and working with these, these teams, what percentage of these teams already have a contract s- management solution in place? Um, but and e- whether they do or they don't, how do their needs evolve or change after working with you? Do they, do they look for, for kind of a one-stop full life cycle management tool? Uh, are there organizations that are, are still just leveraging a repository in some ways? What does that look like? Okay. So it depends on the size of the organization, right? So for enterprise agreement, for enterprise, my enterprise clients, they all have, you know, full CLM. Now, whether the people that I'm working with use it, that's a whole another ball of wax. So let me tell you a story. So I'm mentoring, and it's a u- public utility that's decommissioning a power plant, so I'm helping, um, with the, the development not only of the statement of work but also of the terms and conditions, right?

19:27So we, you know, we've gotta take care if there's, you know, hazardous materials, you know, soil contaminated, things like that. So it's more complicated than your standard contract. So I'm on site, and there are these work trailers. And I get the contract and the statement of work maybe six weeks later or something like that, and , um, the company, the utility is gonna ask the prime contractor to remove the trailers. So then I stop and I say, "Wait a second," like, "Who owns them?" Right? Because in my mind's eye, I'm like, "Why would you own that? You probably leased it through fleet the way you lease any of the other stuff that y- that fleet leases. So do you here at this location have proof of ownership so that the prime contractor and the statement of work can disconnect these work trailers and, and remove them and dispose of them as part of the decommissioning?" "Oh, no, no, I don't know. We don't know where the da-doo-de-da-da-da-da." And so then I'm like, "Well then, you know, can we please go to corporate and ask fleet? Maybe they know." You know?

20:33But it was just stunning to me that it took a couple of conversations, and I kept having to raise it in the meeting like, "Um, hey, Billy Bob, do we have an answer yet about those tra-" "No, no, I'm still trying to find the answer to that." And I'm thinking to myself, "You've gotta be kidding me." You know, why, why isn't this just a click? Why can't we just put the location of the utility plant, and why can't we just find out what's leased, all the things that are leased, whether it's equipment or it's a work trailer? And if it's not on that lease, then it's probably purchased. Why can't we then go through a verification process of when it was purchased, right? I mean, come on. Like, I, I don't know how that... sounding arrogant, I don't know how it could be that complicated. It's that complicated because of legacy systems. Utilities in particular are very old, right? I mean, they started at the turn of the last century.

21:30So they, um, are having their own challenges getting their new processes, CLM, to align with their old processes, right? So that's why it can be very difficult. Newer companies definitely have these CLM and are definitely using them more and more, and I'm definitely seeing that sense of younger companies that don't have these entrenched processes who are used to working within a s- some sort of an app environment, being able to use the CLM and being able to get the information that's needed very quickly. Um, so for example, someone sent me for my personal company, um, a bunch of things that I needed to sign, and there were blanks, and it was in a PDF. It was very easy to switch that over into the system where I could just auto-fill and sign through DocuSign and things like that. So I know that the, the newer systems are very much more robust.

22:27Now that I'm in the CLM, it'll be very easy to see that I have an existing relationship, what my contract is, et cetera. Yeah, well- Is that helping? Yes, of course. Okay. I mean, and, and that u- u- usually happens, like you said, with, with legacy industries, right? They have, like, very old processes, and it's very hard for them to just innovate their own processes, right? When- Yeah... when, when, when you want to make them learn how a new tool that is not Microsoft Word and, and redlining, this is where s- things start to get a little bit messy, right? Uh, but I think that showing them some of those pain points like that one, right? Yeah. Because that, that can be, I don't know, that may cost them, like, couple hundred case of fines or, or whatever. And- That's right...

23:17it's, it, it's a very basic feature, which is just having a centralized repository with all their documentation well labeled where this is leased, this is owned, and you can have access with just one click, right? Yeah. And, and but I would say that not even the newer companies know that because, uh, there's a lot of companies, especially startups, that they just start to scale like crazy, and it's very hard for them to just keeping track and try to have everything well documented and, and mapped with the, with the processes. Well, I'll tell you why, Pepe. It's because companies really don't see the procurement sourcing function- Exactly... as an essential seat at the table. And that, that, uh, you know, so I work with both sales teams and procurement teams, and they just have very different personalities, you know? A sales team is just gonna bust in, and they'll either bust in and be all, like, bravado, or they'll be the one that's bringing the donuts and the coffee and, like, kinda hanging out in the back, and then you're like, "Oh, wait, are they still there?"

24:21"Well, yeah, I brought the coffee and the donuts, so I wanna hear what's going on." Right? They have a very different way of making sure that they're at the table because they're generating revenue. Procurement, on the other hand, wants to be invited, and, and then even when they're invited, sometimes they're too busy to attend, or they're not sure what they need to be talking about or how to prepare. So it's a very different personality. So companies- Right... that don't treat procurement as a critical function for their scaling, you're right, then it, it's just gonna be haphazard, and people will work around. So if you even implement a CLM function where the entire contract negotiation, the development and negotiation process is within a tool, people will end run it. I'll download it, and then I'll save it on my desktop or my F drive, and then I'll send it to somebody else to work with, and then they'll send it back to me. So now I have to remember to put my initials, JNV2, on it. Then I send it back to you, right? So then you have to remember to put your initials, and now it's V3, and now we're trying to figure all this stuff out, right?

25:23It's, it's silly, but it's a lack of respect for the full capacity of procurement and sourcing to enable the business. Exactly. And I think another of the mistakes is just that thinking about CLM as a legal tool. It's not a legal tool- Right... it's an enterprise software. Because at the end, the, the people that are, are going to benefit from these kind of tools is, of course, procurement, because they can close deals faster, or sales, right? And legal, I mean, they don't have to care about administrative work, which is- Right... I don't know, following people to sign this contract, because otherwise they cannot prove it- Right... and they cannot bring some new vendor inside the company, right? That's correct. Yeah. So I think that this is, like, one of the main mistakes done on, on why, uh, building a business model for a company to implement a software can be a little bit difficult.

26:22Especially because, you know, legal departments don't bring cash to the, to the company, so their budget- Correct... is, like, very strict, right? Right. Very. And short. Yes. And especially right now after COVID. Yes. You know? So it's, it's better to, to bring other stakeholders, as procurement or sales, to be part of this, uh, CLM implementation. One per- Yes. Right? And, and, and, and because it, it's not just that the departments have a small budget. It's that over the 30 years since I've been practicing, those departments have changed. So we don't have a lot of attorneys with a lot of really good, solid commercial background. You know, that's really pushed to contract professionals who are non-lawyers, who I also, uh, work with, and love to work with them. So, you know, if you do get a commercial attorney and you have something super specific you need to do for a contract, you know, that has to go to external counsel now.

27:19And so the counsel that's left are hyper-focused on, you know, data security, trademarks, and intellectual property, and tax, and international law, and things like that, which are completely legitimate. But then they're not really the people who can understand how to best enhance the business operations ability to use these commercial documents to their benefit. Because it's gonna be Sally Sue, who's in the field, who I'm calling saying, "Well, do we lease these trailers, or do we own these trailers?" And she's like, "I don't know. Heck if I know. I've only been here for five years." It's really, it's not gonna be the IP attorney or the tax attorney who's gonna have any understanding of why that's so important. It's c- the commercial attorney, and then it's gonna be Sally Sue f- frustration as she can't answer this question. And Billy Bob's like, "Yeah, just have the prime contractor do it. We'll f- we'll deal with it later." And I'm thinking, "If you lease this, you've now destroyed their property if they go and move it." You know? Like, seriously, can we slow down here a minute?

28:23And I, and that's a part of it, is we just, we just don't have a lot of commercial attorneys left in these enterprise agree, uh, in, enterprise legal departments anymore. They're stretched incredibly thin as compared to my experience even 20 years ago. Yeah. And, and, I mean, Jeanette, what do you think is... How do we resolve that? What's, what's the answer to that? Is, is it to bring in more of them into the organization? Is it to, is it to, to get other folks inside the organization that do understand those processes? What, uh, what do you think the fix is there? So I, I'm a lawyer, so my own tribe is gonna shoot me, but I actually think it's bringing up contract professionals as a full-on paralegal. You know, so I was r- it was really exciting for me in the '90s to watch a lot of paralegals come on board to be able to do a lot of work that junior associates in the decade before used to do. And, um, having really good paralegals is amazing, right? But they have a specific kind of training that's different from the old-fashioned legal secretary. So back when I started, Gracie sat at the front desk.

29:27She did a lot of booking. It was, a lot of it was paper. We weren't automated. And if I faxed a contract, I'd sit there and I'd BS with Gracie for another 10 minutes after I faxed it to get the counter fax back, and she and I would talk about what, what bar we were going to, 'cause I was, you know, 24 years old, right? It's changed so much that a lot of that work in corporations can be done by contract professionals, but they really need to be trained as if they're a paralegal. They are paralegals. They are not, you know, just some AE or some procurement person. They really are in a paraprofessional role, and I'd really like to see them own that role so that the lawyers that we do use are used effectively for true legal advice. So for example, um, there's an issue about when we want- when my client wants to transfer title, and I raised it as a red flag early on. Like, "Hey, we need a legal opinion on this," and why.

30:28And I helped as part of my mentoring to frame the issue so that we could get the appropriate legal advice. That's an excellent job for a lawyer. The lawyer needs to go look at the nuances. Do we transfer title to the shipper? Do we transfer title upon delivery? When, who takes title? 'Cause it was, um, about insurance, and we were creating a donut hole. So we had far more insurance to cover the damage than the shipper or who we were delivering it to, et cetera, et cetera, right? So that's, that's something you really need a lawyer to do. But a lot of the work that we can do that would be, um, a- augmented and enhanced by a CLM system, that's really paraprofessional work or paralegal work, and I'd really like to see the contract professional program stand on its own two feet. Right, and that's why we've, we've seen more, um... How do you call it? Like, no diversified legal team, but people with more professional diversity inside the legal team because- Yeah...

31:33they don't have to be a lawyer to know about project management. And we've seen people like engineers- Right... that have experience, uh, with huge projects, right? And they have more project management backgrounds, and they can help lawyers to focus on the legal stuff, around the ne- on the negotiation, on things that can, uh, uh, represent a risk to the company- Right. Exactly... and then just leave those, uh, project management or any other administrative work to somebody that has that kind of experience. And- Exactly... I will be sure that they will be way more efficient. Correct. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, Jeannette, I was hoping that was gonna be your answer on that. I, I kind of threw you one right down the middle, and you hit it out of the park, so I'm, I'm glad we're on the same page there. You know, when we, when we implement these projects with... You know, we obviously work with a diverse group of, of teams, but the ones that we see are the most successful, uh, are when they do have, uh, either a paralegal or a paralegal that's become a contract manager. Somebody in that role, at least one of them, that can really get hands-on inside of the system, truly understand it, and, and be that be-all power user inside the system.

32:37And it's, it works out so much better when it's not the general counsel or another attorney on staff that, that's trying to run the program. Um, it, it's definitely those folks that, um, you know, aren't heads down, like Pepe said, doing negotiations and things like that, that really drive these, these business processes with the other parts of the organization to be successful. So yeah, I agree. And I think a really well-trained contract professional is not a cost center. Mm-hmm. A really well-trained contract professional may not be generating revenue in the same way that a salesperson is, but they sure as heck can track all kinds of cost avoidance. Yeah. And I'd really like the finance team to pay them that respect because, um, the former IACCM, which is now World Commerce and Contracting, you know, they always do the value leakage. You know, some others do. Gartner does, Aberdeen Group, IAOP. You know, uh, depending on who's doing it, like, the least... The most effective contract has 9% value leakage.

33:36The worst case is probably 45%, or almost half of your value is lost between what you thought you would be able to capture through this customer-supplier agreement and what was actually delivered to the customer in terms of value. So there, there is a very good business case to supporting the contract professional. I would like to see organizations do that going forward. Yeah. Yeah, I, I agree. And, and I, I think that's hopefully something that, that folks are noticing that we're, we're pushing for. Um, definitely advocate for it. So Jeannette, I, I think we're coming up on time here. This has been a fantastic conversation. If folks wanna learn more about you, they wanna connect with you or, or possibly pick up one of your books, where's the best place to do that? Yeah. Yes. So the book that would be most appropriate for this conversation is The Contract Professional's Playbook. It's available on Amazon. My website is www.jnyden.com. J-N-Y-D-E-N.com.

34:35And there's a lot more information about the playbook and the corresponding e-course that goes along with that playbook for people. And it is my passion, literally, to bring the profession up, the contract professional, the non-lawyer professional, so that they have a seat at the table and are recognized as a valuable team member. Yeah. I think we're all on the same team here. So hey, this has been a great conversation. Thanks for joining us. And, uh, to those listeners, we'll see you back here for another episode soon. Thank you very much.